BOUNTIFUL—As a young boy growing up in Brigham City Utah Chris Simonsen always wanted to be a dentist. Not just a dentist but a pediatric dentist. He reached that goal and after 56 years in practice, Simonsen retired Sept. 27 and turned 82 a week later.

“I would hang around dental offices,” said Simonsen. “My friends thought I was a little crazy that I wanted to hang around dental offices and go visit the orthodontist and watch what they do and pour models. So I did that and I liked to take classes in high school like chemistry, math and anatomy, things like that.”

 After graduation in 1961 from Box Elder High School Simonsen went up to Utah State. “There I started in pre-dent and the professor in charge of pre-den got us all together in a room,” he said. “We had the pre-dent and the pre-med. There were over 100 of us. He said ‘I’m going to be frank with you, there's probably only going to be one or two of you that will get into dental school or medical school. You’ve really got to want to do this.”

Probably after the first quarter, half of you will be gone, he said. “That was true. There were only about 50 of us. Having a pre-dent major I decided I needed to do a little more than that so I got a minor in psychology and also a minor in pottery because I felt as a dentist I had to use my hands and my feet and coordinate that and pottery would be the best way to do all of that together. Besides that, all the cute girls were in pottery.”

Simonsen said he found out that Utah State had the leading speech pathology school in the country. “I thought ‘why not have that as my major?’ So I changed my major from pre-dent to speech pathology. I went and told my advisor that I was doing that and he said ‘Chris there’s no way you’ll ever get into dental school with a speech pathology degree.”

Simonsen said the speech pathology advisor took him under his wing. “He was able to get a head corpse that I could then dissect out the jaw and the muscle. That was really kind of weird.” At the end Simonsen said the professor told him he really needed to be a speech pathologist. “‘You’re really good with the kids and what you’re doing and you should really go on and get a PhD in speech pathology and then come back as a professor.’ I said ‘oh sir thank you but I want to be a dentist. I want to be a kids’ dentist.’”

He said “OK,” Simonsen said. “So I looked up dental schools and in 1964 the number one dental school in America was Marquette in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was a Catholic dental school. I got the application and filled it all out and sent it in. I went and told my ex-advisor in pre-dent that I’d submitted my application to Marquette. He said ‘oh Chris there’s no way you’ll ever get in because first of all you have a speech pathology degree and you’re going to a Catholic school and you’re a Mormon.’”

Simonsen said he didn’t apply to any other schools. “On Christmas Eve I went home to have Christmas with my parents and after we opened our presents my mother handed me a letter from Marquette School of Dentistry. I thought ‘oh no.’ I opened it and I got accepted. I was so excited. I was the only one who got into dental school that year.”

 As a sophomore, Simonsen enlisted into the United States Army so he could be in the Army Core and went through training to prepare him to go to a MASH unit in Vietnam. “The training was really harsh there,” he said. “They showed us things that we would see in Vietnam that had happened to people – it was real. It was kind of scary. That’s part of the reason that I felt we needed to have the Veterans Park (in Bountiful). We had to shoot the guns, we had to throw grenades, we had to go through mines and go into tear gas chambers and take off our masks. It was nasty.”

About two weeks before he was to be deployed the president pulled all of the MASH units out of Vietnam because the Viet Cong were going after the MASH units, he said. “They did that to demoralize the troops because they wouldn’t have someone to take care of them if they got hurt.”

When Simonsen got out of the Army he became a dental resident at Milwaukee Children’s Hospital where he served as an intern resident and got his degree in pediatric dentistry. After graduation he came back to Utah and opened a practice in pediatric dentistry. “I found out that I was the first pediatric dentist in Utah,” he said. “There are about 165-175 dentists now.”

Simonsen moved his practice from Salt Lake to Bountiful and it grew. “Patients were coming from as far as Alaska to see me,” he said. “We had families coming from Georgia and Tennessee. They were following me. Lots of second generation patients that we see.”

Besides patients from out of state, Simonsen also treated children from all over the world, even the children of a Saudi Arabian prince.

For the 56 years he’s been in practice, Simonsen has done more than just dentistry – he becomes a child’s friend. 

“I like to build a relationship with the kids,” said Simonsen. “I go to their games, dance recitals, etc. places where they can see me and say ‘hi.’ There needs to be a relationship between dentist and patient. I want them to know they are a real person – not just a number.”