An early cassette-tape recording of Scott Simon didn't bode well for a future career in radio.

"Don't hit the microphone when you talk. Stop standing on your head," his father, comedian Ernie Simon, tells Scott, right after the little boy sings a discordant version of "Happy Trails."

Many happy years later, Simon, 56, is a master in front of the microphone, and standing tall as the award-winning host of National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition Saturday."

The respected journalist and author, who's just released his second book of fiction, "Windy City: A Novel of Politics," will visit Thousand Oaks on Sunday to speak about his life, literary output and, likely, his undying devotion to the long-suffering Chicago Cubs. Hosted by KCLU, Simon's appearance will benefit the local public radio station, which airs "Weekend Edition" twice on Saturdays, from 6 to 10 a.m.

Mary Olson, KCLU's general manager, said she met Simon two years ago in Washington, D.C. "He is very bright, very charming and very down-to-earth," she said. "He won me over with his coverage of the war in Afghanistan, the famine and civil war in Ethiopia, and his reports from Ground Zero. He's a Peabody Award-winning journalist for a reason — he's amazing."

Simon has been with "Weekend Edition" since the program's debut in 1986; before then he was the bureau chief for NPR in Chicago.

The show airs on more than 600 stations around the country, with a weekly audience of 4.3 million, including 10,000 to 15,000 KCLU listeners.

They aren't just giving "Weekend Edition" a cursory listen. Simon said the "Weekend Edition" statistic he's most proud of is that people listen on average to the program for more than 75 minutes. The average for NPR's other two-hour news programs is 15 to 20 minutes.

Like NPR's weekday news shows, "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition," "Weekend Edition" is a hodgepodge of breaking news; in-depth reporting, analysis and commentary; interviews with and profiles of famous, infamous and not-so-famous but always intriguing people; and stories about anything you can think of and plenty you would never think of — political campaigns, annoying campaign songs, jazz musicians, children's books, Mother Teresa, whatever.

Simon, in a phone interview, said he doesn't consider juggling topics each week a difficult task. "I think of it as being natural," he said. "That's the way life is; it often goes from the profane to the profound to the inane."

Perhaps "Weekend Edition" listeners stick around for that extra hour on Saturdays because they're enjoying a lazy morning instead of a harried commute, but time's not the only factor.

"First and last, I think we do a good news show," Simon said. "I also don't mind saying it has a sense of personality, which can be a rare thing in some forms of broadcasting. Personality shouldn't be confused with being bombastic or lecturing people or being opinionated for that matter. It's something that makes you want to spend time with that program."

That's about as close to bragging about the show as Simon gets.

Throughout his life Simon has lived in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Montreal, Cleveland and even West Hollywood. Now living in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Catherine Richard, and two daughters, Simon travels frequently and has reported from all 50 U.S. states and around the world.

The geographical spot closest to his heart, however, is the Windy City he writes about in his latest novel.

A favorable Washington Post review said that "Windy City,' for all its emphasis on the sausage-factory venality of big-city politics, seems intended mainly as a big, sloppy valentine to the cultural jambalaya that is 21st-century Chicago."

Simon said he visits the city often, adding the new book "will always tie us one way or another to Chicago, which pleases me greatly."

His other books include "Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan" (2000), cited as one of the best books of the year in Washington Post and Boston Globe; "Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball" (2002); and "Pretty Birds" (2005), a novel about teen girls during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s (Simon covered the conflict for NPR).

Simon, who finds time to write at 4:30 a.m. before his kids wake up, said he took on novel-writing because he wanted a challenge.

In Thousand Oaks, he said, "I will be talking about the whole process of creation. I feel strongly that you need to keep challenging yourself and learning as you go along. I think of all of that as contributing to my novels. And I think of my novels as contributing to journalism, freshening my eye."

Simon's also written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and other publications. An essay he wrote last year for Gourmet magazine, titled "Conflict Cuisine," won an International Association of Culinary Professionals food journalism award.

Simon wrote in the article, "Some people vividly remember three-star restaurants in Paris and Rome. I consider myself privileged to have had memorable meals in places where the three stars are war, famine and pestilence."

Every week, listeners get a dose of Simon's warm writing voice on "Weekend Edition" when he reads personal commentaries.

In 1989 he won a prestigious Peabody Award for the weekly essays, which address a mix of serious and humorous topics. The award citation read, in part, "Scott Simon communicates and interprets our increasingly complex world with simple elegance and eloquence. The result is radio that makes one think and feel, an experience all too rare in modern radio."

The vintage recordings of Simon and his father (who died when Simon was 16) mentioned at the beginning of this article were the subject of an essay that has been replayed many times (you can download the audio at http://www.npr.org).

After listening to his father on the tapes, Simon said, although "practical lessons survive" about father-and-son relationships, "what stays for me are ways in which we can make each other laugh."

Simon is now a dad who laughs often with his two little girls, both adopted as babies from China: Elise, who will soon turn 5, and Lina, adopted in 2004.

In an essay that aired in June, Simon spoke about the day he and his wife took Lina into their arms in China. "Race, blood, lineage and nationality don't matter," he said. "They're just the way small minds keep score. All that matters about blood is that it's warm and beats through a loving heart."

His other love in life is any Chicago sports team, in particular the Chicago Cubs. Simon's own favorite form of exercise, however, is ballet. He even once played Mother Ginger in Ballet Austin's "The Nutcracker."

Simon, whose other hobbies include book collecting, said some of his favorite authors, like Charles Dickens, Tom Wolfe and Scott Turow, "are all deft storytellers. They create true characters. They capture places. They can make me laugh and cry in the same paragraph."

That, too, is what Simon does — with true stories.

He shared such a story with The Star, one that he never got to tell on the air.

Reporting in Afghanistan, Simon went to the first soccer game in Kabul after the retreat of the Taliban, a match between Afghan athletes and a team of British paratroopers. During the time of the Taliban, sports (along with art, music and TV) had been outlawed.

The game took place in a soccer stadium where the Taliban once conducted public executions. "The British paratroopers won the game," Simon said, "but the first goal was scored by Afghan United. I have never heard a cry of such quality and poignancy as the cheer that rose up then."

Later on during the match, a British female paratrooper took off her maroon beret and "her hair kind of cascaded" down, Simon said. "Of course women had been in burkas for 5 1/2 years; you didn't see a woman's face, and you certainly didn't see a woman's hair. The crowd just went wild. For the rest of the match, every few minutes an Afghan woman would stand and take off her burka, and the crowd would break into that same kind of cheer."

After the game, however, when Simon and his producer started putting the radio piece together, the Afghan justice minister was killed, so they had to shelve the story.

"It was one of the most moving things I've ever seen in my life," he said of the experience. "And it's one of the things that makes me want to write novels. Sometimes the news can't hold everything."