REDMOND (AP) — A mass of excited youngsters swarmed the bronze statue of former Oregon Gov. Tom McCall outside McCall Elementary School here Tuesday as it made a stopover on its trip from Pendleton to the Salem waterfront.

It depicts the popular former governor emerging from the North Umpqua River clutching a steelhead. The kids ran their fingers along the metal fish, laughing as they jostled beneath McCall’s downward gaze.

McCall is remembered for, among other things, launching key environmental initiatives such as the bottle and beach bills and land use planning.

“For us, it was a great time in Oregon history, when Republicans and Democrats worked together,” Norma Paulus, former Oregon secretary of state and close associate of McCall, said Tuesday. Paulus led the effort to raise $200,000 to commission the statue.

Paulus said she visited McCall in Portland when he was dying of prostate cancer, and he told her that if there was ever a statue of him, he wanted it to be modeled on the John Daniel Callaghan photo of him holding the fish and his fly rod as he splashed from the river in T-shirt and waders.

A descendant of prominent East Coast families that included a governor of Massachusetts, he was raised on a ranch along the Crooked River. He rose as a journalist and television commentator advocating river cleanup.

He was governor from 1967 to 1975. He died 25 years ago and is buried in Redmond.

Paulus said he wanted any statue to be in Salem near the Willamette River, and that’s where it will be installed Thursday and dedicated Friday, in Riverfront Park.

The 1,000-pound statue is the work of Troutdale sculptor Rip Caswell, who spent more than a year researching his subject and building models in clay. The final product took three months to cast in an Enterprise foundry.

Caswell said he had Paulus track down the waders McCall was wearing the day the photo was taken and even re-created the fly McCall was casting, a Skunk.

“I started to gain an understanding of this moment, this day on the river, and why it was so important for him,” Caswell said. “His heart was really to protect Oregon but also to be able to harvest from the abundance of that.”

In bronze, McCall stands more than 9 feet tall, and his face is thoughtful, his eyes look downward and he walks toward shore. Caswell purposefully left the skin on his subject’s thick forearms rough to the touch, reflecting McCall’s gruffness.

“He was always a straightforward straight shooter. He told it like it was,” said Jim Nolan, a retired sand-and-gravel contractor from Redmond at Tuesday’s unveiling.

McCall was known for his quick wit and way with words, such as when he lambasted the “grasping wastrels of the land” when fighting for the adoption of Oregon’s pioneering land-use laws.

Or when he said on CBS, “Come visit us again and again ... but for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.”

He took some heat for that one. It didn’t seem to bother him.