Colin Kahler, nephew of Ken Stewart, presented a $3,000 donation to the Olympic Peninsula YMCA for the operation and maintenance of the YMCA of Sequim facility pool.

“Uncle Ken spent hours and hours with my brother Brady and me supervising our swimming lessons at the former SARC,” Kahler said. “This feels like a fitting tribute to his memory.”

The late Stewart “had a passion for parks,” according to Laurie Stewart, his widow and Sound Community Bank CEO. That passion led him from service as a parks commissioner in Shoreline to Sequim, where he volunteered for the local Parks Board and worked tirelessly on the skateboard park project here.

When Stewart succumbed to a rare form of liver cancer in January 2001, the family established the Ken Stewart Park Fund at the Olympic View Community Foundation (then called Community Foundation of the Sequim-Dungeness Valley).

After a 20-year career in the military, Stewart ran his own businesses, then returned to the University of Washington and completed a theater arts degree. He was active in many area theater companies, including in Sequim.

To honor his life of service, both in the military and in the communities where they lived, the family offered three alternatives — in lieu of flowers — to those who wished to remember him.

Those options were gifts to the Ken Stewart Park Fund held at the community foundation, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and the Woodland Park Zoo. Distributions from the Park Fund supported the skateboard park and the park by the alternative school in Sequim. The family also funded a bench at the zoo and a brick at the Hutch.

“Ken would be very pleased about this donation,” Stewart said.

The new Sequim facility will become the largest branch to the Olympic Peninsula YMCA and is complete with a fitness center, gym, racquetball courts, aerobics studio and a six-lane pool.

“We are honored by such a generous donation in memory of Ken Stewart,” Len Borchers, CEO of the Olympic Peninsula YMCA, said.

The new Sequim Advisory Committee, led by Gary Huff, began its $150,000 financial campaign this May. Huff and Borchers met with Laurie Stewart very early on when the Olympic Peninsula YMCA was considering whether the Y will transform SARC into a YMCA.