Every couple of weeks, on a Tuesday morning, a group of local residents €“ women, mostly, converges on the downtown section of Main Street.
As traffic whizzes by a lane away, behind a row of orange cones, they work their way down the median strips, clipping dead blossoms, pulling weeds, checking baskets. They’re led by a pair of determined women €“ Alice Grovom on one end and Phyllis Osborn on the other.
They are the driving force, though certainly not the muscle, behind the Sweet Home Beautification Committee, whose goal is to make the city something residents can be proud of and visitors remember.
Grovom, 83, is the one who is largely responsible for getting the current Beautification effort started some 10 years ago, City Manager Craig Martin said.
The median strip dates back to the 1970s, though it was kind of an “on-again, off-again” affair, Martin said. For years personnel from the Sweet Home Ranger District did the upkeep on the median, but by 1997 the U.S. Forest Service staff in Sweet Home was being scaled back and the median wasn’t getting as much attention.
“We had a meeting with the stakeholders, people who had volunteered in the past,” Martin recalled. “The conversation was about whether we should keep it or tear it out. Alice was at that meeting, and she spoke up and she thought she could organize people to help backfill the lack of volunteers we had. That was the birth of the Sweet Home Beautification Effort.”
Grovom said she got interested in gardening in 1995, when she decided to retire from her career as an accountant.
A native of St. Helens, she moved to Sweet Home on Aug. 30, 1951 with her husband Roger, who started a radiator repair shop here. After working for five years as secretary for the District 55 school superintendent (“I was the only secretary the district schools had. All the calls that didn’t come to me went directly to the principal”), she opened a bookkeeping/accounting office next door to her husband Roger’s radiator shop. She also managed a trailer park she and Roger owned and raised two children.
She also was involved in various community service projects, she said, joining the Business and Professional Women at the urging of another local accountant, Barbara Musgrave.
Grovom worked as an accountant for nearly 40 years, eventually becoming an enrolled agent certified to practice before the U.S. Tax Court. She sold her office in 1991, but, on the advice of a friend, retained a few clients.
“Then one day, in May 1995, a beautiful day, I said to myself, ‘If I don’t retire now, when will I retire?’ So I retired.”
She said some recent arrivals in town had started attending Master Gardener’s classes in Corvallis and had started a beautification group. With encouragement from local businesswoman Corky Loewen, she got involved.
She had been a member of the President’s Club, which had been raising money for a community center. When Jim Riggs and other local residents built the center, and the Senior Center moved in, the President’s Club suddenly had a nest egg of money.
Ten years ago, Grovom decided that money could be used in a constructive manner elsewhere.
“I knew the Beautification Committee would not succeed easily without being a nonprofit organization so I went to the President’s Club and asked them to change their name to President’s Club DBA Sweet Home Beautification Project.
With the $300 left over after the Senior Center was completed, Grovom went to the Sweet Home Foundation, the charitable arm of the Sweet Home Economic Development Group, and asked for a grant.
“They said they’d give $3,000 if we could match it,” she said. “We did it within a week.”
It was around that time that Osborn started getting involved in the beautification effort.
Now 70, Osborn grew up in Sweet Home, graduating as Phyllis Barnes from Sweet Home Union High School in 1956.
In her younger years she was active in the Jaycees and as a Girl Scout leader. After working for a while in the insurance business and while raising three children, she went to college and earned three degrees in education and counseling.
She taught business at Lebanon High School, worked as a counselor for the Lebanon school district and then became principal at Harrisburg Middle School.
“I couldn’t be as involved in Sweet Home as I wanted to be when I was working and taking classes,” she said.
One day, she said, she saw “people working in the middle of the street” and then her mother, Eleanor Barnes, got a letter asking for a donation towards the beautification effort.
“I wrote a note back saying I wanted to get involved,” Osborn said.
Soon after she got involved with the Arts and Crafts Festival, taking over in the second year as chair.
“I said I won’t be chair if the proceeds didn’t go to beautification,” she said, adding that she’s gotten help from others,
particularly Joyce Geil, who coordinates vendors. “They agreed, so I’ve been chair every year. It’s gotten to be a very big deal.
It’s grown every year with the Jamboree.”
A year ago Osborn married Jerry Smith, who has been pressed into service on numerous occasions, she said, to help with beautification projects. They will celebrate their first anniversary Aug. 27.
The two most obvious accomplishments of the Beautification Committee have been the downtown median planters and the landscaping around the city welcome sign on Highway 228 at Fern Ridge Road. Grovom said some younger volunteers have gotten involved in its activities, which also include putting out Christmas decorations during the holiday season.
To get the median strip finished, the committee got a grant of $25,000 from SHEDG, a major supporter of its efforts, Grovom and Osborn said, to buy lamp fixtures and install irrigation in the strip.
The city Tree Commission helped procure trees to plant in the median.
“The beautification would not have been successful without various talents from various members,” Grovom said. “Some of them are master gardeners and we listen to them. We plant plants where they tell us to plant them.”
Osborne said one of the most popular contributions of the beautification effort has been the baskets hanging from the lampposts in the median.
“People love the baskets,” she said.
Osborne and Grovom said they are surprised the plants do as well as they do in the environment they are in, with large semis and other traffic rushing by a few feet away.
“The beauty strips have done surprisingly well,” Osborne said. “We’ve had to find drought-tolerant plants for areas without irrigation. That has worked.”
Martin, who grew up in Sweet Home and worked in Washington before coming back in 1997 as city manager, said the efforts of Grovom and Osborn and their corps of community volunteers has made a distinct difference in how Sweet Home is viewed by outsiders.
“When I first came back, when I told people I was from Sweet Home, they didn’t know where it was or didn’t have a positive impression of the city,” he said. “Now, when I tell people at government meetings and other events that I’m from here, the first thing they say is how beautiful the median strips are. It’s what we’re known for.”
He said he’s had people call from as far away as New Mexico, wanting to know where they can get baskets like the ones hanging in the median and “how we get the flowers to grow so big.”
Martin said he’s seen positive changes in the way the public views the median, which he helps with when Grovom and Osborn and the other volunteers do their cleaning and clipping.
He said he helps because one traffic lane needs to be shut down and he wants to be there when it is, but also because he wants to help.
“Quite frankly, when I saw Alice and several of her friends way beyond my years in age out there in the rain and heat, willing to get dirty and to make the place more beautiful, I decided I was going to jump in there with them.
“I just considered it as part of my duties to get that (median strip) resurrected for a couple of hours every three weeks.”
Grovom and Osborne said they are proud of what they and their volunteers have wrought.
“The reward of it is the satisfaction of seeing something accomplished that’s been tried for so many years,” Grovom said. “With this group of people, it has worked.”
“It’s very satisfying,” Osborne agreed.
To volunteer with the Beautification Committee, contact Grovom at 367-5231 or Osborn at 367-2150.