Citizen power.

"If people don't want to come to the park, nobody's going to stop them."

--Yogi Berra

The great Yankee malaprop probably had a different kind of park mind in his lament over falling attendance. Unlike managing a professional baseball team, which rises and falls on its fortunes in the batter's box, our kind of parks are always grand slam homeruns. In August, the NRPA and its partners Washington Parks & People and the D.C. Department of Parks & Recreation knocked the ball out of one of the smallest possible venues--the playground at Marvin Gaye Park in Washington, D.C. It was the first playground this gradually emerging community has seen in nearly four decades. Interesting, but no surprise, the origins for the resurgence of the overall park began with community activists. All they needed was a helping hand, and this playground will go a long way in returning the park to greatness. And nobody could possibly have stopped the thrilled kids from scampering over the state-of-the-art equipment and surfacing donated by Playworld Systems and Surface America. The event was no tree falling in the forest--local and national media took note that the dedication was just the beginning of a long-range NRPA program to document and disseminate the community health benefits accruing from a resource absent for so long. They now have one of the best.

Shifting to a level almost sublime, our cover story this month focuses on Ken Burns and his latest cinematic venture, a six-part documentary on the rise of one of our greatest national treasures-national parks. In her interview with Burns, Managing Editor Jennifer Barnett learned much about national parks from the producer of academy award-winning documentaries on the Civil War, baseball, and jazz. For starters, he tells Jennifer that Theodore Roosevelt comes up in virtually every conversation on the founding of national parks. But Burns notes quickly that the 26th President is but part of the second of six episodes--that it was ordinary Americans of a widely diverse nature that made national parks a reality. At NRPA, we call them "citizens" These are the remarkable people with vision, passion, and most important, commitment. Today, now more than ever, the health and well being of the parks and recreation field depends on the such volunteer efforts.

In August, we lost one of the greatest citizens to work on behalf of a major population once excluded from all that parks and recreation has to offer: the mentally disabled. Eunice Kennedy Shriver fought successfully with everything she had to put grace and dignity into the lives of people the medical community clinically once labeled "morons, "idiots" and "retarded" It was a summer camp for mentally disabled kids Shriver ran in her backyard in 1962 in suburban Washington, D.C., that planted the seeds of the great Special Olympics that we know today. Her response to skeptics of allowing kids with mental disabilities to compete in sports was every bit as salty and succinct as Yogi Berra could have said: "Baloney."

Phil Hayward

Chief Communications Officer