'Humbled' to help
From the Herald Journal, August 3, 2009
‘Humbled’ to help
Master builder lends time, talent making life a bit easier for those with disabilities
By Jay Patrick
staff writer
Bruce Simons says he’s just OK at building stuff. Stan Clelland, coordinator of Utah State University’s Assistive Technology laboratory, calls him gifted, a master.
“He can build anything.”
Simons, 86, has been volunteering at the AT lab for 12 years. He designs, fabricates and modifies equipment aimed at making life a little more manageable for disabled people. Last month he was honored as a star volunteer by the Center for Persons with Disabilities — a sort of lifetime achievement award.
“I don’t handle pride very well,” Simons said about how he felt when the staff presented him the award at a surprise banquet. “I was embarrassed. I walked out and couldn’t get my hat on my head it was so big. Everything was all about me.”
Simons said for him it’s been all about the impaired people who turn to the lab for help. When he first came to Logan, Simons visited the lab with a friend who worked there.
“They came in with half a body that worked, with arms that didn’t work, with mouths that didn’t work right and they didn’t complain,” Simons said. “It humbled me, really. I think that’s my driving force.”
When he saw lab workers brainstorming one-of-a-kind designs to help one single person, Simons said he was taken.
Simons is a part-time Logan resident, here from May to August escaping Phoenix’s searing summer. Before retiring, he ran a hardware store in Detroit — same as his dad, grandfather and great-grandfather had done. For him, being good at building stuff, especially out of wood, seems ingrained.
Right now he’s helping the university’s science folks by making a wooden and glass cube that will hold a beehive. Usually he’s making or modifying tables, chairs, cribs, spoons, bicycles — anything that someone with a particular disability may need customized. The goal is to make a person’s life more free, Clelland said.
“I’m happy I can help do that for these people,” Simons said.
Soon he heads back to Sun City, Ariz., but he plans on coming back to Logan and the AT lab next year.
“There’s a breath of pleasure just driving into the valley every year,” said Simons. In large part, it’s an overriding attitude among Logan people that made he and his wife settle on the city as their summer refuge.
“It was really the people that really turned us on,” he said. “It’s a delight to be around people who are appreciative of what they’ve got.”
Meegan M. Reid/Herald Journal
Bruce Simons works on building a display case at USU’s Center for Persons With Disabilities Applied Technologies Lab in Logan on Thursday.
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