AJR  Unknown
From AJR,   January/February 1999

A Park with Meaning   

By Mark Lisheron
Senior Contributing Writer Mark Lisheron (mark@texaswatchdog.org) is Austin bureau chief for Texas Watchdog, a government accountability news Web site.      

Related reading:
   » The Mentor


M ICHAEL GARTNER DETRACTORS, and Gartner is quick to tell you they are legion in Ames, delight in sniping that he and his partner, Gary Gerlach, might own a newspaper in Ames but they are not of Ames. In fact, Gartner and Gerlach live in Des Moines, 35 miles south of Ames on Interstate 35, as they have for many years.
Each has made an effort to be involved in the Ames community. For example, Gartner conducts weekly journalism discussion sessions for senior citizens at Iowa State University that regularly draw 250 people.
Gartner also had a park in Ames named after his son, Christopher.
For 15 years St. Thomas Aquinas Church leased 12 acres to the city of Ames. Neighbors around dead-ended Abraham Drive had always assumed the modest park the city maintained there belonged to taxpayers--until the church sold the property to a developer for about $250,000. Through the intercession of the neighbors, the developer agreed to sell 2.4 acres of the tract to the residents for $50,000, recalls Nancy Carroll, Ames' director of Parks and Recreation.
In 1996, after two years of furious fundraising, the residents had come up with $40,000. But the developer was becoming impatient, Carroll says. The neighbors made a last pitch to the community in a letter to the editor of the Tribune. ``They were $10,000 short and the bucket was dry," Carroll says. ``If I remember correctly, the letter to the editor mentioned something about giving whoever donated the money naming rights for the park."
Gartner ran the letter, but he also called Carroll. ``I asked Nancy, `If I buy this park and give it to the neighbors, will you name it after our son, Christopher?' " he recalls. ``It just seemed right. Christopher was a great, great boy."
Weeks after the residents and Gartner donated the park to Ames and the city renamed it Christopher Gartner Memorial Park, Christopher's father explained the gesture to readers in an editorial that ran on December 23, 1996.
``The park, just a few months old, is already serving its purpose, we thought," the editorial read. ``That purpose is to provide joy unbounded--joy for little kids, joy for their parents, joy for their dogs. For Christopher Carl Gartner was the most joyous boy that ever lived."
Christopher Gartner died at 17 of an acute attack of juvenile diabetes on June 30, 1994. ``He was an unabashed hugger from the day he was born in 1976 till the day he died in 1994," Gartner wrote. ``His last words to his father, as he lay in the hospital early in the morning of the summer day he died so suddenly and unexpectedly, were, `I love you too, Dad.' "
Gartner recites the years, the months and the days since Chris' death like his home telephone number. Gartner and his wife, Barbara, adopted three children. Melissa, 28, is an emergency medical technician in Minneapolis. Mike, 19, is a freshman at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. But it is Chris alone whose black-and-white framed picture sits front-and-center on Gartner's office desk.
Gartner says he intends to run the editorial, part of the entry that earned him a 1997 Pulitzer, every year at Christmastime.
``[I]f it's a nice day tomorrow," the editorial reads, ``you might want to wander over to Christopher Gartner Park and toss a ball around or romp with a dog or push a swing. And think nice thoughts about the cheerful boy who has lent it his name.
``It's too bad you never knew him. You'd have loved his laugh. You'd have loved him."

###