When I went to put the Rocketship Park link into yesterday's entry, I remembered that I haven't told the Rocketship Park story in this space; it was over on the median strip. Due to livejournallers plagiarizing some of the better articles (not mine), the writing archives -- the original main point of the site -- are no longer linked from the medianstrip table of contents. But stories, you cannot kill them.

Original dateline: 2000 May 8 (before the official park & rec webpage existed).

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On the other side of the fence from the grassy backfield of my elementary school, there lived a small park. One edge of it was the very edge of the hilltop, and from there one could see wonderful distances northward across the Los Angeles basin, as far as Malibu and the mountains on (rare) clear days. The name on the sign was Los Arboles Park, but everyone called it Rocketship Park.

The rocket stood four levels tall, with a short space underneath between the fins, where the first ladder was fixed to the central support pillar. The flat bars enclosing the round metal floors ran from orange fins to orange nosecone. Ladders led up and up, past the slide down-and-out from the second floor, to the tall cone-roofed cockpit at the top housing the steering wheel and two gearshift levers, none of which were any less powerful for being fixed in position. At the top, you got the full force of the nearly constant sea breeze, and you could make the rocket sway a bit if a few of you worked together.

I loved the rocket dearly. I could climb to the top and sit happily watching the park, the neighborhood, the beach, and the distance while other kids climbed up, wrestled the immovable gearshifts with convincing vocals, looked around, caused a few sways, and climbed back down. Even when I was down below the hill, it was comforting to look up and see the rocket's upper half silhouetted against the sky. I visited the park less often as I got older, but the rocket was always there, part of my home.

I got complacent, and left the area for college. Behind my back, the city decided that all Torrance parks and elementary schools needed shiny new primary-colored safety-conscious equipment. Out with the double-sided-wide-slide-thing. Out with the monkey bars shaped like a flying saucer. Out with the monkey bars shaped like a submarine. Out with the rocket.

Then (as I read afterward in local newspaper clippings) something wonderful happened. I wasn't the only one who loved the rocket. The people rose up, and their voices were heard crying, "SAVE THE ROCKETSHIP!" But the safety, protested the surprised city, it's old equipment, it's worn out. "SAVE THE ROCKETSHIP!" cried the people. And lo, the city knew a determined mob of PTA parents backed by tearful children when it saw one, and behold, the rocketship was saved!

Many things around the neighborhood have changed since I was a first grader. The fields around the airport are mostly full of shopping centers. The Shell station where I used to watch the full serve attendants attend our faux-woody station wagon: station, full serve, and wagon are long gone. The site of the beloved Begonia Farm nursery is soon to become a group of houses called "Begonia Village." But the renovated rocketship today stands tall on its fins as in times past, though the fins and cap are blue now, and the hood of the slide is red. It stands in a slightly different spot than before, but still near the top of the slope, and I can still see it from my house. One fin now sports a plaque, identifying the rocket as a landmark installed in 1960, restored in 1992 - Torrance Historical Society.

And the sign now reads 'Los Arboles "Rocketship" Park'.

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