Standing in front of a new readerboard in Dale Collins Memorial Park late Tuesday morning, Mary Jo Collins remembered coming down to the green space on the east end of the Philomath couplet to help her husband keep it in top shape long before the city ever put his name on it.
“He just liked to come down and keep it clean, and I came a few times and helped him trim the bushes, get the weeds out of here,” she said. “I think he was just proud of the whole park, and then he was totally surprised when they named this park after him. He was very surprised at that, but very, very proud and honored that they did do this for him.”
The park has carried Collins’ name since 2013. Tuesday’s brief ceremony formally added “memorial” to that name — recognition city leaders said was meant for a man whose volunteer work stretched across more than five decades in Philomath. The City Council voted this summer to add the “memorial” designation following Collins’ death at age 81 on June 14.
Collins moved to Philomath with Mary Jo and their daughters in 1972, spent 40 years as an insurance agent and became a fixture of local government and community life — serving on the Philomath City Council, later as mayor, and for years on the city’s Park Advisory Board. He was also a longtime member of the Philomath Lions Club, the service organization that helped fund the park’s newly installed electronic readerboard.
At the conclusion of the program, Mary Jo Collins cut the ribbon in front of the new sign as daughters Lisa and Michele looked on.
‘He never really stopped volunteering’
City Manager Chris Workman told the crowd that Collins’ influence on Philomath was hard to overstate.
“From the time he arrived, Dale became deeply involved in the life of the community,” Workman said. “As near as anyone can tell, he never really stopped working. He never really stopped volunteering. Over more than five decades, Dale became one of those people whose fingerprints could be found throughout Philomath.”
Workman added, “Dale represented something that has long been central to the identity of this town — the belief that communities become stronger when people are willing to step forward and help.”
Workman shared a story from Collins’ volunteer history that even some longtime residents may not know — his role in saving Philomath’s original Christmas light displays. The 24 custom-built fixtures were privately purchased in the 1980s by Dave and Jeanine Vincent, who were inspired by a similar holiday display they had seen while driving through the Monmouth area. After years of use in downtown Philomath, the decorations went missing and were presumed lost — until 2010, when a city Public Works employee found them stashed inside an old barn off Bellfountain Road following years of searching and chasing down conflicting rumors.
Once the lights turned up, Collins led a weeklong volunteer effort at the Public Works yard, where crews stripped, cleaned, repainted and rebulbed the recovered fixtures to get them back on Main Street. That rescue effort, Workman said, paved the way for Philomath’s modern holiday traditions.
Workman closed with a message directed at Collins himself: “Whenever families gather here, children play in our parks, neighbors meet or the community comes together in this space or in other spaces throughout our community, Dale’s name will continue to remind us of a simple but powerful idea — a community becomes stronger when its people care enough to show up. Thank you, Dale, for showing up for Philomath for more than 50 years, and thank you for leaving this community better than you found it.”
A small word with a big meaning
Mayor Christopher McMorran said the addition of a single word to the park’s name carries real weight.
“Adding the word ‘memorial’ to a park may seem like a relatively small change, but it carries a really important meaning,” McMorran said. “This park will no longer just carry Dale’s name in recognition of his contributions, but it will stand as a lasting memorial to a man whose life was deeply connected to Philomath and to the people who call this community home.”
McMorran also thanked the Philomath Lions Club for a $10,000 donation that covered most of the cost of the park’s newly replaced electronic readerboard, with the remainder funded through the city’s transient lodging tax — money collected from guests staying at places like the Galaxy Hotel and local Airbnbs.
Bruce Spediacci of the Philomath Lions Club, who also spoke at the ceremony, said Collins brought energy to Lions Club meetings.
“He was gregarious,” Spediacci said. “He often led the meeting — always with a sense of humor, always looking at the bright side of things, very optimistic about the future and how the town was developing and whatnot. He was really a great guy.”
That same instinct to pitch in showed up in smaller ways, too. When the Lions Club ran garage sales as a fundraiser, Collins was typically in charge — and he didn’t wait for donations to come to him.
“He would go out like on a Saturday afternoon and if somebody was having a garage sale, he would go over and contact them and say, ‘Now, if anything doesn’t sell, and you want to get rid of it, we could take it,'” Spediacci said.
Mary Jo Collins said that instinct to volunteer never really slowed down, even when she thought it should.
“He liked to volunteer, and sometimes I told him ‘you’ve got too much on your plate,’ but he just kept volunteering anyway,” she said. “But that made him happy, and so that’s what mattered.”
She said her husband especially valued his years on the Park Advisory Board — a role, she said, that let him stay hands-on in the community in a way being mayor didn’t always allow.
“He liked the Park Advisory Board — getting into the Music in the Park and the flower baskets, just everything,” she said. “He just enjoyed being involved.”
She recalled one ordinary afternoon at the park that stuck with her — a small moment that captured how contagious his sense of service could be.
“He and I were down here one day cleaning up the park, and somebody came by and saw us in here, went home and came back to help,” she said. “They came back and helped us finish cleaning up.”
Dale Collins Memorial Park, located at 1501 Applegate St., features the newly upgraded readerboard, the “Traveling the Applegate Trail” mosaic art structure, a park bench and a picnic table.
