It seems the Stark Foundation CFO Clyde McKee III (11 years old when Mr. Stark died) knows Mr. Stark better than his own son. Hardly! The Shangri La slogan “Be Kind to Your World” would not be there for sure. Mr Stark was a conservationist, not a preservationist! Homer Stark said “Dad is rolling over in his grave at how the Stark Foundation is run today. A children’s wing at the hospital would have benefited people more than Shangri La, but you can’t have “social” events there. Scholarships don’t have any overhead compared to the Lutcher Theater and Shangri La.”
$15 million Shangri La plan upsets Stark's son
By KEVIN J. DWYER
September 1, 2004
Posted: June 28, 2008, 7:40 PM CDT
ORANGE - Homer Stark remembers walking through Shangri La with his father the day H.J. Lutcher Stark decided to close the botanical garden to the public.
"He had three rules," said Stark, 81. "One: stay on the path; two: don't trash; and the third rule was don't break off the branches of the shrubs and azaleas."
Stark said that day he and his father saw people breaking all three rules.
"He said, 'Well, that's all for them, I'm going to close this place down,' " Stark said, recalling his father's reaction to visitors' disrespect.
This is the reason Stark feels his adopted father would be opposed to recently announced plans to spend $15 million to renovate the Shangri La Botanical Gardens and Nature Center.
"I'm real upset," Stark said. "What he would have done if he were alive is take less than $1 million and fix the place up like it was. He would have taken that $15 million into a scholarship program for the kids in the area, or built a children's wing on the hospital."
Designs for the 252-acre Shangri La are being finalized, said Clyde McKee III, chief financial officer of the Stark Foundation, which owns Shangri La. Current plans include man-made wetlands for water purification, several new buildings, educational facilities and restoration work on existing structures.
In addition to Shangri La, McKee said, the Stark Foundation maintains the Stark Museum of Art, W.H. Stark House and Lutcher Theater in Orange. The foundation also provides numerous scholarships through the Miriam Lutcher Stark Contest in Reading and Declamation and the University Interscholastic League.
"We're a public concern," McKee said. "We have to make our assets available to the citizens, we have to let the public in. (Shangri La) has to have a charitable use, and opening up the gardens to a charitable use would certainly be what Mr. Stark would want."
If Shangri La remains closed to the public, McKee said the foundation could be required to sell the property or pay taxes on the facility.
"The founders, with their private money, could keep it fenced and locked," McKee said. "But once they put it into a foundation it almost becomes public property. I think (Mr. Stark) would be extremely pleased with this."
Homer Stark, who is currently involved in a long-running lawsuit against the Nelda C. and H.J. Lutcher Stark Foundation over assets of the Stark estate, still has a key to the gate at Shangri La and last visited about six months ago.
His father, Stark said, originally intended to use the property as a homestead for his first wife, Nita.
"It was beautiful," Stark said of Shangri La in its early days. "We used to ride horses through there until he started fixing it up and he put a stop to that. It was a wild place to go."
Located in Orange between Adams Bayou and West Park Avenue, Shangri La was Stark's father's personal project. He imported trees, flowers and artifacts from all over Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana.
According to the Stark Foundation, more than 30,000 visitors toured Shangri La in 1952. McKee said a hard freeze in 1958 destroyed about 85 percent of the garden's plants, and prompted Stark's father to close the garden to the public, a statement with which Homer Stark disagrees.
Stark's third wife and widow, Nelda, oversaw the gardens until her death in 1999, when the property was left to the foundation.
"We just want the people of Orange to know he never would have put $15 million into that," Stark said. "He'd roll over in his grave."