Jon and Helen Schoonmaker, son and granddaughter of Joan Hurdle, speak at a ceremony in Hurdle’s honor Saturday.
Friends and family members who gathered to dedicate two park benches in honor of Joan Hurdle may all have known her, but they did not all know her in the same way, former Mayor Chuck Tooley said Saturday.
That’s because Hurdle was active in so many different ways, Tooley said: as an educator, legislator, conservationist and as a member of the League of Women Voters and the National Organization for Women.
A couple of dozen people traveled to John H. Dover Memorial Park on a pristine late-summer day for Saturday’s dedication, high on an isolated bluff overlooking the Yellowstone River. John Spencer of the Yellowstone River Parks Association said the benches were purchased and installed with donations and volunteer labor on land owned by the YRPA at the end of Mary Street past Five Mile Road.
Joan Hurdle
The land was donated by Jim Sindelar, and not far from the new benches stands a memorial marker in the memory of a family member, Lois Sindelar.
The goal is to build a privately owned park that will be accessible to the public, he said. As the ceremony was under way, volunteers elsewhere in the park were planting apple trees. Plants damaged in the recent hailstorm also have been donated by Gainan’s, and the park contains maple, apple and cottonwood trees.
Those present agreed that it was a fitting setting for a memorial to Hurdle, whose autobiography, “Every Dam Place,” published shortly before her death last year at age 81, talks about a childhood with a father who helped build dams in the West. By contrast, the Yellowstone River remains the last major undammed river in the United States.
Jon and Helen Schoonmaker, son and granddaughter of Hurdle, read a statement from the family that said Hurdle had been “driven to make the world a better place.” Others spoke of Hurdle’s determination and persistence in advancing causes she believed in.
Gibson said Hurdle drew her into her own political career, taking her out to knock on doors of constituents even when there was no campaign. Colburg included a pitch in her talk for U.S. Senate candidate Amanda Curtis, an interruption that Hurdle would have welcomed, she said.
Others noted that Hurdle was a tireless writer of letters to the editor and a legislator who became deeply versed in issues before committees on which she served, even when they were not issues close to her heart.
Tooley summed up with a quotation from Hurdle: “The whole purpose of life is to learn how to make the world a better place.”
