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could raise money to supplement what the city could do to improve the trail. With the support of Nettles and novelist Olive Hershey, one of Taylor’s first running mates, Taylor began gathering signatures and writing letters to politicians, churches, neighbors, and anyone else he could think of asking for donations. In a series of meetings with Don Olson, then director of the Parks and Recreation Department, Taylor learned that the city would fund improvements to the trail, but it would not light it. The Houston Lighting and Power Company agreed to light the perimeter, but private funds were necessary to light the trail inside the park. In 1990, after years of telephone calls and several petitions, Taylor’s efforts resulted in the city-funded construction of the trail with a crushed granite surface.5 It took another two years, but by late 1992 the trail had lights. Grants from the Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation and Houston Endowment Inc. (supported by Olive Hershey and Ann Hamilton, respectively), many individual donations, and a gift of twenty-four acorn lamps along the 1/2-mile section next to the golf course by Burr Engineers Inc., in commemoration of their twentieth anniversary, made lighting the trail possible.6 Fifty-two streetlights were installed along the carriage trail, North MacGregor, and Golf Course Drive. For a donation of $500 or more, a benefactor was honored with a plaque in front of a lamppost. One, inscribed “The Taylor Brothers,” was given by Marvin Taylor in honor of three of his grandsons. When the 2.1-mile trail was named the Marvin Taylor Trail in 2003, Allan Turner wrote in the Houston Chronicle: “And in the 1980s, he [Taylor] began to cobble community sentiment into a potent force to urge rehabilitation of Hermann Park’s trails.”7 This kind of “community sentiment” from a variety of other T he first organized group of Houstonians to take an active interest in Hermann Park was incorporated in 1987 as the Hermann Park Joggers, Runners, and Walkers, a nonprofit organization founded by Marvin Taylor for the purpose of maintaining and enhancing a running trail in Hermann Park along an old carriage drive.2 Taylor grew up in Longview in East Texas, where he credits his experience as a Boy Scout and later as a Scoutmaster for instilling in him a sense of civic activism that has sustained his thirty-plus years of involvement with Hermann Park. After serving in the Navy, Taylor graduated from Prairie View A&M University in 1955 intending to become a teacher, however, he discovered he did not like teaching. Instead he moved to Houston and began a thirty-year career with the US Postal Service. Taylor, a high-school athlete, began running on the deck of his aircraft carrier for exercise when he was in the Navy during the Korean War. When Marvin Taylor moved to Houston in the late 1950s, jogging was not popular. He ran in his Third Ward neighborhood but looked for more remote trails because, he says, people thought it was weird to be running on the streets. At first he cut his way through dense underbrush, clearing short trails along Brays Bayou and in MacGregor Park. But he soon discovered the old, overgrown carriage trail in Hermann Park. “I took my sickle and started clearing a trail over there.”3 Before long others who had taken up jogging joined him, and in 1978 the Parks and Recreation Department placed exercise stations along the picturesque trail overhung with giant live oaks that Taylor had begun clearing a few years before.4 Taylor heard that attorney Larry Nettles was working on a jogging trail in Memorial Park. He contacted Nettles, who advised Taylor to form a nonprofit corporation so the Hermann Park runners CHAPTER SEVEN Community Action There must be a message of healing and new strength of unity as well as high quality execution in the design [for Hermann Park].1 —William J. Johnson, 1992 98 Chapter Seven had been provided. The triangular site gradually became a parking lot where cars pulled up right to the colonnade, creating an unsightly, often muddy rim around the circular colonnade. The Warwick Towers group, calling themselves the Neighbors of Hermann Park, raised more money than expected, allowing the scope of the grass project to grow much larger. With the approval of Don Olson, they hired architect Guy Hagstette, who designed a small plaza with radiating walkways and trees around the perimeter, and...

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