Penny Playground 2.0: Chehalis Residents Celebrate the Legacy of Community Effort

Call it Penny Playground 2.0, Penny Playground: Next Generation or another future-forward name. However one chooses to describe it, it was clear Sunday that citizens of Chehalis still feel a deep connection to the playground more than 2,000 volunteers helped build in 1993, and will continue to do so when it is replaced later this year by an all-weather, accessible installation.

More than 100 people filled the pavilion and the surrounding area outside the V.R. Lee Community Building at Recreation Park for an hour-long retrospective of how Penny Playground came to be and a glimpse at what will become of the popular play structure. City, state and federal funding will be used along with funds raised by the community for a more than $2 million overhaul of Recreation Park that includes artificial turf for ballfields, revamped lighting and a new playground.

Children played in the background of speakers ranging from current city officials to former civic leaders and the granddaughters of the woman who spearheaded the effort to build Penny Playground back in 1993. All said that in one way or another, the years of community activism followed by volunteers taking a week out of their lives to construct the playground will continue to stand as a symbol of what’s possible in Chehalis.

“I think other projects like Alexander Park, the (Vernetta Smith Chehalis Timberland Library) and our swimming pool grew out of that effort,” said Bob Spahr, who served as mayor of Chehalis in 1993 and sits today on the city council. “That is Chehalis. This is what we do and how we do it.”

Current Mayor Dennis Dawes, former City Manager Dave Campbell and others told the crowd stories of how the playground came to be and of their own experiences working firsthand with local children in the spring of 1993 to make it a reality. Spahr and Campbell each recalled having their children soap screws to make it easier for the adults to erect the wooden framing for slides, swings and more

The name for Penny Playground was selected from hundreds of suggestions submitted by a prior generation of local schoolchildren. Three boys suggested the moniker independent of each other — classrooms collected pennies back then to help pay for construction of the playground. Campbell recalled Sunday that the out of pocket cost to the city was about $80,000, less than half of the actual value of the labor and materials used.

One of the three children who came up with the name attended the ceremony on Sunday. Eddie Arredondo was a fifth-grade student at Olympic Elementary when his teacher introduced a competition to name the playground. Arredondo recalls jotting the name down on a piece of paper and not giving it a second thought once he turned in his suggestion.

“I grew up eight blocks from here,” Arredondo recalled Sunday. “We would sometimes hold birthdays here. My dad and brother helped build the playground. It’s sad to see it go, but wood can’t last forever, and this one made it more than 25 years. It’s still going to carry on even longer in a different form.”

The promised unveiling of a time capsule buried following the dedication of the original playground more than 25 years ago did not happen Sunday. Workers who dug up the capsule in preparation for the event found that moisture had seeped into the container, damaging some of the artifacts inside.

Many of the items, having been laid out to dry, were on display inside the V.R. Lee building for the public to examine. School breakfast and lunch menus sat alongside the more than 20 pages of volunteer sign-in sheets from the week of playground construction and unopened packs of Fleer sports cards.

The capsule also contained a previously unread letter written by Connie Small, who managed the project in 1993. Her grandchildren, Riley and Lauren Fisher, read from the letter and the speech given by Small at the dedication of Penny Playground. Small passed away in 2014, but her words still echoed at the conclusion of the ceremony.

“Penny Playground will be remembered as the time the whole community came together for one goal — to make our children’s dreams come true,” Small said in 1993. “We all feel a tug at our hearts and a sense of pride at what was accomplished.”