A homeless history album

SALT LAKE CITY — I see community advocate Pamela Atkinson in Terminal Two at the Salt Lake City International Airport. She is on her way to a conference in St. George and is pulling a small suitcase with wheels. I greet her and we find a couple seats in an alcove area where I pull out a manila file folder with printouts of photographs of homeless people taken between 1982 and 2009.

Atkinson says she has been working with homeless people in the Salt Lake area since about 1987. I called her earlier in the day while she was packing for her trip to St. George for the Utah Coalition Against Pornography's regional conference on "Protecting Children and Families from Pornography and Other Harmful Materials." Photo historian Ron Fox had selected a sampling of photographs of homeless people from the Deseret News photo archive for our weekly historical photo feature and I wanted Atkinson to give her thoughts and impressions about how homelessness had changed over the past 28 years.

Atkinson had offered to stop by the Triad Center on her way to the airport, but to make it easier, I met her right before her flight.

The first photograph, from April 1982, is of a transient shelter built in a hole in the ground. "Oh yes," Atkinson says. "Many of our homeless friends are very creative — particularly in the winter when they want to get in out of the cold. And they will gather all kinds of cardboard and wood, crates — they'll haul in anything … that will keep them warm."

I hand her the next photograph. It shows the beds at the first night at "The Shelter Project" in December 1982. "We've progressed from head-to-foot beds into bunk beds because you can get far more people in." She says these beds look too close together.

The next photograph has a doctor listening to a child taking deep breaths in 1984. Atkinson remembers having doctors and nurse practitioners examine homeless people at a trailer clinic once a week. "And that was the only health care that was available for homeless people at that time," she says. "It was before the Road Home shelter was built."

A December 1985 photo shows homeless men coming through a line for a holiday dinner. "There wasn't a lot of room to serve these big meals," she says. She pauses and points to a man with a beard and a knit cap: "I recognize this man. He's passed on now. I remember seeing him around in the late 1980s." She doesn't mention his name.