November 2025 | Vol. 5 Iss. 11
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Davis County
Y O U R C O M M U N I T Y N E W S PA P E R
Special Veterans Day section
Page 11
Healthy Utah Community
Bountiful City receives designation from Get Healthy Utah
Page 9
For Simonsen, dentistry has been about the kids – and the relationships By Becky Ginos | becky.g@thecityjournals.com BOUNTIFUL—Chris Simonsen retires
after 56 years in practice as a pediatric dentist.
A
s 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 predent 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
Chris Simonsen treats a child at his practice in Bountiful. Simonsen retired after 56
Continued page 4 years as a pediatric dentist. Courtesy photo