A gift of the heart is jump-starting the campaign to raise money for the new Wildcat Park.

The family of Lisa Bailey, who died of cancer last April, has donated $25,000 to the project in her memory. Organizers plan to name a section of the rebuilt playground after her.

Her husband, John Bailey, is a professor of forestry at Oregon State University, where he did his doctoral work. The family moved back to Corvallis a little over a year ago after 10 years in Flagstaff, Ariz., where Bailey had been teaching at Northern Arizona University while Lisa stayed home with their son, Rhys, and daughter, Virginia.

Rhys, 14, is an eighth-grader at Linus Pauling Middle School who occasionally romped at Wildcat Park as a toddler. Virginia, 11, is in the fifth grade at Wilson Elementary School, where the park was built in 1989 as a community playground. It was torn down last year because of safety concerns, and now a citizens’ committee is raising money and organizing volunteers to build a new playground on the site.

Bailey said his late wife, an architect, had been heavily involved in their children’s’ school in Flagstaff, even teaching some classroom lessons in architecture and design. By the time they moved back to Corvallis, she was too sick to volunteer.

If not for her illness, Bailey’s certain Lisa would have immersed herself in her daughter’s new school, and especially in the Wildcat Park project.

“Had she been healthy she’d be doing all of that sort of thing at Wilson, and because she’s an architect she’d have been all over that park,” he said. “That made me think this would be a nice thing to do with some of the money we had.”

Bailey said about $20,000 of the gift came from personal funds and his late wife’s life insurance benefit and the rest from other relatives on both sides of the family.

Wildcat Park Steering Committee Chairman Mark Hoffmann said the park’s “tot lot,” a section set aside for younger children, would be named after Lisa Bailey.

The family’s gift is the first major donation to the Wildcat fund-raising campaign, bringing the total to a little over $50,000. The committee is looking for $150,000 in cash and material donations to go with $100,000 set aside by the school district. The group is also working to sign up hundreds of volunteers to help build the new playground during a five-day construction blitz starting May 30.

Hoffman said he’s hopeful the Bailey gift will inspire other people to pitch in.

“There’s a lot of nights I think, ‘Why am I doing this?’” Hoffmann said. “But things like this make me think it’s all worthwhile.”

Throughout Lisa Bailey’s long illness, her husband said, they were always open about her condition with the children.

Bailey said he wasn’t always comfortable with that decision as a parent, but as a result, Rhys and Virginia are comfortable talking about their mom, and they’re excited about making the donation and having her name associated with the park.

“You walk a line about how many times you want to remind them of their pain versus losing track of the person,” Bailey said. “The kids have become my inspiration.”

Bennett Hall is the business editor for the Gazette-Times. He can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.

ON THE NET

More information about the Wildcat Park project is available online at http://www.newwildcatpark.org.