Laguna Beach Will Pass a ‘Rocket Ship’ on to the Next Generation

Lisa Stewart grew up playing at least once a week on the huge rocket ship jungle gym that once graced Laguna Beach’s Bluebird Park.

“It was very exciting because the higher up you got, the better view you had of the canyon,” recalls Stewart, now 44. “They had a wheel at the top that you could turn and pretend you were captain.”

Stewart wants her 21-month-old son, Caden, to have the same experience. So on Sunday she and about 200 other parents paid $35 a head (and $15 for their kids) to eat hamburgers, dance to tunes from the ‘60s and ‘70s, bid on items in a silent auction and generally yuk it up for the survival of a tradition. Organizers hope the money raised will put a fund for a new such rocket ship over the top.

“It was a very big part of my childhood,” Stewart says. “Now I’ll be able to watch my son climb up to the top and tell him that I used to climb up there too.”

The city removed the old one two years ago after declaring its rusted metal base unsafe. That got the attention of Mayor Cheryl Kinsman, who says her then-8-year-old son pitched a fit. “He was devastated to the point of tears,” the mayor reports. “And so were a lot of other kids.”

Kinsman donated $1,000 of her own for something new in the place nicknamed Rocket Ship Park, because “we don’t do enough in this city for kids.” She helped get a $55,000 matching grant from the city,and other donations came in.

Going into the weekend, the mayor says, about $87,000 had been raised -- just $13,000 short of the price tag for a 30-foot-high custom-designed rocket ship, with two slides, one of them tubular. City officials hope to install it this summer.

Most agree that the original rocket ship was installed in the early to mid-1960s. “I remember celebrating my fifth birthday at the foot of the rocket,” said Stacy Dugger, 43, now the mother of a 7-year-old boy and 2 1/2 -year-old girl. “I remember the freedom of playing in the park and using your imagination.”

Shelley Cox Jones, 47, also remembers many happy hours spent flying the city’s most famous spacecraft. “Every kid needs to be able to grow up playing in a rocket ship,” said Jones, who now directs an after-school program, Laguna Club for Kids.

She said she was impressed with the design for the new apparatus, posted near the entrance to Sunday’s gathering.

“This one’s so huge,” she said, “that we can all play on it.”