COOPER, Iowa, December 17, 2009 – You can’t tell much about it right now, with all the snow cover, but the “Christopher Klinzman Memorial Wildflowers Garden” has now been planted alongside the Raccoon River Valley Trail at Winkleman Switch, a trailhead between Cooper and Jefferson in Greene County.

“It’s the first patch of wildflowers we’ve put in along the trail in our county,” said Dan Towers, the conservation director, who did the site preparation and planting.  “It was really nice of the family and friends to make this possible.”

The wildflowers garden honors the life of Christopher Klinzman, a noted TV and video producer in Kansas City who died of a sudden heart ailment in early May, 2008.

His parents Martha Gilmore Klinzman and David Klinzman had grown up in the nearby towns of Cooper and Bagley, and Christopher visited this area many times to see his grandparents and attend family reunions.  In later years, he started bicycling and camping along the RRVT.  In the year before he died, he said he had decided that he would soon buy or build a get-away home in the area to enjoy country life and the recreational amenities of the trail, river and county parks.

Christopher Klinzman

After his death, his family and friends donated $965 in memorial funds to pay for development of the wildflowers garden.

Conservationist Towers used herbicide in September, 2008, to begin killing the vegetation on the wildflowers site.  He burned off the area in March of this year, then sprayed again in April and September.  In November, he leveled and worked-up the soil, and finally seeded it with the wildflowers mix.

“This is called a ‘dormant seeding,’ since I did it too late in the season for the seeds to germinate,” he said. “The idea is that with snow cover and then melting, that will work the seeds into the soil in a natural way. Most people who have experience in developing prairies say fall seedings seem to work out a little better.”

Towers said the 100-by-50-foot patch of wildflowers will feature such species as dwarf red coreopsis, grayhead prairie cone, purple prairie clover, blue flax, cornflowers, scarlet flax, Shasta daisies, red yarrow, purple coneflowers, California poppies, showy evening primrose, lemon mint, black-eyed susans, Mexican red hats, New England aster, gloriosa daisies and little bluestem.

“The first year it won’t look like much, because these perennials take a couple of years to start showing their colors,” Towers said.  “But I expect we’ll see some of the blues during the 2010 season, and then the rest of the colors in the next couple of years.  A lot of it will depend on how much moisture we get.”

A temporary sign was placed on it for this past summer and fall, telling trail users about the project.  There is already a bench adjacent to the garden.  And eventually a permanent sign will be erected there, explaining to trail users just who Christopher Klinzman was and how much he loved the area.

This photo shows the Klinzman Wildflowers Memorial Garden after it had been planted in November — and before the recent snows covered it.  The garden is located at Winkleman Switch, which is a trailhead located midway between Cooper and Jefferson.  There once was a stockyards and small grain elevator at the site, which was a shipping point for livestock and other ag commodities when the railroad operated on today’s RRVT.

Klinzman spent most of his elementary and secondary school years in South Africa, where his parents worked, his father David in the computer industry and his mother as a food writer and journalist.  Christopher got his first training in TV and video work in that country, then returned to the U.S. to attend film and theater school at Diablo Valley College in California.  He went on to the excellent radio and TV program at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville and graduated in 1987.

Once he started his career, he worked at local TV stations in the Midwest as a cameraman, editor, director and commercial writer-producer before moving into sports TV photography. He also worked regularly with the regional and national TV networks on sports coverage, including Kansas City Royals baseball and Big 12 Conference men’s basketball.

In addition, he worked as an independent filmmaker, utilizing TV as the main form of distribution. He had his own state-of-the-art digital editing system and camera gear, with which he produced commercials and other smaller video projects. For movies and other large projects, he partnered with others, generally in the Midwest.

He’d been married earlier in life, and had a serious relationship with a woman at the time of his death.

“I got to know Christopher the last couple of years of his life,” said Chuck Offenburger, of Cooper, a writer who is webmaster for the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association.  “He was a big, stout man, but he was really like a teddy bear.  He got in touch after my wife Carla and I moved to the Cooper area in 2004 and we were getting involved with the RRVT and other local projects.  He was always real interested in the latest developments here, especially with the trail.

“Christopher told me how much he always loved getting out of Kansas City and visiting here.  He’d ride his bike, canoe, fish and camp out along the trail.  I’ll never forget one time he was camped up near the North Raccoon River, and he rode his bicycle into Jefferson for lunch.  When he got back, his campsite had been burgled and he lost a good camera and some other possessions.  He was laughing it off, saying he always worried about that happening in Kansas City but not in rural Greene County.  He couldn’t have been less concerned, but I was so furious I insisted he report it to our local sheriff.”

Offenburger said in early 2007, he invited Klinzman to write a guest column about the area for the Internet site Offenburger.com  (to read it click here).  Here is part of what Klinzman wrote:

“I grew up from ages 8 to 18 living overseas, as my parents traveled professionally…  Both of them small-town Iowans, they traveled the world in cutting-edge businesses, their roots always serving them well in competitive environs.

“I had chances to return regularly to the Cooper and Bagley area, by myself from age 11 onward, to see both sets of my grandparents, who lived only miles apart until 1981. As such, I grew to think of the area very fondly, and still regard it as one of my favorite spots on the planet.

“Squirrel Hollow Park, on the National Historic Register. The bike trail. The railroad bridge. The North Raccoon and its sandbars. The Greene County Historical Museum. The Mahanay Memorial Bell Tower. The Jefferson A & W.

“All simple pleasures from a time seemingly past, especially to a hard-core post-modern urbanite like myself.”

Those same simple pleasures are attracting increasing numbers of urban people into the countryside to enjoy recreational trails like the RRVT.

Here is the temporary sign that marks the location of the Klinzman Memorial Wildflowers Garden.