Pamela Atkinson is welcomed among kings and paupers

When she was growing up in England, her father raced greyhounds and gambled away everything he earned. Eventually, he left and her mom took whatever menial job she could find to support two sons and three daughters.

"There was never enough to eat. We lived in an awful, awful mouse-infested house with an outside toilet," she says. When she took a paper route, all the money went to support the family. At age 15, other girls made fun of her clothes. When she went to a friend's home, she saw things her own lacked, like a table at which to study and indoor plumbing.

But she loved learning. She'd do her homework at the library, where a friendly librarian set new books aside for her to read. And she somehow knew, without being told, that education could change her future.

At night, lying in the bed where she slept heel-to-head with her two sisters, Pamela Atkinson would plan.

"I'll marry a rich man and never have anything to do with poor people," she told herself.

Fast-forward five decades and 4,500 miles, and it is actually her love of those who are homeless or simply poor for which Atkinson is best known.

Most weeks, you may find her offering gloves and socks, sage advice and hugs to those who shelter along the Jordan River or beneath the abutments of underpasses.

She has loved her homeless friends enough to scold them occasionally and to bargain for their better choices. She will pay to kennel a dog to get his owner into medical care. She speaks at the funerals of prominent friends — but she also eulogizes and mourns homeless friend C.J. and Papa Smurf and poor Virgil Robertson, who froze to death one Thanksgiving Day.

A reporter remembers having a cup of tea with Atkinson and one of her street friends in a house made of cardboard, called a hooch, where Atkinson and her host made small talk as a train rumbled yards away, shaking the cups and the makeshift furniture.

She usually has dog food in the back of her vehicle, a nod to her fondness for pets and her understanding that a homeless person may count a dog as his only true friend. Pets are a repository for love, and they boomerang it back to people who may find it nowhere else, she says.

H. David Burton, presiding bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, met Atkinson years ago, when she was organizing a Christmas dinner for the homeless. She needed food and lots of it for Salt Lake City's sizeable homeless population. It would be the first of many humanitarian projects the well-placed Mormon and the elder from the First Presbyterian Church would share.