Jeb Bladine: Kids caught more than crawdads in City Park
In the News-Register, our weekly “Vintage N-R” photo array is accompanied by “Memory Lane” morsels from 10, 25 and 50 past years. We reminisce about times when Hotel Oregon was the Greyhound bus depot, an historic courthouse stood proudly on the current site, town leaders met for coffee at Thrifty Drug, maple bars were the stars at Atlas Bakery, and big-screen entertainment included the Mack Theater and an outdoor drive-in.
Newspaper feature stories and family-produced obituaries regularly remind us of the people, places, things and activities of years gone by. But for me, this lead sentence of an April newspaper story struck a truly nostalgic chord:
“Ask a McMinnville native about childhood memories of growing up in town, and there’s a good chance you’ll hear about catching crawdads in Lower City Park.”
Yes, we caught crawdads in Lower City Park, but that’s just one memory of McMinnville’s great City Park.
In this mid-1950s town of about 7,000 people, hundreds of young kids were dropped off in Lower City Park on Saturdays for an amazing array of activities supervised by Parks Department staff and volunteers. In that one limited space, there were rousing games of softball, tetherball and box hockey; tables of board games and comic books; occasional arts activities; the adjacent, original outdoor pool; and races up and down the rough hillside trails leading to playground equipment in Upper Park.
There was no sprawling Dancer Park with baseball and soccer fields … no invasive/divisive cell phones or computer tablets … no high-tech in sight. It was a kids’ community melting pot that produced childhood memories shared still by all who grew up in those McMinnville years.
Yes, we occasionally did catch crawdads in Lower City Park, but we caught a lot more in life experience.
Our April newspaper story described completion of a two-year restoration project by the Greater Yamhill Watershed Council “to remove invasive pests and plant natives along the creek from the culvert near Second Street to the bridge in the middle of the park.”
Restoration specialist Markie Hess and volunteers planted more than 600 native plants and five pounds of native seed. The native plants, she said, filter water, feed native pollinators and hold soil in place; continuing project goals include reduction of water temperature and erosion mediation.
Hess applied for funding to complete park creek rehabilitation from the bridge to the culvert at Park Drive. Our online story has more details, at shorturl.at/m3ROt.
If you haven’t seen Lower City Park recently, there aren’t any crowds — it’s worth a short drive-down and a longer walk-around to see and touch and feel the old-time park experience.
As for nostalgia, we may never again see the likes of McMinnville’s raucous, semi-orderly, child sanctuary world of the 1950s. But we can remember that it will take careful planning and imaginative programming for even the grandest of youth-activity facilities to replicate what Lower City Park meant to tens of thousands of McMinnville children.
Maybe the next aquatic center needs a crawdad pool.
Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.
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