Unrestrained glee: This muddy O.C. playground has inspired kids for 50 years
Good morning. It’s Wednesday, June 19. I’m Carol Cormaci bringing you this week’s TimesOC newsletter with a look at some of the latest local news and events.
Pack a lunch, pull on your grubbiest clothes and leave any cares you may have behind. It’s time to round up a kid or two between the ages of 5 and 12 and go to Huntington Beach’s Adventure Playground in Central Park.
This “paradise for fearless and intrepid youth who don’t mind getting a little down and dirty in their playtime pursuits,” as my colleague Sara Cardine puts it, will reopen for the summer season at 10 a.m. Saturday.
Adventure Playground opened in an abandoned sand quarry in 1974 and was a bit more rough and tumble than its current version, according to Cardine’s feature story on the city-owned amenity.
She spoke to Eric Barraza, a city staffer overseeing this year’s operations, who looked through vintage photos depicting the play area’s early days.
“Honestly, it just looks like a Mad Max wasteland,” he said of black and white images of a youth sitting atop a busted recliner, or burning T-shirts over an open fire pit. “Kids brought hammers and nails and plywood boards and just built shanties — I had no idea what it used to be.”
Today the 1.5-acre site at 7111 Talbert Ave. is a place where kids can float rafts and inner tubes across a lagoon, slide down a mud hill and construct forts navigable by rope bridge, Cardine writes.
“Barraza acknowledges that, while similar adventure playgrounds currently operate in Irvine and in Yorba Linda, the Central Park facility is among a handful of cherished and time-honored community traditions the city’s denizens seem to have a keen interest in preserving,” she reports.
The cost for this fun right out of “Tom Sawyer”? It’s just $4 per child. Anyone 16 and older who is accompanying a child is admitted free. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (cleanup starts at 3:40) Mondays through Saturdays during the summer. Adventure Park is closed on Sundays and the Fourth of July.
This is key: Before you go, you’re supposed to make a reservation and payment here so the park isn’t too crazy when you’re there. And read the rules while you’re at it. Among them, you’ll see that you have to leave your flip-flops at home: “We do not allow sandals, water shoes, crocs or any shoe that may easily come off,” one of them states. “Anyone wearing shoes we deem inappropriate will not be allowed to enter.”
Don’t let that be you. It sounds like this play area could be a welcome respite from today’s plugged-in life, for the children as well as their chaperones.
As Barraza told Cardine, “This is really a park where kids can use their imaginations.”
MORE NEWS
• A federal appeals court last week upheld legislation banning the sale of firearms and ammunition on state-owned properties in California, which means the OC Fair & Event Center in Costa Mesa cannot welcome back the Crossroads of the West Gun Show, it was reported by the Daily Pilot. The first two Crossroads shows this year, held in January and March, brought in a combined $371,096 in revenue to the local fairgrounds, including rental agreements, parking and food and beverage commissions, according to OCFEF spokeswoman Terry Moore.
• Basing its actions on claims of retaliation against Disneyland employees, the Master Services Council, which is comprised of four major Disney unions, last week filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board. According to the story reported in TimesOC over the weekend by my colleague Gabriel San Román, the union coalition claimed more than 500 workers have faced unlawful intimidation, surveillance and disciplinary threats for wearing union buttons on their clothing while not in the “backstage” area of the park. The battle over buttons comes amid a contract campaign.
• It appears Westminster Councilwoman Amy Phan West is very close to being formally censured by her council colleagues, based on this report by San Román. Phan West’s misdeeds, according to the story, range from accusing city staff of taking bribes to taking long breaks during council meetings to divulging closed session discussions. Last week, council members voted 3-1 to move forward with censure. Phan West abstained. If she doesn’t change to the council majority’s liking, a censure resolution will be scheduled for a Sept. 11 vote, San Román reports.
• Forecasts for a warmer-than-normal summer are likely to prime California’s landscape for fire this fall, experts told the Los Angeles Times for this environmental feature. In Laguna Beach, as it has for almost three decades, the city has been employing about 400 goats this month to chew down brush that can serve as wildfire fuel. While the four-legged crews tend to some sections of the rugged land surrounding Laguna, hand crews manage 17 zones, with much of the land they work on containing protected vegetation and wildlife. The goat-grazing program costs $183,000; the city spends about $1.3 million annually on the hand crews.
• UCI Irvine has reported that a $50-million gift from Orange County biotech entrepreneur Charlie Dunlop will be used for an endowment fund that will usher in a “new era of discovery,” bolstering academics and research programs within the school. The university will rename its biological sciences school after Dunlop.
• Newport Beach Mayor Pro Tem Joe Stapleton has been elected chairman of New Majority Orange County. The group, according to its website, “seeks to inform its membership and contribute resources to Republican and other philosophically aligned candidates and issues that share its mission.” Stapleton succeeds another Newport Beach resident, Lucy Rawlins, in the role.
PUBLIC SAFETY & COURTS
• Two separate incidents believed to be gang-related, one a fatal stabbing last Tuesday and the other a shooting, took place on the 1700 block of Placentia Avenue in Costa Mesa last week. The shooting occurred early Friday at the site of a makeshift memorial that had been set up for the stabbing victim.
• Raymond Mario Jimenez, 27, of Santa Ana faces the potential of life in prison after Orange County prosecutors say he shot at two 13-year-old boys in Santa Ana from his car on June 5, killing one of them, and wounded a third teenager as he stood inside his own kitchen, peeking out a window. The Times’ report on the incident can be found here.
• More than 40 years after her body was found in an Orange County culvert, DNA testing ultimately helped sheriff’s investigators identify the woman as Maritza Glean Grimmett, who was 20 when she was last seen alive. According to The Times’ report on the identification, Grimmett’s remains were discovered in 1983 when children playing near the area of Canada and Old Trabuco roads in Lake Forest stumbled upon a human skull. Homicide is suspected. Anyone with information is asked to contact Investigator Bob Taft at (714) 647-7045 or coldcase@ocsheriff.gov.
• An arrest was made in a fatal traffic collision that killed 86-year-old John Robert Gilroy of Newport Beach on Sept. 30, according to the Newport Beach Police Department. Costa Mesa resident Andrew Bilat Awad, 35, was taken in on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence,
• The Fontana man who was arrested following a DUI crash that killed a 14-year-old girl near the Balboa Fun Zone over Memorial Day weekend pleaded not guilty Thursday to murder and drunk driving charges.
• A U.S. Secret Service agent who was held up at gunpoint at the intersection of Edinger and Harvard avenues in Tustin Saturday night opened fire at the suspect, according to a City News Service report. The suspect then escaped him.
• Federal prosecutors appeared yesterday before a panel of three judges at the Richard H. Chambers U.S. Court of Appeals in Pasadena seeking to overturn the dismissal of charges against Robert Rundo of Huntington Beach, an alleged member of a violent O.C.-based white supremacist group, according to a report in Pasadena Now. After the hearing, CNS reported the judges who heard the appeal took the matter under submission and gave no indication when a ruling might be issued.
SPORTS
• With skateboarding making its second appearance in the Summer Olympics this year, Laguna Beach resident Nyjah Huston, considered by many to be the best contest street skateboarder of all time, headed out Sunday for the last Olympic qualifier event in Budapest, set for this Thursday through Sunday. According to this feature story by my colleague Matt Szabo, the 29-year-old Huston practices the sport on his private skateboard park in San Clemente.
LIFE & LEISURE
• After years of working out of a trailer, the Newport Beach Jr. Lifeguards program has a new, $7.8-million facility that is welcoming its first wave of summer participants this week. A big crowd turned out last Wednesday for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new building, which was paid for by the city and the Newport Beach Jr. Lifeguard Foundation. One of the special guest speakers at the event was the program’s founder, Reenie Boyer, who established it in 1984.
CALENDAR THIS
• St. Paul’s 44th annual Greek Festival begins this Friday and runs through Sunday. Guests can enjoy Greek folk dancing lessons, a kids’ play zone, Greek food and a boutique from 5 to 10 p.m. Friday, noon to 10 p.m. Saturday and noon to 9 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $3; children under 10 are admitted at no charge. St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church, 4949 Alton Pkwy, Irvine.
• In celebration of National Corvette Day on Sunday, June 30, the Marconi Automotive Museum & Foundation for Kids will showcase “some of the coolest Corvettes Southern California has to offer!” Gates open at 7:45 a.m. for Corvette parking, with the show taking place from 9 to 11 a.m. Admission is $15 per person and includes museum entry, a light breakfast and coffee, and one raffle ticket per guest. The museum is located at 1302 Industrial Drive, Tustin. While the museum’s parking lot will be reserved for Corvettes only, additional parking will be made available for spectators.
• Internationally recognized artist John Cosby is the Laguna Plein Air Painters Assn. Gallery’s “Artist in Residence” this month. “Looking West, a Portrait of the Places I Love,” a solo exhibition created by Cosby, features several major works, as well as plein air studies. The exhibit ends July 1. The LPAPA Gallery is located at 414 N. Coast Hwy. For more information, call (949) 376-3635.
Until next Wednesday,
Carol
KEEP IN TOUCH
I appreciate your help in making this the best newsletter it can be. Please send news tips, your memory of life in O.C. (photos welcome!) or comments to carol.cormaci@latimes.com.
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