Many Hands Raise Community Center Bayview Residents Celebrate Mortgage Burning

There is no local government in this lakeside resort community. No city council, no mayor.

“We’re just a collection of individuals doing their own thing,” Hobart Jenkins said. “There are times when that’s great. But there are times when we feel a need to be together.”

That’s why it was traumatic when, in the late 1980s, the only meeting place - an old schoolhouse with rotting floors - was torn down. That’s also why it was so significant that people gathered Thursday evening to burn the mortgage on their community center at the south end of Lake Pend Oreille.

Within these 5,000 square feet of hillside building, residents come together for a range of reasons as wide as the view of the lake. They ring in the new year. They praise the Lord. They vote, attend classes and shoot pool. Children giggle in the basement day-care center. Members of the 55-Plus Club gather for goodies and gossip.

The 6-year-old center was built as much from serendipity and perseverance as from beams and wallboard.

At Thursday’s celebration, Jenkins, chairman of the Bayview Community Center Foundation, thanked 63 women and men who pitched in to build and operate it - in typical Jenkins style, by “telling lies about them.” He also used the occasion to announce that he was stepping down from his chairmanship.

Jim Hawkins, a guest of honor at the party, could attest to Jenkins’ pivotal role in making the community center dream come true. Hawkins was head of the Idaho Department of Commerce when Jenkins wrote a proposal seeking Community Development Block Grant.

The grant, from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, needed approval by the state.

“The application was very professionally done. I remember it well,” said Hawkins, now the state’s director of early childhood development.

When Jenkins and fellow retiree Chuck Waller went to Boise in 1992 to present the community’s case to the Economic Advisory Council, Hawkins said, “They did a masterful job.”

In fact, Hawkins urged them to apply for more than the $100,000 they first sought. “We said, don’t be shy.”

State officials approved $142,000. Plus, they took the unusual step of allowing the Bayview boosters to do a lot of the interior construction when the contractors’ bids came in way too high.

Hawkins hasn’t been to the center since the summer of 1993, when it was being built. At that time, he was stunned by the care people were putting into it. He recalled a group of women individually painting quarter-inch spokes of wood on the deck. He explained that there were more efficient ways to tackle the job, “but they said `We like doing it this way’ … They were going to do it first-class.”

Jenkins laughed at the memory of the volunteer labor.

“You should have seen us put this false ceiling in,” he said, sitting in the main meeting room. “He had a level and a tape measure in one hand, and instructions from Eagle (Hardware) in the other.”

Waller and his wife, Gail, donated the half acre on which the community center is built. They recently gave an adjoining half-acre for a memorial garden.

Waller’s grandfather settled in the area and once owned all the property between Bayview and Farragut State Park. Ultimately, all was sold but one acre that his aunt was going to sell to the post office. When that didn’t work out, Waller bought it.

“We didn’t even have a use for it,” Waller recalled. “The way this land thing came together was almost spooky.”

The $32,000 bank loan that launched the community center effort is being paid off three years early. Eighty-three people pledged an average of $100 for each of 10 years. Lists of other donations and grants fill large signs in the entryway.

In all, $306,000 was spent on the building, counting the donated labor - some of it quite professional. For instance, plumber Jerry Judd and electrician Ken Rickel charged only for the cost of their materials.

Jenkins snared a $10,000 Gem Community grant to develop the Bayview Memorial Garden and Park. One corner of it, a garden of blue flowers, will be dedicated to his wife, Marilyn. When she died in March, $4,000 in donations poured in.

Foundation board member Linda Hackbarth designed the garden and is directing the project, Jenkins said. “When I typed up the grant, her name got in there somehow.”

What’s next? Well, foundation members want to create a computer users group to make use of the donated equipment that fills a corner of the basement rec room.

Explained Jenkins, “We have to have some kind of project.”