Bob Simon Funeral at The Metropolitan Opera (Tuesday, February 17th) By Jeff Fager

I’m Jeff Fager, and like many of you, I’m finding it hard to believe that Bob is lying here like this. As he might say, since he has to be lying somewhere, there could not possibly be a better place than this. It was one of his favorite places on Earth.

He wrote in his book that while he was imprisoned, he dreamed of this place-watching Tosca, walking down the grand staircase beneath the Chagall murals. Another one of his favorite places was across the street at the Lincoln Plaza movie theater, where they showed all the independent films.

Bob loved opera. He loved symphonies. He loved movies. But he didn’t know much about popular culture. I used to accuse him of not being a real American, and he was kind of proud of that.

About 15 years ago, we were at an awards luncheon-I think it was the Peabodys-where he was being honored. At our table, just before he was about to accept his award, he spilled an entire glass of red wine down the front of his suit. The woman sitting next to him was incredibly kind. She immediately began dabbing at the stain with a napkin and trying to help him clean it up.

Before he got up to speak, he leaned over and asked me, “Who’s that woman sitting next to me?”

I said, “Bob, that’s Oprah Winfrey.”

Bob grew up at CBS News watching the great gentleman correspondents do their work. Morley and Charles Kuralt were his heroes. They were reporters in an organization that valued original reporting and exquisite storytelling above all else, and Bob knew he could fit right in. He knew he had a gift. He knew he could do what he saw them doing.

I was in my late twenties when I first met him. For all of us young producers at the time-and there are so many of you here today from that next generation-Bob had already risen to another level in our minds. He was our hero.

He was understated, thoughtful, articulate, unaffected, easygoing, and cool. He had it all, and we looked up to him. We all wanted to work on stories with him, and every executive producer at CBS News wanted him on their broadcast because he could do everything well.

His observations found their way into his stories in a manner that was descriptive, lyrical, and real. He could be covering the same story as dozens of other reporters, but every one of his pieces contained something nobody else had. Bob loved beating the competition, and he usually did.

Andy Clarke sent out this note earlier in the week:

“In Sarajevo, he had a narrow escape when a shell exploded close by. That same shell seriously injured a woman. At Sarajevo hospital, we followed her fight for life as a surgeon working without electricity, without modern machines, desperately trying to save her, but she died in front of the camera. Bob asked the surgeon whether anyone knew her name. The surgeon replied no, we don’t know her name. Bob wrote in the story that evening, she died quickly, this girl with no name, Sarajevo is going slowly, to the grave embarrassment of all of those countries that decided to let it happen. Bob Simon, CBS News, Sarajevo.”

And there are memorable lines in every Bob Simon story.

This one is from The Lost Boys:

“When they saw their villages burning, they started walking. Within days, streams of boys became rivers, hundreds became thousands, until an exodus of biblical proportions was happening here in Southern Sudan.”

And this one is from Joy in the Congo, a piece Bob was even getting tired of seeing because we replayed it so often:

“It’s called Ode to Joy, the last movement of Beethoven’s last symphony. It has been played with more expertise before, but more joy, hard to imagine.”

He covered the most important events of our time, and I think one of the common themes you’ll hear today is that he never took himself seriously. He always preferred to stay in the background-just another reporter, a regular guy.

He couldn’t stand it when reporters made themselves part of the story and turned the focus onto themselves. He had no patience for self-important reporters puffing themselves up. That drove him crazy. It was as un-CBS as you could get, and Bob was CBS through and through.

Bob wouldn’t have expected the outpouring we’ve witnessed over the past week. He was not a humble man. He knew how good he was. But I don’t think he fully understood how many other people knew how good he was as well.

And during this past year, he experienced something of a dream come true. We let him report on two opera stories within a twelve-month period.

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He had just finished the second one in recent weeks. It was a story about James Levine, a conductor here at the Metropolitan Opera. Bob asked him, “When was the last time you screamed at a singer?”

And Levine replied, “Screamed?”

Bob said, “Yeah, got really mad?”

Levine answered, “I don’t scream at people. Would you like it if people screamed at you?”

Bob replied, “No, not at all, but people do.”

I don’t remember ever screaming at him, but I do remember being mad at him from time to time and scolding him like a bratty child-which, frankly, isn’t all that unusual when it comes to our correspondents. But we never really fought over a story.

I worked on almost every story he reported during the past two decades. He was a tremendous collaborator, and I loved working with him, just as everyone else did.

That said, we all got mad at him occasionally. He could be far too self-centered at times. But it was impossible to stay mad at him for long. Most of the time, he knew when he was wrong, and his favorite way of making things right was with one of the countless jokes he kept in his arsenal.

I have my favorites too, and I considered telling some of them today, but I can’t. I’ll gladly share them later with anyone who wants to hear them. They range from off-color to way off-color.

And we’ve been telling those jokes all week.

You could always tell when Bob wasn’t doing well because he stopped telling as many jokes. Many of us lived through Bob’s darker periods. Those were difficult times, and he was deeply unhappy.

But when he came to understand that part of what he was experiencing stemmed from his captivity, things began to change. He slowly emerged from that darkness, and we got the old Bob back.

On the day we lost him, he was about as happy as I can remember seeing him.

He had a great shoot that morning. Things had gone exceptionally well on his most recent story, and the fact that it was with Tanya gave it even greater meaning. Working with Nichole Marks, after only a few screenings, the piece had come together beautifully almost from the start.

He took one final look at it on Wednesday. As he was leaving the screening room, I told him the story would be airing that Sunday.

For the next several hours, he walked around the floor telling anyone who would listen that his story had bumped another one.

He truly was on top of the world.

On his way out, he recorded the tease, stuck his head into Bill’s office, and told him everything was done.

Then, as he was leaving, he said, “My blue sheet on Jon Stewart was the first one in.”

It’s that part of Bob, I think, that teaches all of us something.

He possessed a natural curiosity and a wonderful enthusiasm for what we do. He never, ever took it for granted.

If I wanted to send him on a story, he didn’t even need to know what it was about. He’d be out the door and on his way before the details were fully explained.

And he would always, always, always come back with the goods.