Cindy Simon Finds Her Passion in the Palisades

When the Palisades Community Council honored Cindy Simon with the Community Service Award last Thursday, they couldn’t have known that the very words ‘community’ and ‘service’ would align so neatly with Cindy’s focus on building community among individuals, within the neighborhood and school, and finally, in the town. From the moment she and her husband Bill moved from New Jersey to the Huntington Palisades in 1990, Cindy recognized a comfortable familiarity, having grown up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. ‘I liked the feeling of the place, sidewalks and walking distance from the Village,’ she says. The simple pleasure of having neighbors promotes friendships and a bond that builds community, Cindy says. The first year the Simons moved to their home on Toyopa and saw that the Fourth of July 5-10K race passed on their street toward the Recreation Center, they extended an invitation to the community for post-race breakfast that has become an annual tradition. It wasn’t too many years before that suburban life had been quite an adjustment for Cindy. Before she married Bill, she had been living the quintessential urban life’a convertible bond trader on Wall Street, an apartment on the Upper East Side and a robust social life. She met Bill through his brother Peter, who worked in the same office at Kidder Peabody. Their courtship led to marriage in 1986, followed by their first child, Willie, two years later. As the family expanded and Bill joined in an investment business with his brother Peter, and his father William E. Simon, former treasury secretary for presidents Nixon and Ford, the Simons moved to Morristown, New Jersey. ‘It was such a change–suburbs, marriage and a baby,’ Cindy says. So when the opportunity came up to open an office in Los Angeles, she ‘jumped at the chance. It took me the five minutes getting off the airplane to adjust to L. A.’ As the Simons’ three children’Willie, Lulu and Griffith’entered school, Cindy found an opportunity that kindled an unexpected passion for identifying a need at the school and digging in to fill it. ‘I found my niche at Canyon School,’ she says. ‘I enjoyed the principal, Carol Henderson, and her enthusiastic support. She let me do my thing there.’ Cindy initiated, coordinated and participated in a major beautification project that included working on renovating the grounds and the historic school house. ‘Back then when the public schools were struggling with multimillion-dollar debts, Cindy would just do it!’ says her friend Denise Melas, who got to know Cindy while the two were literally pulling weeds together. Melas, whom Cindy credits as her mentor, adds, ‘Cindy is a hardworking woman in her heart and soul. I wish she’d run for president.’ While she has no ambitions for political office, Cindy confesses that she enjoyed stumping for Bill when he was running for governor in 2002. ‘I considered it a great privilege to travel all over the state and visit with people in parts of the state I didn’t know a lot about. I also did a lot of public speaking and enjoyed that.’ She adds, however, that after Bill won the Republican nomination, she took a deep breath and wondered ‘What if he wins this thing?’ He lost an unexpectedly close race to Gray Davis. Cindy’s skill in marshalling successful volunteer efforts is natural to a large degree, but she has always been interested in group dynamics, having studied the topic as a sociology major at Indiana University. For a paper in college on group behavior, she wrote on the social dynamics in her sorority’Kappa Kappa Gamma–which elicited a disdainful comment from the professor. ‘He made a snide remark, which I thought was unjustified, so I went to speak to him about it,’ Cindy recalls. ‘Later, he wrote me a letter in which he apologized for his comments and told me that he agreed that the sorority made an interesting study. Twenty years later, when I went back to the university to give a scholarship to a graduate student in sociology, the same professor attended the event specifically to greet me.’ These lessons revealed Cindy’s graceful tenacity and, more importantly, proved useful in her volunteer work. ‘I think the key is to have fun with the people you’re working with. I always tried to see what people wanted to do and give them the leeway to just run with it. I was organized, had an agenda and kept meetings short. I got a lot of joy out of all these projects, working with people who weren’t necessarily in the neighborhood and from all walks of life.’ Children grow up and move on. Willie is now a senior at Riverview, a school for autistic children on Cape Cod; Lulu, 18 is in her final year at Oaks Christian, and Griffith is a ninth grader at Harvard Westlake. Cindy began to search for something after Canyon. ‘I served on few boards such as L.A.’s Best, but I didn’t feel like I was really contributing,’ Cindy says. ‘I like hands-on and I like to stay local.’ Through their family foundation, the Simons pinpointed community beautification and youth in need, funding physical fitness equipment at Los Angeles public high schools and supporting the Palisades-Malibu YMCA by hosting donor receptions at their home. This association with the Y led ultimately to Cindy’s new venture. ‘I knew Carol Pfannkuche [the Y’s executive director] from Calvary, and we’d run across each other from time to time,’ Cindy says. ‘I remember watching her and found her to be enjoyable and bright. I wanted to work with her.’ When the YMCA took legal possession of the triangular property at the corner of Temescal Canyon and Sunset in November, the Simons pledged $250,000 to help the Y purchase the property and to begin landscaping what is now known as the Simon Meadow. ‘I see it as a place for families to come and enjoy activities throughout the year,’ says Cindy, whose first suggestion was the scarecrow-decorating contest that accompanied the kick-off of this year’s Halloween pumpkin sale. She has also begun to study ideas for beautifying the corner and expanding activities that will bring in more kids for an outdoor experience. ‘I like to get in at the development stage of a project,’ Cindy says. ‘My passion is coming back!’