It was 1982, and the word “homeless” was just worming its way into the public consciousness. Joe Wilson was one of those who found themselves without a roof in the midst of a recession and sharp cuts in social-services spending, and after weeks on the sidewalks of San Francisco in heavy rains, he wound up at the Hospitality House shelter.

It was the beginning of the end of his time on the streets — and eventually, it led to a new era for one of the first places to provide counseling and temporary beds for homeless people in San Francisco.

Hospitality House was founded during the Summer of Love to shelter young people who flocked to San Francisco looking for peace and love but found hard times. In the 50 years since then, it’s become an indispensable piece of the city’s homeless services network, and now serves about 20,000 people a year.

In 2017, the 62-year-old Wilson — already one of Hospitality House’s greatest success stories — became its executive director. The man who once took refuge under the nonprofit’s roof now oversees not only its 30-bed shelter but also arts, jobs and counseling programs. All told, he runs a staff of 55 and an annual budget of $4.5 million.

“Joe is whip-smart, he’s had real life experience, and he’s an inspiration for everyone who works for him,” said Sam Dodge, who oversees homeless policy for the Department of Public Works and helped found the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. “When we all learned he was going to be in charge of Hospitality House we thought, ‘OK, it’ll be all right now.’

“You have to have a deep well to go through what he did early in his life, and he came out OK. He’s got it — that quality it takes to do a job like what he has now.”

Wilson, a community organizer at Hospitality House since 2012, radiates several qualities as he makes the rounds of his programs: He is unpretentious, street-tough but polite, and never has his hardscrabble roots far from mind.

“He’s part of the structure here, a legend,” said Fagis Carter, who helps oversee the volunteer corps at Hospitality House. And “he sure doesn’t take any bull. It helps that he actually knows what he’s talking about. Like, always.”

Wilson greets statements like that with a shrug.

“Every day there’s a miracle somewhere on the streets here, where someone figures out their lives, someone makes the right choice,” he said. “I’m an example of that. I’m a guy who used to sleep on a mat on the floor here, and now I’m running the organization.

“How unlikely is that? I don’t take any day for granted.”

Wilson’s journey to where he is now was a convoluted one, winding through poverty, despair and a couple of stints at Stanford University.

Raised in Mississippi and Chicago by a single mother who eked out a living as a nursing assistant, he excelled at school and came to California to study history and economics at Stanford. He took long breaks from his schooling to go back to Chicago and take care of his ailing mother, and then dropped out of school in 1979 when he was told she was dead.

It turned out she wasn’t — it’s a complex story of family infighting, he says, and he reconnected with his mother in 2008 — but the blow of believing she was gone threw him off track.

After stints driving a cab in Palo Alto and working in a cafeteria in San Francisco, Wilson wound up unemployed and out of money. By 1982, he was living on the street. He spent nights nursing cups of cheap coffee in a Jack in the Box on Market Street to stay out of the cold, and then scored a bed at Hospitality House.

“Hospitality House was probably the first place where I heard the word ‘homeless,’ because it was just becoming a known thing back then,” he said. “The place was more welcoming than the church missions I’d been to. I felt accepted.”

After sleeping in Hospitality House’s shelter for a while, Wilson became a volunteer helping out there, then a peer counselor, then an employee, and finally the shelter supervisor. After a few years he left to work as a youth advocate and a union organizer, and five years ago he came back to Hospitality House for the community organizing job.

Paul Boden, for decades one of San Francisco’s foremost activists for homeless people, met Wilson at Hospitality House. Boden was working at the shelter and got Wilson a job cleaning city buses and counseled him about regaining his footing in life. He calls Wilson one of the smartest people he’s ever met.

“To work in that shelter, you had to be able to work in a really chaotic environment with people that were in really rough shape,” Boden said. “Joe could calm down the room just by his presence.

“If you talk to people with respect instead of just barking at them like a Nazi commander, they’ll chill out,” he said. “That’s what Joe is great at. He has a lot of compassion without being a wimp.”

Being executive director means Wilson must adapt his people skills to the administrative work that goes with running a major nonprofit. He runs a tight meeting — but the real touch is still person to person.

“OK, now what?” Wilson asked the other day of a bedraggled middle-aged man sitting, dazed, next to Hospitality House’s administrative offices on Turk Street. The man, Kenneth “Kirby” McCole, reached up a hand and spoke.

“Soup and soda,” McCole mumbled, gazing up through bleary, uncertain eyes.

Wilson knelt down and looked hard into McCole’s face, forcing him to focus. “No sodas,” he said. “They’re not good for you. Come with me.”

He started to lead McCole to the Hospitality House drop-in center a block away on Leavenworth Street. McCole shook his head. “Just soup,” he said. “No way to the drop-in. Just soup.”

Others might have given up or gotten preachy. Wilson ducked back inside his office and came out with a bag of crackers and two protein bars. He gently took an empty potato chip bag McCole was clutching in one hand and replaced it with the food.

“When you’re ready, you come to the drop-in center,” Wilson said. McCole nodded. He staggered up Turk Street, and Wilson sighed.

“We’ve got to put him together with the HOT (city Homeless Outreach Team) team,” Wilson said. “Maybe try again with our drop-in. You can’t just give up. You have to remember that things can improve.”

Half a block away, McCole dropped the food he was carrying. Wilson walked over, picked up the packages, put them in McCole’s pockets, and patted him on the back as McCole tottered away again.

“It’s not easy,” Wilson said. “But you do always have to remember, there is never no hope.”

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron