Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Dean Klaus, a Sunrise Rotary Club member, looks inside the newly-repaired mushroom house.

The mushroom house is patched, the graffiti is cleaned up, the trails have been re-surfaced. And just like that, the long-neglected fairy tale park looks to have a happy ending.

For years, Galen McBee Airport Park has languished in McMinnville, but a group of local volunteers has now resurrected the whimsical forested trails, breathing new life into one of the most unique public spaces in the Willamette Valley.

I first explored the park in spring 2017, and found it in rough shape. I described the conditions in an article posted on OregonLive that May, which appeared in The Oregonian in August:



When I visited in mid-May, the mushroom house was marred by graffiti, filled with crushed beer cans and condom wrappers. Beautiful concrete drinking fountains also adorn the park - some shaped into spirals, others elaborately decorated with shells - but none were operative, and all were covered in thick coats of moss. Agricultural runoff ran over the trail.



Part of the maintenance issues have to do with the transition from winter to spring, McMinnville parks and recreation director Jay Pearson said, but part of the problem is a lack of funding. The city hit an economic slump in 2008, he said, and ever since it's been hard to keep up with the maintenance of its sprawling park system.

That story caught the attention of Dean Klaus, a member of McMinnville’s Sunrise Rotary Club.

"I read it and I thought, 'Man, what a sad story to put on a travel page,'" he told the News-Register. "And then I thought … any time there's a problem, it's an opportunity."

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Denise Murphy, president of the McMinnville Sunrise Rotary Club, points out the details on one of the nine artistic fountains in the park.

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Klaus talked to fellow rotary club members, who agreed to adopt the park, and then spent the better part of a year cleaning it up. Volunteers gathered to re-surface trails, clean out culverts, replace signs, and patch up and re-paint the iconic mushroom house.

They also got in touch with Galen McBee himself, McMinnville’s first parks director and airport manager, who served from 1968 to 1997.

“I thought the park was named after a dead guy,” Sunrise Rotary president Denise Murphy said, gathered with Klaus and McBee at the park last week.

“I’m not dead yet!” McBee, now 79, laughed.

While walking along the newly-refurbished trails, McBee walked the group through the history of the park.

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Galen McBee walks out to the field where a grove of trees once stood. Their removal led to the establishment of the park.

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It all started in World War II, he said, when the U.S. government offered to build a municipal airport in McMinnville. The resulting airfield butted up against a separate plot of land, which once had been logged and, for a time at least, had been used to store dynamite. Over the years, a roughly 21-acre plot of woods grew up there, and in the 1970s, inspectors with the Federal Aviation Administration told airport officials to remove a patch of the trees that were growing too tall, too close to the runway.

But that land was still private property, and the owner wasn’t interested in selling just a slice of it, McBee said. Instead, the man sold the city the entire plot of land, and after crews cut down the offending trees, city officials decided to turn the rest of it into a public park.

They gave artist Sam Gendusa free reign to design the fairy tale elements, including the mushroom house and nine fountains. The park was promoted as a place to come and watch the planes come in, or for pilots of small aircraft to land and have a picnic lunch. City officials opened the park in 1977, and surprised McBee by naming it after him.

“I felt honored,” McBee said.

In the following decades, McMinnville’s population climbed, and the city’s parks department added 13 additional public parks without hiring more employees to manage them, McBee said. Tiny Airport Park was naturally neglected in favor of the newer, larger complexes of sports fields, and while some locals still stopped by, trails went largely unmaintained, and vandalism went unchecked.

Until last year, that is, when the Sunrise Rotary took it upon themselves to show the park some much-needed love.

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Oyster shells decorate one of the nine fountains in the park.

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Vandalism is still an issue, Murphy said – as it is at a lot of public parks – and there’s still work to be done on the trail signs, which a local teenager is planning on taking up for an Eagle Scout project. The concrete-and-shell fountains, with their artistic curves and basins, will remain capped for now, and won’t be turned back on without testing the water for lead, she said.

But even by giving the park some attention, it feels as if it’s gained new life. As the group walked the mile of trails, pointing out projects done and yet to do, groups of walkers, runners and dog walkers passed, enjoying the fruits of their labor, happily utilizing the unique public space.

With its many whimsical flourishes, the twists and turns of the trail, nooks and crannies and hidden treasures, Airport Park truly has a magical quality to it, one that can transport visitors to a different time and place.

“The idea is, once you’ve finished [walking the trails], you feel like you’ve been somewhere bigger,” McBee said.

As McMinnville continues to grow and evolve, the 41-year-old park by the airport can feel antiquated, even irrelevant. But the group of locals who dedicated their time and energy to resurrecting Galen McBee Airport Park sees a value in keeping it around.

“We have the obligation to fulfill history,” Murphy said. “There are a lot of people who benefit from a little bit of work that we do.”

--Jamie Hale | jhale@oregonian.com | @HaleJamesB

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Denise Murphy and Galen McBee look at one of the nine fountains in the park.

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Short trails run through the park past a footbridge over one of the small creeks.

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Shells and rock decorate one of the nine fountains in the park.

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