Arts, Entertainment and Events, Communities, Front Page, Oakridge/Westfir

Keep celebrating the town’s tree-planting tradition, urges Oakridge-Westfir festival’s very first queen

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In her secluded, tree-lined yard in Oakridge, Marlene Neal expresses hope that the community’s traditional festival can overcome another season of pandemic. Joy Kingsbury/The Herald

By JOY KINGSBURY and DOUG BATES/The Herald —  Like community celebrations everywhere in America, the 68-year-old Oakridge-Westfir Tree Planting Festival remains in a cruel limbo this year because of COVID-19 restrictions.

The festival’s very first queen, Marlene Neal of Oakridge, understands this harsh reality and offers hope and heartfelt encouragement for community volunteers who are toiling to help the towns’ traditions survive.

Marlene Neal,Marlene Elam,Oakridge Tree Planting Festival
Marlene Neal, then Marlene Elam, in her 1954 OHS yearbook.

“The Tree Planting Festival is so important,” says Neal. “It needs to go on.”

It apparently will, although in a much-reduced package this year. A committee of Oakridge-Westfir citizens has been working hard to come up with creative ways to preserve the festival despite the pandemic that all but shut it down a year ago. Whatever transpires this spring may involve some virtual, Internet-based activity, along with possible in-person activities, and although they will amount to nothing like Tree Planting Festivals of the past, they will at least preserve some semblance of the community’s long tradition.

Amy Prince, who manages the secretarial duties of the committee, has committed to creating a Tree Planting Festival YouTube channel to host all virtual content.  Since the festival is still in the planning stages and will require vastly more attention to detail and logistics because of COVID-19 protocols, the festival may not take place at the usual date and time.  The tentative schedule is presently to begin on Friday, April 30.  However, there is some doubt that all aspects of the schedule can take place on one weekend.  The committee has talked of spreading events over a longer time frame in order to offer fun and interesting activities that families can look forward to each weekend.

And if that happens, it will be just fine with Marlene Neal.

“This event is historic for our community,” she says. “It has to continue, in some fashion.”

Growing up in Westfir, the daughter of a Hines Lumber Co. worker who ran the mill’s power plant, she was known as Marlene Elam then. Westfir had only an elementary school in those days, so she attended Oakridge High School and graduated as salutatorian in 1954.

1953 Oakridge-Westfir Tree Planting Festival queen and court
The 1953 Oakridge-Westfir Tree Planting Festival queen and court (clockwise from upper left): Judith Tistadt, Marlene Elam, Betty Satterfield, Betti Mae Easley, Betty Frye and Mayre Lee Lafferty, as depicted in Oakridge High School’s 1954 yearbook. 1954 OHS yearbook

Her biggest honor, though, was being selected by the community as queen of the first Oakridge-Westfir Tree Planting Festival in November of 1953.

Marlene recalls that in early 1953, when she was attending class at Oakridge High School, the U.S. Forest Service sent a ranger to give classroom demonstrations of the proper way to plant a tree.  She remembers the ranger encouraging tree planting by the citizenry and suggesting that a celebration of tree planting would be an event to foster and encourage the practice.  Perhaps, he asked, would the students would be interested in participating?

Student planners were enthusiastic about the prospect of a good time for the youth and the community, while at the same time achieving the Forest Service goal of having trees planted.  The students decided on a parade, but, they reasoned, the lead float should have special appeal. They devised a contest among the junior and senior classes, each class to pick three students to be called princesses, then have a contest to select one as queen to be showcased aboard their float surrounded by her princesses.

There would be food and fun, and the festival would culminate in actual tree planting using the method taught by the Forest Service ranger.

The contest for queen was to be determined by “penny jars.” Each selected contestant located jars labeled with her name in businesses around the town, and townspeople would vote by dropping pennies into the jars.

At the designated time the jars would be collected, the pennies counted, and the student with the highest penny count would be festival queen.  Marlene Elam had the most pennies in her jar and became queen of the first Tree Planting Festival. She does not remember what happened to all those pennies.

U.S. Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon attended the event and was photographed with Marlene as they planted a tree together.  Altogether, the townspeople planted 10,000 trees at that first festival.

“Everyone in town went out to plant the trees then,” she recalls.

Twenty years later, in 1973, Marlene was invited to be grand marshal of that year’s Tree Planting Festival parade. She fulfilled that role by returning to Oakridge from her residence in Kennewick, Wash., as Mrs. Robert Kimsey, mother of seven.

Today, Marlene resides again in Oakridge with husband Brian Neal, a retired logger. She has become well known in the community all over again, this time as one of Zero Clearance Theater Company’s first performers.  She acted in many plays produced by the local troupe under the direction of Bob Wilson.

As she approaches her 84th birthday she says she and Brian are happy , healthy and content in their mountain aerie overlooking the Upper Willamette Valley with its mountainsides lined with beautiful trees, more than a few of them planted over the decades by the people of Oakridge and Westfir.

Joy Kingsbury is an Oakridge real estate broker, civic leader and member of the Highway 58 Herald board of directors. Doug Bates of Oakridge is a retired newspaper journalist and editor of The Herald.

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