THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605170195
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ERIC FEBER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
Imagine how thrilling it would be to discover the bones of a dinosaur while digging in a sandbox.
Chesapeake children have that experience in store, as Phase II of the Fun Forest project gets under way at Chesapeake City Park.
Fun Forest is a complex, child-friendly play park built last spring entirely with volunteer labor and donated materials.
Plans call for the addition of a dinosaur dig area, an aquatic park and a concession stand. The new additions will be dedicated to the memory of two Chesapeake firefighters who died in the line of duty.
Since May 2, more than 20 volunteers have worked on the dinosaur area and the aquatic park, a dry area covered in mulch that features concrete sculptures of several sea creatures including the tail of a huge diving whale and a vicious-looking, great white shark.
According to Phase II's general coordinator Carol Rodenbaugh, the second part of Fun Forest has been in the planning stage for about six months. Construction on the project took a little more than two weeks and was completed last Saturday.
``I had a dedicated corps of about 20 or more daily volunteers who worked every day, Monday through Saturday from about 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.,'' Rodenbaugh said.
The gem of the project is the new dinosaur dig pit and aquatic park designed by Tom Arie-Donch, who heads Inter Play Designs, a California-based company that designs and implements parks and play areas using community help and input.
``I work back and forth with local committees to make a play area unique to each community,'' Arie-Donch said. ``People no longer think of themselves as transient. They now want to belong to an area, to a community. They are now becoming part of communities all over the country. There's a longing for the land and history. Local history becomes important. I try to touch on these feelings when designing parks, play areas and special spaces for each individual community.''
Arie-Donch said he's recently worked with a community committee in the Midwest, having designed a park with a Wild West theme.
After the Chesapeake project he's off to Enid, Okla., where he'll design a park with a time-line as part of the development of a community-built science museum.
``Most of these projects would never get done without community involvement,'' he said. ``The volunteers give each project its unique touches. In working with this community we decided to include various fossils indigenous to this area. We decided to include prehistoric sea life. And then one member of the committee wanted to see a non-meat eating dinosaur as the central design, so we chose the hadrosaur.''
Arie-Donch said Fun Forest's fossils - not real ones, but exact reproductions made of concrete - will include sea life, early reptiles and early mammals. The prehistoric fossils will include the hadrosaur skeleton with eggs, a huge sharks' tooth, impressions of early ferns and plant life, an archaeopteryx (a flying reptile with feathers) and a trilobite (prehistoric sea animal).
``These will be fossils you'll find in a `National Geographic,' '' he said. ``The idea behind all this is to teach and learn and have fun.''
``We call it our glorified sand box,'' Rodenbaugh said.
The sides to the fossil dig are made up of simulated boulders made out of concrete. Inside this area sand has been dumped over everything. Children, using plastic shovels so as not to chip or harm the fossils, can dig away to their heart's content. Digging will reveal all of the fossils mentioned by Arie-Donch. Some will be found at the bottom of the sand pile others will be imbedded into the faux boulders.
Near the play paleontology area is the aquatic park, which features representations of sea life, including a whale's tail about to disappear into the water, several sea turtles and a huge shark.
The sea life in the aquatic park is made from smaller models. The large scale models are made out of reinforcing bars covered with screening wire sprayed with concrete by the Hydrocrete Co. and then troweled smooth by sculptor Thornton Elmore.
Rodenbaugh said the work performed by the project's core committee was invaluable. Those members are Michael Fitchett, Fred Boyd, Teddie Thorogood, Gail Joanides, John Oliphant, John Cannon and Peggy Schmader. by CNB