A Playground Breaks Ground

About 150 volunteers began building a fanciful community playground for mid-Ventura on Wednesday, culminating 18 months of grass-roots planning and fund raising by a committed core of parents, educators, neighbors and business leaders.

Built barn-raising style--1,500 volunteers have signed on to help--the Rainbow Bridge Community Playground is expected to be finished in five days.

Wednesday’s crew laid the foundation for a 10,000-square-foot maze of twisty slides, tunnels, lookout towers, a haunted house, leaping dolphins and a whale.

Seabees from the Port Hueneme naval base joined Ventura bank managers, architects and realtors on a grassy field behind Blanche Reynolds School to shovel dirt, drill holes, hammer nails and saw wood.

“A hundred days for Newt Gingrich. Five days for us,” quipped former Marine Jack Pennarts as he helped build the steel skeleton for a 21-foot-long concrete whale that children can climb and sit on.

After months of pleading for money and materials and organizing endless flow charts, Reynolds kindergarten teacher Lisa Hall said she was thrilled to see the project finally get off the ground.

Hall conceived the idea 18 months ago after visiting a similar playground in Santa Barbara. That playground, called Kid’s World, was also built entirely with volunteer labor, she said.

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Energized by what she had seen, Hall and others presented a proposal for the playground at a school assembly and got an enthusiastic response. A design company that specializes in playgrounds was brought in to draw up the plans, taking ideas directly from Blanche Reynolds students.

Soon 10 committees were formed to deal with everything from fund raising to providing day care for the volunteers.

Construction dates had to be moved back twice as donations dribbled in. The group has raised $80,000 in cash and donations of materials so far, about $20,000 short of their goal, Hall said.

But they decided to go ahead with the construction anyway, hoping for a last-minute infusion of cash, she said.

Although Hall concedes that the playground will mainly benefit Blanche Reynolds students and children in the mid-Ventura area, she hopes the completed project will inspire others to launch similar campaigns.

“It was difficult. It was hard. It was a struggle,” Hall said. “But the more people who come out to see what we’re doing or to lend a hand, the easier it will be to duplicate our effort in other parts of the city.”

The playground will be open to the public except when school is in session. Another smaller, city-owned playground already on the Blanche Reynolds grounds is open all hours and geared to the preschool set.

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Carol Green, a spokeswoman for the city of Ventura, said she was impressed that the organizers were able to maintain their enthusiasm for the project for so long.

“They have done a lot of promotion,” she said. “And that certainly helped to get this project going.”

The city agreed to kick in $20,000 last month because council members were impressed with the group’s efforts, Green said.

“Any opportunity we have to provide play equipment and activities for children is another asset to the community.”

Dan Burgevin, who designed the playground, was also on hand for the groundbreaking Wednesday. Burgevin’s company, Leathers Associates of Ithaca, N.Y., has built more than 100 similar playgrounds across the county.

Several were also community efforts, completed through volunteer work, he said. The real payoff will come Sunday, when the ribbon is cut and children begin streaming into the playground.

“Grown men cry and women cheer,” Burgevin said. “It is the greatest feeling a community can have.”