S.S. Simon

Biography

Character actor S.S. Simon--not to be confused with director S. Sylvan Simon, who occasionally went by the name S.S. Simon--was born in Sacramento, CA, in 1864. His parents were vaudeville actors, and as a child they used him in their act on a cross-country tour. As a teenager he left vaudeville and joined a circus and later joined the troupe of well-known actors Lawrence Barrett and Edwin Booth. He left acting in the 1890s and enrolled in the Colorado School of Mines, where he learned the finer points of prospecting for oil. Upon leaving the school he headed for Death Valley, CA, to try his hand at oil prospecting. He hit a gusher there, and continued that winning streak at other sites throughout the state. When the oil boom hit Kern County (CA), he set up several oil companies to prospect there, and hit even more gushers. When he turned 40 he sold his mine for $2 million, and spent the next year traveling around the world with his wife. Upon his return to the US, however, he discovered that the Taft administration had come to the conclusion that smaller oil companies hadn't been developing their holdings quickly enough, and canceled their oil leases. The government paid him for what he lost, but it wasn't anywhere near what he would have made if his leases hadn't been canceled. He embarked on another prospecting expedition, but this time with no luck. When he decided that Monterey County, CA, was the site where the next big oil strike would be made, he spent most of his money buying and developing fields there, but nothing panned out. He sold his businesses--including a cannery, a fleet of fishing boats and some factories--to raise money for the big strike he knew would come, but it never happened. By the mid-'20s he was flat broke. Down but not out, he returned to an industry where he thought he could make at least enough money to survive on--Hollywood. He started getting jobs in "B" pictures--including a lot of westerns--as a bartender, townsman, homesteader and the like. In 1934 he appears to have landed a contract with Columbia, and appeared in many of their films. He died in April of 1940 in Hollywood.