It happened nearly 40 years ago, but the image remains seared in Harris Simmons’ brain.
It was the grand opening of the homeless shelter at 210 South Rio Grande Street in Salt Lake City. Harris was there because three years earlier he’d answered a phone call from Salt Lake City’s mayor, Palmer DePaulis, asking for help building a home for homeless people.
“Somebody had frozen to death on the street and it really bothered him,” remembers Simmons. “Palmer just had a really good heart and was very determined to create a place that people could come in from the elements.”
As a young, up-and-coming executive at Zions Bank — the financial institution run by Harris’ father, Roy Simmons — Harris was a good person to recruit to help find the financing for the proposed shelter.
“I was a checkbook Christian, as (Latter-day Saint apostle) Neal Maxwell used to call it,” smiles Harris.
Harris and others got enough people to open their checkbooks that the newly formed Shelter the Homeless organization, with Harris as board chairman, was able to purchase a warehouse on Rio Grande Street that was then turned into the Salt Lake Community Shelter and Resource Center (later known as The Road Home).
On Nov. 18, 1988, the shelter was officially opened when President Thomas S. Monson, then a member of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, gave the dedicatory prayer. It was during the prayer that Harris saw the scene that has stayed with him ever since.
“It’s funny how some things stick in your mind,” he says, “but there was a little kid there with his mother, and during the dedicatory prayer this kid had his head bowed, and I just lost it. I thought how this kid doesn’t deserve what he’s having to deal with. Anyway, it really struck me, and I don’t know why, because I’ve seen a lot of other people in dire need of help, but it’s something I’ve never forgotten.”
That kid bowing his head could just as easily have been Harris’s dad.
In 1988, Roy W. Simmons was as prominent and successful as anyone in the state, the president and CEO of a banking empire with billions of dollars in assets. By the time Roy and his wife Tibby’s six children came along — Harris was No. 5 — no one was worried about being kicked out in the cold.
But Roy didn’t start out that way. He was given up for adoption at birth by a young single mother in Portland, Oregon, and when his adopted mother, Annie Simmons, died at the age of 8, and his adopted dad, Henry Simmons, was too sick to take care of him, the Simmonses (who were Latter-day Saints) shipped Roy off to live with a woman who was a family friend in Salt Lake City.
“So he was actually kinda orphaned twice,” says Harris, “he started selling flowers on the street before he was 9.”
“Fundamentally, that kid could have been my dad,” he agrees.
It also could help explain why helping the community was so important all his life to Roy Simmons, and why his son is following in those footsteps. “He always stressed the fiduciary role (a banker) should play in society,” says Harris. “It’s not just making loans and taking deposits, it’s being involved in the community, being generous, figuring out how to make where we live a better place.”
The occasion for reminiscing is because Harris is stepping down as chairman of Shelter the Homeless — it’s been an even 40 years since he took that call from the mayor and started the organization.
Taking over as chairman is Josh Romney, although Harris, who turned 71 this year, will remain on the board. “I’ll stay involved,” he says, “I hope for the rest of my life.”
Looking back on four decades, “we’ve made a lot of progress,” he says. “When people see people on the street and wonder, ‘Why don’t we do something about this?’ what they don’t see are all the people who are actually getting help.”
But he harbors no illusion homelessness will ever go away.
“It’s a problem we’ll never actually solve; there’s no silver bullet,” he says. “But it’s like parents with their kids. Sometimes you see things in your kids that you’d like to fix. It doesn’t mean all your efforts are going to make them better. It also doesn’t mean you ever stop trying.
“Christ said that the poor will always be among us. That’s why I say we’ll never solve it, because the master problem solver said it wouldn’t be solved. But he also said the No. 1 priority is trying. There are a lot of people out there who are just one bad break away from being evicted and having no place to go. You’d have to have a pretty stony heart not to keep doing what you can to help them.”
