It was the truck that started it, sticking out like a plaid shirt in the black tie parking lot of a kids’ soccer game in the suburbs.
Wayne Tinker’s pick-up caught the eye of Jim Onalfo, then with the Soccer Club of Ridgefield (SCOR).
“When I first got involved with SCOR, Jim Onalfo said ‘You’ve got a truck, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I have three of them,’ ” recalled Mr. Tinker, who was a masonry contractor at the time.
“He said, ‘You could be a big help to us. You go to a soccer game and you don’t see any red-necks — no pick-up trucks, just Cadillacs.’ ”
And what began as some soccer parent volunteering led, eventually, to 26 years of service on Ridgefield’s Parks and Recreation Commission.
“I met him in ’77 when I took over as director,” the Parks and Recreation Department’s Paul Roche said of Mr. Tinker.
“He was out on one of our fields with his backhoe, digging out rocks at the new high school —and the rocks were as big as his backhoe. We had terrible erosion problems, because the grass was not established, due to the very heavy play of soccer on very few fields. And we had no renovation or rotation program,” Mr. Roche said.
“He helped us fixing the fields for years and in the early 80s got involved in the fields expansion and renovation program.”
“I was one of the loud noises,” Mr. Tinker said, recalling the lobbying effort by parents to call attention to the problem. “I was affiliated with SCOR at the time.”
The solution involved what was for the time a big bond issue by the town, to fix up playing fields and add new ones to reduce overuse.
“One million dollars, which was lot of money — it was a fortune,” Mr. Roche said.
“Even after we rebuilt the fields, Parks and Rec didn’t have a whole lot of equipment,” Mr. Tinker recalled.
“Kids would get out on the fields with dirt bikes and tear up the fields and my son and I would go out with a truck at night and fix it up so it could be played on the next day.”
His son was about seven then, Mr. Tinker said.
“Paul Roche said the first time he saw my tractor coming toward him on a field he didn’t think anybody was on it, and that was my son.”
Mr. Tinker was appointed to the Parks and Recreation Commission in 1988.
He served 26 years on the commission, although he tried to end it after 24. Back in 2012 he offered his resignation — with an offer to keep serving while the selectmen, who appoint the Parks and Recreation members, found a replacement.
“Told them that even though I was retiring I’d like to stick around until they found a replacement for me,” Mr. Tinker said. “I didn’t realize it was going to take another two years. But I enjoyed the whole 26 years.”
Some of Mr. Tinker’s “old Yankee” traits might be traced to years in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts during his youth.
“Went to an uncle’s farm for two weeks while mom and dad sorted out their problems, and ended up staying six years,” he said.
He spent his high school years in Wilton.
“In those days Wilton didn’t have a high school,” he said. “Depending on what part of town we lived in, we went to Staples in Westport or to New Canaan High. I spent my high school going to Staples.”
He did get to Ridgefield.
“I was probably involved in the first football game between Ridgefield and Wilton,” he said. “About half a dozen guys came up on bicycles from Wilton, and half a dozen guys from Ridgefield.
“We had a football game at the old high school field, five or six on side, and we played until we got into kind of an argument. When it looked like it wasn’t going to be much fun, my best buddy and I we’d bought our fishing poles with us and we went fishing.”
He went to the University of Connecticut for a year and a half, studying agriculture.
“Decided I was going to get drafted and wanted to put a kitchen on my mother’s house before I went into the service,” he said.
“The day after I finished up work on the kitchen I was working for Uncle Sam.”
He served overseas.
“I was in the forgotten war, Korea. I was a medic. I got over there in early April and the shooting stopped about two days before I could qualify to get my combat pin. I was there for 13 or 14 months,” he said.
It was later, as a father, that he got involved with Ridgefield sports and fields.
“My son and daughter, they both played soccer,” he said. “I would pick up the kids up after school and I’d take them up to the soccer field. And I couldn’t see driving all the way from wherever I was working on a particular day, and then getting them to soccer practice, and going back to work, and then going back to pick them up at soccer. And I just sort of got involved with coaching.
After a year as an assistant coach he had his own team, and in a few years he was coaching at several levels.
“I coached 10 years, long after my own kids had quit,” he said. “My daughter eventually quit soccer and went into cheering. And my son, he quit soccer and got on the wrestling team.
“At one point I was coaching a boys travel team and a girls travel team and helping out with ‘house’ and with the girls high school varsity soccer, plus doing all that was necessary with the fields — lining, and moving the goals for SCOR. I also was lining for the football, Pop Warner, and eventually I ended up lining the fields for lacrosse.”
Mr. Tinker and his wife, Brigitte, are on their own now in the house on Shady Lane where they’ve lived for years. Their daughter, Andrea, is in Arlington, Va., and works in real estate. Their son, David, lives in Danbury and has his own business, while working winters with his father.
“I have my own landscaping business and he has his excavating business, and we work together with the snow plowing business,” Mr. Tinker said.
With all he’s done for Parks and Recreation, Mr. Tinker looks back on the fields development as his most significant contribution.
“I was probably the only one in SCOR that had experience with sod development and had studied agriculture, and I just made a lot of noise and there was a lot of other people making noise, too. But I was the only one that thought there was a real solution,” he said. “I think that was the most rewarding part for me, was to have been involved in that.”
And, he remembers the rocks.
“Before we built all those fields we used to go up, every spring. I’d get a group together to dig out rocks on the high school field where they play soccer now, and where the artificial turfs are,” he said. “I’d go up there with my backhoe and crew and we’d dig out rocks.
“Some of them were probably twice as big as a basketball, and a whole lot of them about the size of a basketball.
“Connecticut, somewhere along the way, somebody threw a lot of rock seed down,” Mr. Tinker said, “and we’ve been growing stones ever since.”
Wayne Tinker started as a parent volunteer, caring for town fields, and retired with 26 years on the Parks and Recreation Commission. — Macklin Reid photo