Park Doctor

Tall Grasses!

We decided at one point to build a walking path along the creek on the east side of the park and extend the nature trail a little bit by planting tall grasses in spots which would eliminate views of the baseball fields – baseball, baseball, baseball everywhere!

So, I went to the library and picked-out three books on ‘tall grasses’ – some grow up to fourteen-feet tall and some to only one-feet tall.

I went to sit down and leaf through these books and the librarian, Martha Catt, came up to me and asked: “Now what are you doing?”

Well – I was always in there digging up a book or asking for her help on something or other, and I told her that I was looking at tall grasses…

And she said: “Do you know that a Zionsville, Indiana man wrote one of these books?”

I said: “NO,” I didn’t know…

“And guess how close he lives to the park? Two blocks,” she said!

Isn’t that amazing what you’ve got in your own community? Look around you, look carefully.

Now we’ve got tall grasses leaping and arching towards the sky and some of them are, oh I would say, 14’ tall and some of them are quite a bit thicker but it’s a neat addition to the park and we have our very own ‘tall grass man’ close by. He’s over there checking them all the time looking for Japanese beetles, etc. – we have to keep on top of that otherwise he would cause us a lot of telephone calls. His name is Jack Oakes, he has written a nice book on tall grasses and now he is writing a second book on ‘vines’. He is a very community-minded person and he’s got the energy of a man of 25 and he’s up-there in age, so we give him lots of credit for what he has done.

Parking Lot

The third major project was the Parking Lot. You’ve heard what a mess the parking lot was in the middle of the park – imagine trying to build a parking lot.

So we looked around for ways to build our new parking lot, and we figured we needed about 1200 truck loads of fill to do a good job of building a parking lot.

The question was: Where are you going to find that many loads of fill close to your park-site?

I figured I could always follow the ‘pool-guy’ around; as he digs the pool, I could collect the dirt – that would mean a truck load at a time. But this was a problem that somehow was resolved quite easily.

At a Rotary Club meeting, I met Jack Hendricks – a project manager for Dow Elanco

Just about a mile from our park; while I am building a parking lot and the Kiwanis Plaza, he’s digging lakes!

He had no way of getting rid of his dirt and I needed it. So we worked it out between us. He had a loader, that was so big that it only took 1 ½ scoops to fill one of those large tri-axle trucks. We had six trucks going day and night to get the ground at proper level to build the parking lot.

Building a parking lot requires quite a bit of soil to be moved. All of the top soil had to be removed from the area. Thus, we had a large mountain in the middle of the park of fresh black soil – top soil which had come down into the park via the creek from farms all along the area. This is where we were able to partner with Dow-AgroSciences in a swap. They didn’t need the dirt and we did. So – they loaded and we trucked!

We were able to get the soil down and compacted. But just before we did that, we thought we better double-check on what we were planning to do. So, we had several civil engineers come out and verify that the drawings, we had used for projecting what we were going to do in the park, were accurate.

Well, the parking lot, if you followed the plan that we had, would have ended up a little bit into the creek.

And just in time, I received a call from Mary Smith. Mary said; “You have two choices; you can build your parking lot and then I can come in and tell you what you did wrong, or I can come in and design the whole thing for you!”

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