[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 12 (Tuesday, February 8, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E175]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        A SALUTE TO WALTER MESS

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                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, February 8, 2005

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to recognize Mr. Walter L. 
Mess, on the occasion of his retirement after 46 years of service with 
the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority. Walter is a good man who 
has made invaluable contributions to our area through his dedicated 
public service.
  I am proud to call attention today to Walter's achievements. He spent 
30 years as chairman of the park authority and under his leadership the 
park authority has become a thriving organization. I would like to 
share an article from a recent edition of the Washington Post which 
highlights Walter's many accomplishments and contributions.

              [From the Washington Post, February 3, 2005]

                    Area Parks Pioneer Earns a Rest

                            (By Leef Smith)

       He was the longest-serving public official in Northern 
     Virginia, overseeing the area's regional park authority as 
     chairman for 30 years.
       In December, Walter L. Mess stepped down from that post at 
     the age of 90--his hearing, not his age, the deciding 
     factor--having devoted more than 46 years of his life to 
     preserving land in the area.
       Under his leadership, the Northern Virginia Regional Park 
     Authority preserved more than 10,000 acres while operating 19 
     regional parks in the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax and Falls 
     Church, as well as in Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun 
     counties.
       Today, the authority's assets are valued at more than $1 
     billion.
       ``His contributions have been immense,'' said Barry 
     Buschow, a member of the park authority board since 1990, who 
     represented Falls Church along with Mess. ``He's taken a 
     struggling organization from nowhere to a billion-dollar 
     corporation.''
       Asked this week to name his proudest achievement, Mess did 
     not mention the development of the 45-mile Washington & Old 
     Dominion Railroad Regional Park trail, or the acquisition of 
     the 5,000-acre Occoquan Reservoir shoreline.
       Instead, he talked about his family.
       He told a story about one of his 10 grandchildren, 
     Christine, now a schoolteacher with two children of her own. 
     Just a teenager at the time, she confronted a manager at 
     Upton Hill Regional Park in Arlington and demanded to know 
     why a plaque honoring her grandfather was not being 
     displayed.
       ``That's what I'm the proudest of,'' said Mess, who also 
     has 10 great-grandchildren. ``That's where the pride comes 
     from.''
       Mess and his wife, Jean, met in business school in 1934. 
     They were married for 62 years and raised four children. She 
     died in 2002.
       The parks agency was a voluntary, time-consuming sideline 
     to Mess's career as a land economist and mortgage banker.
       As a child he canoed, hiked, hunted and fished with his 
     father and uncle throughout the area, in the days when it was 
     still undeveloped.
       As a young man hard at work on a law degree in 1939, Mess 
     signed on with a U.S. government covert operations unit and 
     was sent to Europe, where he traveled behind German lines.
       He would receive an honorary green beret more than half a 
     century later to honor his military intelligence service.
       Mess returned to the United States in 1940 and returned to 
     school to complete his degree. He married and started a 
     family. Two years later, he enlisted in the Quartermaster 
     Corps and was on his way to Asia when he caught his first 
     glimpse of the future. Stationed in San Diego for a month, he 
     got a chance to see the area's regional system of parks, golf 
     courses and swimming pools, available to the public at no 
     cost.
       He came home in 1946 to his wife and a 4-year-old daughter 
     he had never met. He brought with him four Bronze Star 
     Medals, malaria, blackwater fever and the knowledge that he 
     was lucky to be alive.
       It was time, he decided, to help his native Washington 
     benefit from the kinds of land preservation and recreational 
     opportunities he had seen in California.
       What the area needed, he decided, was a regional park 
     system. Others agreed, and together they embarked on a 
     decades-long journey to make it happen.
       ``When you start to do something, and you don't have any 
     money and you have to get it from the public, you have to be 
     very patient,'' Mess said. ``We were very patient. That was 
     part of the game.''
       It was also part of their success.
       It took about 10 years to persuade legislators in Richmond 
     to grant their approval. In 1959, Mess was Falls Church's 
     first appointee to the Northern Virginia Regional Park 
     Authority Board.
       Since then, the park authority has spent $120 million on 
     land, including parcels along the Occoquan Reservoir and 
     Potomac River and on the environmentally fragile Mason Neck.
       ``Our whole idea was to protect the watershed and give 
     people access to the water,'' Mess said. ``Back in the early 
     days, much of that land was land that developers weren't 
     going to use.''
       In 1975, Mess became the authority's second chairman. In 
     1999, the agency honored his 40 years of service by naming 
     its headquarters in Fairfax Station for him.
       ``This whole thing I'm being given credit for I didn't 
     do,'' Mess said. ``The people around me did.'' The authority 
     ``gets credit for planning and starting it, but we couldn't 
     have done it without everyone.''

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