Eagle Scout project improves hospital park
The approximately two-acre wooded park that lies on the west side of the Fairview Northland Medical Center property in Princeton has been improved this summer through a project headed up by Eagle Scout candidate Ben Gahm of Milaca.
One of the requirements of attaining the Eagle rank (the pinnacle in Boy Scouts) is to coordinate a civic project. Gahm, 17, with Boy Scout Troop 19, and a senior this year at Milaca High School, thought that fixing up the hospital park would fit that bill. He came to the idea last May as he rode with his father Chuck past the park. Chuck’s wife Laurie is a nurse at Fairview so there was also that connection. The park has four round picnic tables, one made of concrete and the rest having fiberglass tops, plus it contains two wooden benches and a flower bed.
Ben presented the project idea to Boy Scout supervisors, outlining what he hoped to do and how he would coordinate it. The Eagle Scout civic project is set up to test the Eagle Scout candidate’s skills in coordinating a project and leading a work group.
Ben’s goals for the park were to clean up brush piles, refurbish the wooden benches, wash the picnic tables and replace the mulch around the flower bed plants. He had talked about replacing retaining walls at the flower bed but that turned out to not be feasible.
Ben ended up doing some of the project’s hands-on work, which was refurbishing the wooden benches. That included replacing the wooden bases for the benches’ metal legs, disassembly, sanding, painting and reassembly. A furniture maker Ben knows named Tim Ziegler gave advice on the refurbishing and let Ben do the work in his shop this past spring. Ben did the work over four afternoons after school. The reason for Ben doing all the bench refurbishing was because Ziegler did not want others in the shop besides Ben for safety reasons.
The big project day was July 9. Ben arranged with Scoutmaster Chuck Amundson to have the work day then in order to have the park ready for a health fair Fairview was scheduling.
“On the weekend before (July 9), I called all 24 Scouts in my troop and talked with them individually about helping…,” Ben said.
He and his father picked up the Scouts that could work that day and brought them to the hospital park at about 8 to 9 a.m.
There, Ben divided the team of 15 workers into three groups. Rich Chambers and other maintenance workers at Fairview Northland arranged for the delivery of wood chips and weed-barrier fabric that Fairview provided.
Ben had his brother Jonah take a group to wash the picnic tables and had the troop’s senior patrol leader take younger scouts to police the grounds (making sure all the scouts were on task and not goofing around).
Ben had his father and the scoutmaster lay out the weed-barrier cloth and cut it to place in the U-shaped flower bed. Older scouts laid the wood chips on top of the cloth and around the plants while mothers took photos.
Ben and Chambers provided drinking water and Ben had the moms make sure everyone was hydrated. When the work was complete at about 3 p.m., Ben brought out the lunch that his sister Britta had prepared.
“Even though the project underwent several changes, I feel it was a good one to work on and a nice improvement to Fairview Hospital,” Ben wrote afterward.
The park will be an attractive setting for the hospital’s health fair and other events and also be enjoyed by staff, patients’ families and the community in the coming years, he added.
The most challenging part for Ben in the project? It was that some of the Boy Scouts did not want to do the work, he said.
Ben said last week that he has met the requirements for the Eagle rank. His father did note that Ben still has to go through the Eagle Scout candidate interview with a Boy Scout committee before it is official. The Eagle Scout award ceremony will likely be this coming fall, Chuck Gahm said.
Ben said he decided to try for Eagle after he attained the Life rank in 2009, which is the last step before Eagle. Chuck said that Ben probably began thinking about going for Eagle when he reached the rank of Star, which is before Life. When a Boy Scout reaches Star, they “can see the light at the end of the tunnel” for getting Eagle, Chuck said.
Fairview maintenance worker Chambers said on Friday that Ben and the crew “did a great job” improving the park.
Ben Gahm, a member of Boy Scout Troop 19 in Milaca, sits on one of the benches at the Fairview Northland Medical Center park in Princeton, that he had refurbished as part of a civic project to meet a requirement for becoming an Eagle Scout. The flower garden that he led a group of Boy Scouts in repairing as part of his Eagle project, can be seen in the far background.
Ben said that teamwork is what he has learned most in Boy Scouts. Ben, who loves swimming and history and belongs to the FFA chapter in Milaca, said he would like to attend college after graduating from high school.
