CEO aims to improve lives where he grew up
Simon Salas’ window to the world is framed in a decades-old building at Saltillo and Southwest 19th streets. Each workday, after he’s settled at his desk, he looks out onto a stretch of the West Side barrio where he was born and raised.
He sees parents with little ones, trudging by their sides, heading beneath outstretched tree limbs into Good Samaritan Community Services, as mothers, fathers and their tots did in the ’70s. He sees women and men at the corner bus stop, waiting for the main mode of transportation to their jobs, like his mother rode to work at Luby’s in North Star Mall. He sees everyday people who shoulder the unseen weight of striving to provide better lives for loved ones.
As president and CEO of Good Samaritan, Salas is invested in providing resources at the hub that plays a huge part in the 78207 ZIP code.
“Our job is to support, foster and help individuals empower themselves,” said Salas, 64. “There’s a constant influx of support from church partners and diocese individuals who believe in supporting our neighbors. There’s something to be said about the continuity of goodwill.”
Salas is the fifth CEO of Good Samaritan since it began in 1939 downtown as St. Mark’s Episcopal Community House. By 1951, it had evolved into a health intervention agency in an area with high rates of infant mortality, murder, poverty and disease. Services from the nonprofit, known as “Good Sam,” include a child development center, family development services, afterschool and summer enrichment programs, and a nationally accredited senior center.
For the past four years, Salas has supervised services that support the neighborhood that’s much different from when he grew up there. Salas recalled the proud traditions, school pride and success stories of those who left and returned to the thenbarren land. He recalled how families posted farewell signs in front yards for young men sent to fight for their country more than 8,900 miles away in the Vietnam War.
In the ’70s, Salas played basketball with his cousins at Good Sam, which isn’t far from El Paso and Southwest 24th streets, where he lived with his grandparents, brother Mike and mother Margarita “Margie” Garza. She didn’t graduate from high school, but she always prodded her sons to stay in school. In later years, she earned a GED and a business certificate.
“Her education was delayed, but it wasn’t permanent,” Salas said.
A bookish child, he read the encyclopedias his family bought from a door-to-door salesman. The volumes, from A to Z, opened new worlds to Salas during a time when the United Negro College Fund’s motto, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” was more than a phrase — it was motivation.
To bring in money for his family, he worked at a Piggly Wiggly grocery store starting at 4 p.m. and ending between 11 p.m. and 1:30 a.m., stocking goods and working as a checker at the cash register. He’d wake up at 5 a.m. to do homework and squeezed in more studies at lunch, often nodding off to sleep.
In 1974, while at Kennedy High School, he met Hispanic students from San Antonio who attended Yale, Columbia, Harvard and Princeton universities. They belonged to Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, or MECHA, part of a movement to recruit high school students of Mexican descent to attend Ivy League schools.
Salas took their advice and applied to several. When he opened his acceptance letter from Columbia, he was shocked — he had a full scholarship.
“It was like being reborn,” Salas said. “It was hard to fathom.”
That year, he was one of a dozen Hispanic graduates from San Antonio who attended universities on the East Coast. Columbia sent him to a three-week camp in upstate New York to prepare for university life. His first semester was difficult. Being a voracious reader saved him, as he read one book a week, which kept his grades up.
After graduation, he began an industrious career in New York City for more than two decades. On Salas’ first day at the New York City board of education, his boss, Ed Sermier, came out, and the first thing he said was, “It’s time to start looking for your next job.”
Sermier’s statement threw him for a second, but he soon realized that his boss would teach him everything he knew so Salas could expand his horizons.
In 1998, Salas, his wife and two children moved to San Antonio to be closer to family. Former Good Samaritan Board Chairman Neel Lane brought Salas to the nonprofit, where he was vice president and a board member from 2010 to 2016. He said Salas brings a level of sophistication and greater credibility to the agency.
“He’s one of the kids who opened the door and walked through,” Lane said. “His journey is a unique journey of service that enriches this community. It was the longest of long shots. With all of that brainpower, he’s helping kids not that different than himself.”
Lane said Salas’ emphasis on learning shows in Good Sam’s educational programs, especially for youths.
“God didn’t just put gifted and talented people in affluent neighborhoods,” Lane said. “It isn’t that it lacks kids that are capable of going to college, it’s that we’re missing those kids.”
During his junior and senior years of college, just as others reached out to him, Salas traveled to high schools in San Antonio, Houston and Chicago, talking to students. Now at Good Sam, he’s extending that chance to residents of his old neighborhood.
“I have a wonderful life,” Salas said. “It’s what I want every kid here to have — to believe they can do whatever they put their mind to. No one should be held back by circumstance. They should be promoted by their aspirations and their dreams. That’s what should propel them. We should be doing what we can to help people realize their dreams.”
Salas is reminded of that responsibility every day. He’s aware of it on visits with children, teens, parents and seniors who benefit from the nonprofit’s services. On his wall hangs a painting by Bernique Longley of a young girl, draped in pink and purple, pencil in hand, focused on studies that could lead to a brighter future.
One of Salas’ joys is seeing the energetic little ones each time they walk past his window in a straggly line. It makes his day when they pop their hands in the air and wave as they enter Good Sam, a safe place of growth, opportunity and promise.