ALTON - At a recent North Alton-Godfrey Business Council meeting, John Simmons spoke about AltonWorks and his vision for Alton. But first, he told the story of how he met his wife.
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Simmons explained that he and Jayne were both born in the Alton a few years apart, but they didn’t spend much time in the city as John grew up in the East Alton/Rosewood Heights area and Jayne grew up in the Wanda/South Roxana area. They met at Roxana High School, and Simmons immediately new Jayne was the girl. He proposed. He was 14.
“I just knew she was the one. Why mess around, you know?” he laughed. “She didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no, either. It was one of those, ‘So you’re saying there’s a chance?’”
One day, the two of them were driving to a visit a friend in Fairmount in Alton. Jayne, who had her license before Simmons, was driving her Chevy Chevette as they looked for the address. They were “toodling around Fairmount,” lost, when all of a sudden, Simmons pulled the emergency brake.
Jayne yelled out in surprise, but Simmons was focused on something he had noticed outside the window. He pointed to the building in front of them and asked her what it was.
“She said, ‘I think that’s the Olin Mansion,’” Simmons remembered. “I’d never heard of it, never seen it or anything, and we’re sitting there stopped in front of it. I said, ‘The what?’ She said, ‘I think that’s John Olin’s house.’ And I said, ‘That’s a house? For, like, one guy?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I think that’s John Olin’s house.’ And I said, ‘Someday I’m going to live in that house.’”
That was Simmons’s “first foray into Alton.” The couple wound up living in Edwardsville, where they planned to build their dream home. But before construction started, Simmons decided to sit down with the current owner of the Olin House.
“I met with him, and we cut a deal, and I bought the house,” Simmons said. “So now we’re moving to Alton. And by the way, I did all this without talking to Jayne. But we’re still married.”
In 2003, Simmons and Jayne moved into the Olin Mansion and lived there for 21 years. The two of them have been married for almost 40 years now.
