DAZE WORK: A tree mystery grows in Robe-Ann Park

Under the red maple tree between the pickleball and pool parking area at Robe-Ann Park, Darlene Cox sits next to the tree dedicated in memory of her husband Dave Cox.

Banner Graphic/ERIC BERNSEE

Across its 25-acre expanse, Greencastle’s Robe-Ann Park is blessed with many trees.

Some stately and mature ones, mainly oak and ash, have been around since John Robe deeded the property to the city. Others have been added here and there over the years, like the tulip poplar just east of the pickleball courts planted by Park Director Rod Weinschenk’s son Sedrick and his Ridpath School kindergarten class nearly 20 years ago.

But there’s one tree in the grassy strip nestled between parking for the pickleball players and the lot for the aquatic center that has been quite anonymous until recently. Dedicated in 1992 in memory of Dave Cox -- one of the founders of Daves’ Heating and Cooling in Greencastle -- the red maple was moved to its present location sometime after the planting.

It’s likely that it was dug up and replanted to make way for a bigger pool deck and the slide built the following year. Not even Dave’s widow Darlene Cox is sure. But in all the moving and replanting, the tree never got a marker detailing in whose memory it was planted.

It’s a nice tree now, sturdy and tall for a red maple, probably 40 feet high, maybe 50.

“I’m five feet,” Park Assistant Superintendent Chrysta Snellenberger interjected, “so maybe 10 of me tall?”

There’s no need to throw shade at trees. They are an asset to cities, towns and neighborhoods, providing aesthetic, functional and environmental benefits to improve our quality of life.

Darlene Cox recalled that she was assisting the Food Pantry during the Park Department’s Lego Bash fundraiser. It was there that she raised the question.

“I have a tree at the park,” she said, “and it’s never had a marker. Is that still possible?”

She was told it certainly was, and Park Director Weinschenk contacted Greencastle Civic League officials, who were responsible for many of the tree plantings in a past program called 2,000 Trees by 2000.

“More and more people were asking me, ‘Where is this tree?’” Cox said after the marker was placed and requisite photos taken earlier this week.

Megan Linneweber, representing the Civic League, also had no idea how such a beautiful tree could fall through the cracks.

“We don’t know,” she said of the Civic League. “It was before my time.”

Yet the Civic League covered the cost of the marker memorializing Dave Cox.

Joined by (standing from left) Megan Linneweber of the Greencastle Civic League, Park Assistant Director Chrysta Snellenberger, Park Maintenance Supt. David Bault and park employee Rod McCammack, Darlene Cox sits beneath the red maple tree planted in memory of her husband Dave Cox in 1992. It finally got a plaque designating that this past week.

Banner Graphic/ERIC BERNSEE

Dave Cox and Dave Corbin opened Daves’ back in 1986 and Darlene worked in the office for 20 years.

“He waited for so long to do that,” she said of her late husband. “He wasn’t going to start without Dave Corbin. He (Dave Cox) was the Tin Man (immortalized by the metal character seated on the south side of the roof at Daves’),” she noted. “He could just look at a piece of sheet metal and visualize it already being made into a box or ductwork or whatever.

“Everybody loved him,” she added. “He was such an active, smart man. He was so young at the time he died that he didn’t get to do all he wanted to do.”

The tree was a gift from Mace Brothers, Darlene recalled of the construction firm that shared the North Jackson Street building at the time of Cox’s death.

Regardless of how and when the plaque fell through the cracks, the tree is a living thing that allows Darlene to think and talk about her husband, gone too soon at 49 some 28 years ago.

“It’s such a pretty, full tree,” Darlene said, standing to admire the red maple.

It certainly is, and now 28 years later the tree mystery is solved.