Old-Fashioned Fun : Communities: Ojai celebrates its heritage in town festival at Libbey Park. A new jungle gym is a hit, as are pumpkin carving and wagon rides.

Ben Foley, 5, knew exactly what made Saturday’s Ojai Day festival a special event for him.

He pointed to his favorite attraction at the entrance to Libbey Park--a huge, spanking-new jungle gym, gleaming red, green and yellow and swarming with children.

“I like the slide over there that goes way down fast,” he explained, indicating a covered tube attached to the play set, which the city officially opened Saturday in honor of the daylong festival.

Ben, his sister Katie, 8, and other Ojai children had been eyeing the structure for two weeks, waiting anxiously for officials to remove the fence around the $70,000 structure.

“I can’t get my son off of it,” his mother, Lisa Foley, said Saturday. “He’s only been off of it 15 minutes in the last two hours.”

The jungle gym was among the more popular features at the festival, but for those who could tear themselves away, the annual event also offered ring tosses, pumpkin carvings, harmonica performances, bake sales and other home-made attractions, as well as a good dose of town history.

Ojai Day was started in 1917 to honor Edward Drummond Libbey, the Toledo businessman who made Ojai his home six months out of every year, said Craig Walker, one of the festival’s organizers. In an attempt to draw his friends out west from Ohio, Libbey poured many of his own dollars into the town’s development, helping to build the Ojai Arcade, the Ojai Library, the Ojai Valley Inn and Libbey Park, the site of Saturday’s festivities, Walker said.

The event died out in the late 1920s, but was revived by residents in 1991 to commemorate the renovation of the arcade. This year, Ojai Day offered horse-drawn wagon rides around the old part of town, to commemorate the festival’s historical aspect.

“We’re going way back in history, before Prohibition, so our horses are named Whiskey and Rye,” volunteer Roderick Greene told the adults and children, who bounced up and down in the wagon as the two horses clip-clopped around a long town block. Greene said that for Saturday, at least, he was Ojai’s first town sheriff and marshal.

The wagon ride around Ojai--free, as were many of the festival’s attractions--included five-minute visits from many of the town’s “first citizens”--volunteers dressed in period costumes who leaped on the back end of the wagon and introduced their characters and their histories.

“I learned a bit of history from that,” said Karen Courington, a local schoolteacher who went along for the ride. Many of the “historical” volunteers were her fellow teachers, she said. “I’m really impressed that they just volunteered and did it all.”

Nearby, at the city’s cotton candy concession stand, volunteer Matt Dekker, 14, was also giving Ojai Day his best effort. Covered in sticky pink stuff, from his shoulders to the tips of his gloved fingers, Matt attempted to swirl the fuzzy candy onto white paper sticks before the spewing machine overwhelmed him with cotton candy.

“Hurry! Go, go!” ordered Joshua Halls, 14, as Matt fell behind the pace, dropping his head to lick a wisp of pink candy fluff off his red flannel shirt.

“I’m getting sick and tired of this,” Matt concluded, 45 minutes and many of gobs of cotton candy later. “It’s getting old.”

But Bill Fox, 52, carving pumpkins at an adjacent stand, seemed nearly indefatigable. For a price of $5, customers could buy a pumpkin from the local PTA, then turn the purchase over to Fox for decoration. A biologist at Ventura College, Fox sat for hours Saturday, turning pumpkins into grimacing orange ghouls with the turn of his knife.

“You just kind of look at a pumpkin and the face jumps out at you,” he explained as a cluster of girls watched him carve a witch into an orb.

“Will it last till Halloween?” asked a woman whose daughter wanted a jack o’-lantern.

“No,” Fox admitted, “but it’ll be fun until then.”