Greening of Harbor Park Cheers Retiree Who Made It Happen

Standing in the shade of a eucalyptus tree at Harbor Regional Park, Ken Malloy was about as far away as you could get from the Friday morning tree-planting ceremony and still hear the speakers. It seemed odd, since over the years no one has done more for the park.

But the 79-year-old San Pedro resident was content on the sidelines of the ceremony. It even brought a smile. After all, the event was about what Malloy’s been about all these years: the greening of the park.

Malloy first saw the park on a foggy night in 1937, when it was a pasture and he accidentally bumped his car into several cows grazing there. The event proved serendipitous: Malloy returned again and again, making the park one of his passions. He has been its patron, not with money but with work recognized many times over the years.

Now others are pitching in. And no one is happier than Malloy.

“I’m very pleased,” Malloy said during the ceremony, in which the Wilmington Rotary Club and three large harbor-area employers donated $3,500 to purchase new trees for the park’s Machado Youth Campground. “It’s been a struggle to get trees here in the past. We just haven’t had the money.”

The park--dedicated in 1971 after Malloy led a fight for its purchase by the city of Los Angeles--is the third largest in the city behind Griffith and Elysian parks. Covering 320 acres, including its lake, Harbor Regional Park straddles the border of Harbor City and Wilmington, a patch of green amid one of Los Angeles’ most industrial sections.

Through the years, the park has been a sanctuary for many residents, though funding for its campground has been limited to programs and facilities, not planting or maintenance. Not until two years ago, in fact, did Los Angeles find the funds for a part-time groundskeeper to assist Malloy in maintaining the 62-acre campground.

Over time, Malloy has tended the campground as meticulously as a home gardener might care for a flower bed. Seven days a week for the last 20 years, the retired longshoreman, onetime market owner and early member of the California Conservation Corps has spent his days at the campground planting, watering and weeding, caring for trees, shrubs and flowers.

“Without Ken working and working, pushing and pushing, we wouldn’t have anything around here. Nothing,” said the park’s longtime director, Roger Williams. “This place would be nothing, just space.”

Instead, thanks to Malloy, the campground is dotted with eucalyptus and California pepper trees, sagebrush and saltbrush, spike-weed and tumbleweeds. With Friday’s plantings, it has 40 more trees, the first of at least 150 to be purchased with funds from Union Oil Co. of California, Union Carbide Industrial Gases Inc., Kaiser Permanente and the Wilmington Rotary Club.

Though Malloy himself has planted upwards of 500 donated trees and shrubs in the campground, the new trees represent the largest one-time gift of plantings at the park since its dedication.

“It’s quite a donation,” Malloy said.

The trees planted Friday line the park’s border with Anaheim Street, blocking the campground from view and buffering it from the noise of traffic. The rest of the trees will be planted throughout the campground, where Malloy leads tours of a wildlife sanctuary.

While he still works at the park weekends as well as weekdays, arriving at 6 a.m. or so, Malloy has recently cut back slightly on his hours. “Lately, I’ve been running out of steam a little. I’ve only been here about four hours a day,” he said.

Of course, Malloy added, that might change with the donation of the trees.

“I’ll have to work harder to keep the trees up,” he said, adding with a smile: “It wasn’t a favor in that way, that’s for sure.”