Scott Swanson
Alice Grovom, long a leader in Sweet Home, particularly in efforts to improve the city’s image, died Tuesday, July 19.
She was 96.
Universally recognized as the person most responsible for the creation and maintenance of the Main Street median flowerbeds through downtown Sweet Home, Grovom is remembered by former associates and friends as tough but kind, and visionary.
“She was one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever had the privilege of working with in Sweet Home,” said Craig Martin, who was city manager from 1997 through 2016, a period during which many of Grovom’s efforts took shape.
A tall, angular woman with a very direct, though refined, demeanor, Grovom was very visible in public life and could be seen every second Tuesday morning, spring through fall, busily directing and assisting her Beautification Committee volunteers as they worked on the median.
“I called her the Queen of Sweet Home,” said Joe Medley, her former pastor at Fir Lawn Lutheran Church.
“I have seldom met a more even-keeled, strong person than Alice. She was probably sometimes irritating to people because she was unyielding, but she had a good heart. She was not selfish or greedy.”
Phyllis Osborn-Smith was jokingly often referred to as Grovom’s “partner in crime.” The two worked together for 10 years on projects through the Sweet Home Beautification Committee, which Grovom founded, and became good friends, traveling the world with a small group of friends.
“We went to Palm Springs nearly every winter for three or four weeks,” Osborn-Smith said, noting that on a trip to Mexico, they missed their return flight. At that point, she recalled, “we decided we wanted to do parasailing. Alice was in her 80s but she was, like, ‘Let’s do that.'”
They did.
“We had a great time,” Osborn-Smith said. “Maybe we were too dumb to be scared.”
Another universally acknowledged truth: Grovom was not dumb.
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 told an interviewer in 2020, 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.”
Martin remembers the meeting in which Grovom took on the median project, held at the newly completed Jim Riggs Community Center.
“There was a lot of contention about what to do with (the median).” Some participants wanted to “tear it out and put it back to asphalt,” he said.
“I’ll never forget Alice there. She had a vision for it to be redone.”
One meeting participant, in particular, was doubtful anything could be done with the median.
“Alice stood up and looked at her and she said, ‘It didn’t work back then, but who’s to say it won’t work now? I say we give it a try.'”
That, Martin said, was the real birth of the Beautification Committee.
When she had a green light on her median project, Grovom 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.
Martin said Grovom “sweet-talked” Northwest Natural Gas into installing a water system in the median and then finding surplus plants that she could get for a bargain, sometimes mothballing them until the next year.
“She was always making a deal with somebody for something,” he said. “She was literally able to take a dollar and stretch it into hundreds, if not thousands.”
She was uniformly unselfish, friends said.
“She never asked volunteers to do anything she wasn’t willing to work right along with them and do,” Osborn-Smith said. “I think that was amazing. She was quite a bit older. She just quit working on the median a couple of years ago.
“She was just a nice lady, always wanting to make community better, help people.”
“If Alice asked you to do something, you didn’t think twice about doing it,” said Medley. “She was considerate of your time and she’d earned it 1,000 times over.”
With Grovom serving as its chair, the Beautification Committee expanded. She personally spent thousands of hours over next four decades spearheading the planter projects along Highway 20, developing the Sportsman’s Holiday Arts and Crafts Festival as a fundraiser, getting Highway 20 widened, working to get landscaping installed around the city welcome sign on Highway 228, and making landscaping happen at Clover Park and other points around the city that Martin described as “weed patches.”
The median drew attention not from enthusiastic local residents, he said, but from other communities.
“The city of Bend contacted us one time, wanting to know how to do it,” Martin said. “I told them they needed a community champion like Alice Grovom.”
He attributed the median’s success with improvements to other areas of Sweet Home, many engineered by Grovom.
“People started wanting to see the parks green and attractive,” he said. “When I first came, in ’96, the city was contemplating selling the parks for housing.”
Her efforts did not go unnoticed. Grovom was named Woman of the Year in 1981 and Distinguished Citizen twice, in 2001 and in 2017.
“You look around Sweet Home, all the things you see. Every time I see the baskets hanging (over the median on Main Street), I think about Alice,” Medley said. “I remember driving through town and I’d see her sitting on a stool, in a dress, leaning over and working on flower beds. She was in her late 80s.”
Grovom retired from her public activities at the end of 2020, just before her 95th birthday, after suffering a number of injuries.
“I’m a bionic woman,” she told the interviewer in 2020, grinning and putting her hand on her hip. “I have half a hip, and I had a T-11 fracture.”
Grovom was born Dec. 9, 1925, in St. Helens. She and Roger Grovom married in 1949 and moved to Sweet Home in 1951.
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.
Roger died in 1972, and Grovom never remarried.
“Her husband died 50 years ago and she went to work as a bookkeeper, and invested in real estate,” Medley said. ” She was sharp as a tack right up till the end.”
Grovom was extremely particular with Fir Lawn’s budget, he said.
“I remember one time we had the roof done on the church and the roofers got a little impatient because she wouldn’t pay them until she was sure the roof was done correctly. She was an incredible steward of church funds.”
Grovom established strong friendships in the community: Mona Waibel, another community leader, Betty Acaiturri, whom she knew through the church, and Patti Holk, another fellow church member and partner in the beautification efforts.
Grovom loved square dancing, Osborn-Smith said.
“Alice always willing to do anything. She got me into square dancing.”
They continued with the Sweet Home Squarenaders until Grovom was forced to retire from that activity, shortly before COVID shut club activities down.
Medley said Grovom was one of those people who, now that she’s gone, I have no regrets about her life. She got everything out of life that she wanted and she gave more than most. She lived a life without regrets.
“She had an incredibly compassionate heart and an open mind. She was incredibly dear. I treasure that she was my friend.”
Martin, who recalled how he “spent a lot of summers, weekends” of his own time solving plumbing and other problems on the median strip in response to reports from residents that something was amiss amid the flowers, said Grovom’s efforts helped lift Sweet Home out of doldrums left by the timber wars.
“In my mind, the most memorable thing was her taking something that had been divisive in the community and turning it into an object of community pride. Everybody talked about the beauty strips, the median, how beautiful they looked, how green, alive, fresh, vibrant they were. To me, that was pretty significant.
“For me, as city manager, it was great to have a person with such positive energy, strength, and courage to do things that people didn’t think could be done. She will definitely be missed.
“Alice was one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever had the privilege of working with in Sweet Home.”