Dear readers,
Last week, when city councilman Chuck Reed met with a group of concerned citizens to discuss the future of Morrison Park, it brought back fond memories of my youth. My memories stretch across several presidential administrations like tree rings on the stump of one of the many catalpas once growing in the park.
I spent the entire Kennedy administration and a fair chunk of the Johnson years roaming Morrison Park. Had history taken a slightly different turn, I might have spent the Nixon administration walking the halls of a high school planted in the middle of the park.
Back in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, Shelbyville almost built its new high school in Morrison Park. But thanks to the foresight of local visionaries, including Lee and Mark McNeely’s father, Carl, the school ended up on a large tract of land on the edge of town instead.
Some folks at the time questioned why the school needed so much land, but in hindsight, it was a masterstroke. Had they built the school in Morrison Park, we’d have neither a park nor the space to build another school when the inevitable growth demanded it.
Now, the discussion revolves around the Boys and Girls Club potentially managing some of the park’s outdoor activities. Their members, of course, are Shelbyville’s boys and girls, but some worry that non-members might be left out. While that concern is understandable, I believe there’s a program allowing any local child to join the club.
There are upsides to adult supervision. The quality of graffiti would improve. Imagine poetic, well-structured messages scrawled across park property. Shelbyville could be known for correct spelling and grammatically perfect graffiti.
A generation ago, I was there for the grand opening of the skate park at Morrison Park. Orville Branson was president of the Shelbyville City Council at the time, and he attended. Neither he nor I managed any gravity-defying tricks or wicked flips that day, but the skate park quickly became a hit. I was convinced Shelbyville would soon produce the next Tony Hawk.
But alas, the golden era of free-range kids with the ability to solve their own problems, make their own rules, and head home when the streetlights flickered on, had already ended. With no adult supervision the skate park was soon jinxed.
One skater told me that playing at the skate park without adult supervision felt like a live-action adaptation of “Lord of the Flies.”
Just like the boys in the novel, he and his peers learned lessons about chaos and survival. Unfortunately, reason and intelligence weren’t abundant enough to keep the park from descending into savagery. It eventually closed, leaving behind a fenced-in reminder of the delicate balance between civility and anarchy.
But Morrison Park has always been more than just a collection of playgrounds and sports fields. It’s a place where Shelbyville’s history takes root. The grove of trees planted after World War I honors local men who died in the war. In 1935, Roosevelt’s WPA built a bandstand where Sunday night concerts enchanted listeners.
I still remember seeing The Derby’s, Shelbyville’s very own Beatles, perform on that stage during the Johnson administration. The bandstand is long gone, but its echo lives on.
A new bandstand is rising in Blue River Memorial Park, and maybe, just maybe, something good will come from these discussions to breathe fresh life into Morrison Park.
See you all next week — same Schwinn time, same Schwinn channel.
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