Kelly Kenoyer
Alice Grovom has finally retired, just in time for her 95th birthday.
Though she retired from her career as a bookkeeper several decades ago, but didn’t miss a beat in her efforts to improve the image of the Sweet Home community.
Of course, she would probably have kept going if it weren’t for her body holding her back.
“I’m a bionic woman,” she said, grinning and putting her hand on her hip. “I have half a hip, and I had a T-11 fracture.”
Those injuries, suffered in the past two years, have made it difficult for her to continue her work on the Sweet Home Beautification Committee, which she helped launch in 1980, serving as chair in its second year. It started as the President’s Club, but quickly grew to much more under Grovom’s leadership.
Over the next four decades, she spent thousands of hours working to improve the Sweet Home community and make it beautiful. She spearheaded the planter projects along Highway 20, developed the Arts and Crafts Festival, got Highway 20 widened, worked to get landscaping installed around the city welcome sign on Highway 228, and made landscaping happen at Clover Park.
“I would even go after work, she said. “I was out there picking up weeds all by myself at 8:30, and Mr. Jim Gourley brought me a Coke to drink.”
“I’ve been busy all my life, even since I retired, until I got hurt.”
Bionic woman, indeed.
A life of service and friendship
Born in St. Helens in 1925, Grovom married her husband Roger in 1949 and moved to Sweet Home with him in 1951.
“They were just rocking Main Street – I mean the big rocks. And there was just about one store,” she recalled.
Roger Grovom opened a radiator repair shop, and she went to night school in Corvallis to become an enrolled agent tax advisor. She opened her bookkeeping office, Accurate Bookkeeping Service, next door to his shop a few years later, and kept working there for 35 years.
Grovom took a lot of pride in the relationships she developed with clients there, and her ability to help them with their finances. She convinced skeptics to invest in their retirements, and knew just about everyone in town, she said.
Roger died in 1972, and Grovom never remarried. She had great friendships in the community, however: Mona Waibel, with whom she traveled extensively, Betty Acaiturri, whom she knew through the church, and Patty Holk, who worked closely with her on beautification efforts.
Holk is a more recent friend, having met Grovom 15 years ago through beautification activities. Holk said she admired the flowers in the Highway 20 median, so she went to the Chamber of Commerce to ask how to get involved.
“So they called Alice, then said, ‘give her five minutes and she’ll be right there.’ So, sure enough, she came through the door of the chamber.”
Holk started volunteering right away, first helping with garden beds, then with ordering flowers.
“Everyone knew that when Alice came around, you were going to be doing something wonderful,” she said.
Holk said Grovom was never afraid to get her hands dirty.
“It didn’t matter if she had on her fluffy white blouse and a white skirt. She would be out there weeding and digging and hauling plants and – and look as clean as she did when she started.”
To Holk, it seemed Grovom would make something happen almost as soon as it was asked: If someone wanted a planter in front of their business downtown, she would be there “in seconds” to help them out.
“Every day was Alice’s beautification day,” Holk said. Grovom spent an entire day making five trips to nurseries in Corvallis and Salem, not stopping until it got dark.
Another time, volunteers were working on putting bark dust out by Highway 20 and Oak Terrace, Holk recalled.
“We needed another wheelbarrow because we were just kind of shoveling it by hand. Well, she lives up on Nandina off First, and she said she had one up at her house, ‘I’ll just go get it.’
My husband offered to drive her up to bring it back, and she said ‘Oh no, no no, I’m gonna walk and get it.’ And she walked all the way to her house and then pushed the wheelbarrow all the way back. And I just thought, ‘holy mackerel! We’re dealing with this super woman here.’ But you know, that’s just how she did. If something was needed, she didn’t hesitate one second to make it happen.”
Grovom is “extremely dedicated,” Holk added. “She worked on beautification every day since its conception. The hours are unimaginable that she has put in.”
Acaiturri agreed.
“She worked down at the beauty strip; she probably worked down there until her early 90s,” she said. “I think she probably was still down there weeding. And if she wasn’t weeding, she was organizing. Very, very community-minded.”
Grovom is clever, not just hard-working. When construction projects on Highway 20 went awry and a large hole was left in the middle of Main Street, Grovom knew it wouldn’t be left that way and that she had room to negotiate for water improvements.
“There’s only so many highways that go clear through the United States, and Highway 20 is one of them,” she said, eyes twinkling. She knew cave-ins out by Cascadia were always rapidly repaired for that very reason, “so eventually Sweet Home Economic Development gave us $25,000 to repair it.”
When she had a green light on her median project, she carefully chose plants for each area, based on how they could be maintained, with hardy plants along areas where they couldn’t do automatic watering. She also kept a keen eye on sales at the nurseries she patronized, and found good deals for the plants she cultivated in Sweet Home.
Money tended to find its way to beautification, thanks to Grovom, Holk said.
“Alice would get money for walking down the street. Mike Melcher would come by and every so often he would drive by and stop and give Alice $100 that she would put in her pocket and it would go towards beautification. And she liked to refer to that as her ‘street business,'” she chuckled.
Whenever the Beautification Committee needed more funding, Grovom was “out beating the pavement,” Holk said. “She would be talking to City Council, and they all knew you that gotta be careful when she came around because she was after something, and you couldn’t say no.”
That money went to a lot of different causes. Holk recalled another time when the Arts and Crafts fair was just starting, and when Grovom was funding it from her own pocket.
“I remember that the first year they had the arts and crafts, they only had maybe five or six vendors, and they were really worried people wouldn’t come buy,” Holk said. “She called her kids and everybody else she knew who lived close and gave them money to go shopping so the craft festival would be a success.”
Grovom’s friends and colleagues repeatedly spoke to her ability to bring people together through her hard work and positivity.
“I’ve just been blessed and blessed,” Grovom said.
Acaiturri said she and Grovom used to square dance together, and said Grovom was quite good at it.
“If some of the square dance clubs were giving a special event in different cities, we’d just pack up the old travel trailer and away we’d go,” she reminisced.
Ever a breaker of barriers, Grovom takes pride in being one of the first two women in the local Rotary Club. She took note of the progress women have made over the years.
“We’ve come a long way from when my mother worked in the mill,” she said. “It is getting better, like, even in Congress last year, when all those women got to be representatives. That was a big moment, I thought.”
Grovom was deeply involved in the Fir Lawn Lutheran Church for many years, where she has served as for most of that time.
“Sometimes they’d have somebody fill in for a while, because you’re only supposed to hold office for two years. But I think they have somebody to replace me this time,” she said.
Her friend of 50 years, Acaiturri called Grovom a “great supporter of the church,” and “a kind, faithful and considerate friend.”
Even now, Grovom is still there “scrapping for everything that we need,” her friend said of her church involvement.
Acaiturri said she admires Grovom’s positive attitude and sense of humor.
“She is one person who would never, never gossip or pass gossip. If you ever have any subject that has any gloom and doom, she can find the silver lining.”
Even when Grovom broke her hip, she was joking around in the hospital, Acaiturri said.
“She has a way of looking at the sunny side of everything. Very very seldom in the 50 years I’ve known her has she been discouraged.”
Retired at last
Now that she has so much free time, Grovom plans to throw herself into her novels.
She loves James Patterson books and mysteries, and takes a lot of pride in maintaining her home and garden in pristine condition. Each piece of furniture is in place, each decoration carefully placed in her home.
Her home garden, of course, still gets plenty of attention. She takes particular pride in the water features she had installed years ago, which remain in excellent condition.
“Even at 95, even though that when you get to be our age you know that time is limited, she still is looking at it with a positive attitude,” Acaiturri said.
Grovom’s awards and plaques from the City and Chamber of Commerce are arranged among angels on the shelves in her living room.
“I’m not anything special,” she said, incorrectly. “My grandma taught me to work.”
Grovom has a lot of hope for the future of Sweet Home, she said. “We’ve already turned the corner; we just can’t see it.”
She sees it in the willingness of its citizens to help each other. She pointed to the example of the dozens of volunteers who came to the Church of Nazarene to build platforms for the homeless last month.
“It’s not easy in some towns to have people volunteer to do anything, especially together. And I think the more people work together, it develops families and develops the community in which you live.”