John Simmons, SECO Equipment & AAM/Parts Pro Founder
By Gary Molinaro | February 26th, 2010 | Category: Obituaries | No Comments »The big industry picture and one-on-one daily business dealings both mattered to SECO Equipment Co. founder and SEMA Hall of Famer John Simmons, who died Feb. 14 at the age of 73. Simmons is survived by his wife of 55 years, Annie Marie Kilgore Simmons; and daughters Lynne Aldridge, Aline Jackson, and Anne Graves, president of SECO.
SECO’s origins date back to a mail-order parts business Simmons founded while still working for his father’s electrical appliance repair business. As Graves notes on the SECO website, her father “began selling racing slicks and t-shirts out of a trailer he hauled to the (race) tracks.” The company grew into a warehouse distributor and a five-store chain of SECO Performance Centers.
In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Simmons got more and more involved in the industry. His Hall of Fame biography on the SEMA website notes that Simmons joined the association in 1969 and became a Performance Warehouse Association (PWA) area director in 1974. For two solid decades, Simmons was generous with his leadership and insight, serving three terms on the SEMA board of directors (1978-’82), holding his PWA directorship until 1991 and serving two terms each as PWA treasurer and national director. In 1993, he was given the PWA Pioneer Award, and SEMA inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2004.
Simmons also co-founded the AAM/Parts Pro group in the late 1980s. AAM President Tim Odom called Simmons a man of vision who recognized early on the value and importance of organizations like PWA and SEMA and who saw that investments in other parts of the industry come back to help individual businesses. “He wasn’t a self-centered businessman,” Odom said. “He was somebody who looked at the industry overall and knew that what would be good for the industry would be good for his business as well. It takes a person of vision to do that.”
At the same time, Odom complimented Simmons as a sharp horse trader, who knew how to deal and find opportunities and who never stopped conducting his business warmly and on a person-to-person level. “He knew how to make things happen,” Odom said. “He knew how to find deals and opportunities, and, within our group, he was respected as a negotiator. But, he did it all with a smile on his face.”
John Towle, executive director of PWA, knew Simmons for more than 40 years and the two shared a long-standing enthusiasm for drag racing. “I always found him to be just a genuine, honest, wonderful individual to do business with, and he was certainly a voice of the aftermarket,” Towle said. “There’s just not thousands of those kind of folks out there.”
Towle also spoke of Simmons’ ability to see and understand challenges and issues from all sides. “When you worked a program together, you always knew where John was coming from,” he said. “He could wear an association hat or an industry hat, and he could wear his own business hat. The industry was important to him — not just SECO itself.”
