Sculptor Creates a Fantasy in Jungle Gym for Head Start

When the directors of Head Start began looking for playground equipment for their new Solana Beach day-care center, they wanted something a little different from the prefabricated metal gym bars you can order out of a catalogue.

That’s when they stumbled across Suzie Daughtry’s “bus,” an old bread truck coated with so much plastic-foam ice and snow it looked like something Frosty the Snowman drove down from the North Pole.

The sculpted bus, which serves as Daughtry’s calling card, was all it took to persuade the directors to give her a crack at filling their playground with sculpture designed for children to play on.

Three months later, the fence around the playground came down, unleashing children on Daughtry’s whimsical creations, which accommodate a youngster’s yearning for climbing and swinging in addition to stretching the imagination.

“The children seem absolutely enchanted with the playground,” said Hope Cedaker, head teacher at the center. “The uniqueness of this playground is just wonderful, and the children seem to find more creative activities than at a normal playground. . . . They are pretending to be astronauts in the castle. . . . And the burro, they pretend to fly him or ride him.”

“It’s about fantasy,” Daughtry said looking over her five soft, white-cement sculptures, which create a scene as weird as any drawing by Dr. Seuss.

There’s the cookie cutter kid, just the right size for a preschooler to stand inside, taking an imaginary shower next to a circa 1910 tub embedded with marbles and wearing cowboy boots.

There’s a winged burro, called “Pablo Pegaso,” with rungs for climbing and swinging, and a hollow head children can yell in, listening to their echo or pretending to be the burro talking.

There’s a castle with five chambers, each with a different motif and strategically placed holes offering interesting views. The central room has a celestial ceiling, with a prism built into the roof, which casts a rainbow that moves with the sun across a galaxy of little mirrors. Another room has an animal theme--a green sea monster toy swimming through a sea of sparkling marbles and drawings of owls and salamanders taken from ancient Indian art.

“I do a lot of walking around in this playground on my knees, to get at the right level,” Daughtry said. “The children will discover all of the things that are in the castle by themselves as they go through it.”

Head Start is a federally funded program for preschool-age children from low-income families designed to develop their academic and social skills before they start public school. There are 30 centers in the county, said Head Start Assistant Director Angie Fischetti.

Head Start was bequeathed $20,000 by the late Janice Jacobs of San Diego to build a playground for its program, Fischetti said. Since the new Solana Beach center needed a playground, it was the lucky one to benefit from Jacobs’ generosity.

“Jacobs was an advocate of children and a believer in the Head Start philosophy,” Fischetti said.

The Solana Beach center opened a year and a half ago and enrolls 34 children with plans to expand. Head Start leases the land from St. Leo Mission Church and, in an arrangement with the church, will offer access to the playground to the neighboring community of Eden Gardens, Fischetti said.

Fischetti estimated the contract with Daughtry to be about $16,800. Daughtry was responsible for buying all the materials and hiring help--three “maestros,” or cement artisans from Mexico, she found in Eden Gardens.

“I think it’s truly a very different and unique playground,” Fischetti said. “It’s one of a kind. . . .”

Daughtry divided a cement border around the playground into foot-long sections for each child in Head Start to create his or her own designs. The children drew and embedded a variety of objects into the wet cement, including chains, safety pins and trinkets brought from home, and signed their names. One section was covered with the paw prints of the community dog, Zoe.

“The children were so thrilled to see their own work right there,” Cedaker said, “And that they can come in and play and look at it. They feel so much a part of it.”

Daughtry said she sculpts in cement because it is versatile and durable. Most of her work is in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, including a 62-foot-high sculpture that serves as the welcoming piece to the resort city.

She first builds a core of reinforced steel bars and wire mesh and then applies several layers of cement, each finer than the last, on top. She said her sculpture is extremely sturdy.

“That’s my high,” she said. “Knowing that I have made a contribution through my work and knowing that it’s going to be here to enjoy for a long, long time to come.”