PORT ANGELES — Janet Young’s early-morning routine includes sitting on her porch and gazing across the street at the quiet ball fields of the city park named after her son, Shane, who died 37 years ago today.
Within easy sight of her 1331 W. Sixth St. home, about 50 yards away, is the corner of Shane Park where the 9-year-old boy was severely injured in a construction mishap that led to his death.
Four tall firs, absent then, now stand sentinel at the spot.
On Aug. 13, 1973, while the park was being built, Shane Fowler was playing on a 4-foot-diameter concrete ring that was standing upright when it fell on top of him, according to The Daily News, a predecessor to Peninsula Daily News.
Young, a retired First Federal collections department employee who now lives on West Sixth Street with her husband, Don, was inside the house at the time.
Shane was still alive after the ring was lifted off of him by then-assistant Public Works Director Paul Reed and an unidentified man, but he fell into a coma and died 11 days later.
The park was completed in July 1974.
This summer, after almost four decades, Young, now 69, was finally able to read the newspaper account of her son’s death, she said.
Also this summer, while watching children play soccer and softball, she got the feeling something was missing at the park she knows too well.
Children also play basketball and tennis there. A walking trail curls beneath a tree canopy that covers about a third of the 15-acre site.
Playground equipment
But Young said playground equipment is sorely lacking, limited to one slide barely wide enough for a toddler’s diaper.
“I’d see [children] wandering around, of course their parents were with them, but I just got to thinking, these kids really don’t have a place to play,” she said.
“Some were sitting on the grass. Some were lucky enough to ride a bike around. It’s just something that kind of bothered me,” she added.
Young’s other children played on playground equipment that was subsequently removed from the park about three decades ago, she said.
It included tire swings, a teeter-totter, a merry-go-round, a big slide and monkey bars, all of which she’d like to se reinstalled.
Richard Bonine, the city’s deputy director of parks and recreation, said Tuesday the playground equipment likely was removed for safety reasons.
But while the city capital facilities plan includes renovation of equipment at Shane and the city’s 10 other neighborhood parks, “there is no funding at this point” for new equipment at Shane Park, Bonine said.
That didn’t surprise Young.
She hopes volunteers and fundraisers could accomplish the task in the same way the Dream Playground was built in Port Angeles in 2002 in five days.
She said she plans to talk to the city about her own dream for Shane Park.
It was named after her son following a contest won by 11-year-old Tammy Goodrich and co-sponsored by The Daily News and the city’s Park and Beautification Board.
It’s still hard sometimes for Young to live across from the park, especially on days like today, but she also feels a happy connection to the place — even if she also believes it needs playground equipment to reach its full potential.
“I just feel it was built for him, that’s my feeling about, and all the other little kids that need a place to play,” she said.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
