We are pleased as punch that Mike Weilbacher took pen to paper this week! He honors SAC members in his Main Line Times Column- First dear Wally McLean, secondly the incomperable Chad and Allison Graham. These are SAC members who are true to the spirit of volunteerism! Maybe to honor Wally the Township could dedidicate the Linwood Park to be in honor of someone like Wally? He lives right there. McLean Park has a nice ring to it, huh?

Read all about it:

Main Line Times:Hat's off to Wally McLean: Ardmore's gardening angel By Mike Weilbacher

I met up with Wally McLean in a place many people have seen him - and his handiwork - in the last 18 years: in front of the Ardmore train station. But watch carefully, as this may be his very last year as the station's unofficial gardener.You know the station, that concrete box built in the 1950s as a temporary replacement for the gorgeous Victorian that burned down. Fifty years later, that box is still with us, standing at the epicenter of a tug-ofwar over the redevelopment of Ardmore's downtown. Today, the surprise is that the old station is still standing, as plans for the area chug slowly along.

Wally's assumption is that the station is coming down this year, at which point the site becomes a construction project. After that, he doesn't think the newly enlarged and expanded station built and run in part by private interests will be looking for the services of a volunteer gardener. He seems ready to end his extraordinary run.

When Wally retired from a 40-year career in trains, beginning as a mail boy for the Pennsylvania Railroad ("that's where everybody started in those days; you worked your way up") and climbing the ladder to retire from Conrail, he asked by Kay Gordon of what was then called Main Street Ardmore to help provide plants at the train station.

He and a pair of longtime volunteers with the North Ardmore Civic, Chad and Alison Graham, have over the years planted thousands of tulips, daffodils, irises, impatiens, dusty miller, begonias, marigolds, and on and on. They hacked back weeds in an overgrown strip between the station and Anderson Avenue, which Wally said was once "a junkyard of cans and bottles." They carved out another corner on the eastern end of the station, placed annuals in window boxes along the station, and kept the plants watered and happy in several large concrete planters donated by North Ardmore.

Wally is at the station every other night in the summer, watering the plants so they don't wilt in the heat. This alone is an amazing feat, for if you think it's hot at your house on those sweltering summer nights, it's even hotter at the train station. All that asphalt around it combines with the lack of tree cover to keep temperatures as elevated as the tracks, making the plants continually vulnerable to heat exhaustion. A local plumber saw Wally toiling in the sun and volunteered to add an outside spigot to the station; that's the kind of assistance he's gotten many times over the years, and it's one of the things that keeps him going.

Wally choked up when he showed me his memorial garden, a rectangle of dusty millers and vincas on the western end. Each year, he dedicates the garden to a different friend or neighbor who has passed away, and he tells only that family that the garden is being cared for in that person's honor. One year, the funeral entourage passed by the station between funeral home and cemetery so the family could pause for a moment at the memorial garden.

He also dutifully mows the little strip of lawn on both sides of the station, and the threesome continue weeding their patch. They perform other services for the station as well. Knowing that graffiti can quickly hasten the station's decline, Chad spends many Sundays painting it over immediately, not allowing graffiti to accumulate. The threesome also spend weekends disinfecting the tunnel from God-knows-what noxious fluids might be there, and they added wooden strips to the stations' benches to disinvite skate-boarders who were chewing the wood up performing tricks on the benches' edges.

Every train station needs guardian angels like these.

And they've seen a lot over the years. Recently, they'd come back to the station to find the geraniums in the window boxes all missing, without a scrap of dirt visible anywhere. It didn't seem like vandalism; it felt like someone deliberately took the geraniums to plant elsewhere, which is not something you expect happening at a Main Line train station. "If they wanted them that badly," Wally realized, "I hope they really enjoy them."

So this year, they switched from geraniums to impatiens, and the theft miraculously stopped. Seems impatiens are not as valuable as geraniums.

And a few years ago, SEPTA rumbled down the R6 line automatically spraying herbicide along the sides of the tracks to suppress the growth of vegetation. They inadvertently left the sprayers on while they passed Ardmore, dousing the station itself - and Wally's handiwork - under a blanket of herbicide. It wasn't pretty.

Wally lives in Ardmore, just across the street from the newly purchased Linwood Park, that one-acre asphalt parking lot that is happily being transformed into a park. Wally was one of the first cheerleaders for the park's purchase, and has been an avid participant in the numerous public meetings and workshops that have happened since. In fact, there was some sentiment to name the park in Wally's honor.

I'm in with that.

Wally's brand of volunteerism is as endangered as our historic architecture; it's hard to imagine how many people nowadays might give up several evenings a week to water plants at a train station.

And that kind of volunteerism seems more typical of Wally's generation, called "the greatest" in some places, but known for its high level of civic engagement. And yes, Wally did serve in World War II, graduating from Lower Merion High School in 1944 and spending four years in the Navy. He witnessed Japan after the bombings, something he was unable to talk about for the next 50 years. It still moves him today.

So why do this? Here's why: "One day, a lady came running up to me and said everything went wrong, it was just an awful day, and she barely made the train. Then, she got out at Ardmore, and saw the flowers. She smiled, and her horrible day ended. That's the effect I want."

Paging Ardmore commuters: If you see Wally, Chad or Alison at the train station - they'd be the ones weeding and watering-please say thank you. And let's discuss continuing this kind of civic investment when the new station is built.

Mike Weilbacher is executive director of the Lower Merion Conservancy. E-mail him at