Brooklyn Primary third-graders honor Leo Adler with community service

Brooklyn Primary’s third-graders honored Leo Adler by doing the kind of work that still defines his name in Baker City: serving the community. Teachers Jill Welter and Katie Johnson swapped a one-day field trip for a spring schedule built around Adler, with matching purple shirts reading Be the spark and a series of service stops across town.

The students decorated 300 coffee sleeves for Coffee Corral, visited the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, toured the Baker City Fire Department and read to residents at Settler’s Park and Meadowbrook. They also cleaned up around Geiser-Pollman Park and the Leo Adler Memorial Parkway, then left painted kindness rocks behind. The project tied schoolwork to visible places in Baker City, putting children inside the civic spaces Adler helped support.

That choice fit the history behind the name. Leo Adler was born in Baker in June 1895, started selling newspapers and magazines at age 9 and, by 1925, had built a distribution territory reaching from The Dalles, Oregon, to Grand Island, Nebraska, with 2,000 outlets in seven states and sales of more than three million magazines a year. He became known statewide as Mr. Baker, and he supported local institutions for decades, including the Baker City Fire Department, where his money helped pay for fire trucks and ambulances.

Adler’s influence still runs through Baker County institutions. When he died on November 2, 1993, at age 98, he left $20 million in trust to support community grants and scholarships. The Leo Adler Foundation continues that mission today, aiming to enrich quality of life and opportunity in Baker County and North Powder through grants and scholarships. The foundation has distributed more than $42 million since 1995, keeping Adler’s philanthropy tied to everyday public life.

For Welter and Johnson, the lesson reached beyond local history. Their students connected Adler’s story to The Spark and the Light, then will finish the school year with a birthday celebration at the Leo Adler House museum at 2305 Main Street and a cleanup at the Splash Pad. The house, Adler’s former 1889 Italianate home, was restored and opened as a museum in July 1998.

The result was more than a classroom unit. It was a civic habit in motion, showing how Baker still passes its values forward by asking children not just to learn about Leo Adler, but to act like his legacy is still their own.