The Field of Friendship : San Fernando: Rival gang members join with other community volunteers, hauling wood and hammering together a new children's playground at Las Palmas Park.

By MICHAEL ARKUSH

March 28, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Giovanni Herrera passed his childhood at San Fernando’s Las Palmas Park, waiting for darkness to force him home.

“I used to climb all over this ladder,” Herrera, 19, recalled last week. “I played here all the time. I grew up here.”

He eventually moved on, into adolescence, even gangs. But when Herrera found out that San Fernando would build a new, modern playground at his old neighborhood hangout near the outskirts of town, he was immediately transported back.

“My aunt called to tell me about it,” Herrera said, “and I told her, ‘I got to be there to help out.’ This is my park. This is my town.”

Herrera joined dozens of other volunteers to construct a new playground at the park. The workers dug holes, sawed wood, and planted poles to assemble a multilevel structure with interconnecting tunnels, ramps, bridges, ladders and overhead rings.

But this playground isn’t about plywood; it’s about people. Together, old and young, working-class and middle-class, Anglo and Latino, worked side by side to build more than an object for recreation. They started on a future.

“The people are feeling good about this,” said John Medrano, 35, an audio engineer consultant, who echoed the sentiment of many volunteers who hope that the playground can help change some people’s perception of the city as a drug-infested outpost for gangs. “We can put in any structure we want, and that won’t change it. It’s the people seeing that the community cares.”

The project’s been in the works for months. Originally, Frito-Lay showed interest in building a playground in a Latino community in East Los Angeles or Pacoima, but the project never was approved. Soon after, civic leaders and activists quickly lobbied the corporation and the city of San Fernando to get the playground built on their turf.

“This is the place which had the most people with the least money,” said Linda Jauron, 43, a member of the San Fernando Parks and Recreation Commission. She said the community hadn’t upgraded its playground in decades. “There were swings, and those horses stuck in the ground, but they weren’t adequate. They were boring, and they were old.”

Soon a $45,000 fund-raising campaign was started and quickly secured $15,000 from Frito-Lay and $5,000 from Vons. The effort continues; organizers say they still need about $10,000.

The project remains largely a grass-roots effort. The majority of volunteers are regular folks looking forward to a better tomorrow in their town.

Residents building the playground “might want to protect it more because they were part of building it,” said volunteer Lorraine Perez, 20, just finishing her term as Miss San Fernando.

Even members from rival gangs took part. At first, gang members were a little reluctant, not certain how it would play before their friends.

“I saw a lot of peer pressure,” said Medrano. “One guy volunteered and got taunted by his friends. But after a while, they all started to help out, and they’re not afraid to do cleanup.”

Herrera’s brother, Eric, 18, belongs to a local gang, Shakin Cat Midgets. A week ago, he and about a dozen members of his group hauled wood. They wanted to prove something to the community.

“We’re not just in a gang,” Eric Herrera said. “We’re human too. We want to show the cops that we’re not here just to cause problems. We’re good people.”

Added P. Wee Nunez, 19: “I used to write graffiti all over the park and I realized that it was no good. Now I want to do something good for the park instead of destroying it. We want to prove that an Hispanic environment can be just as good as a white environment, that San Fernando can be just as good as Canoga Park.”

As the gang members Shakin Cat Midgets worked, their rival gang was also helping with the project. The different groups worked at opposite corners of the playground, and members didn’t speak to each other.

The playground brought a truce.

“If we’re going to hate each other here,” said Eric Herrera, “we’re not going to accomplish anything. It’s better that we’re not in each other’s way. Maybe later, because of the work here, we won’t have any problems, but who knows? Once this is over, we could go back to the same war.”

John Garcia, 12, isn’t contemplating the resumption of any hostilities. He can only anticipate a future of fun in the park on Huntington Street that he was helping to build.

“We’ll spend a lot more time here,” John said. “I can’t wait for it to be ready. I’m going to bring my sister and my mom to show them what I did.”

Medrano shares the same pride. He never expected to leave any major imprint in San Fernando.

“We never thought it would be our generation,” Medrano said. “We thought we’d grow up, do our jobs, and move on. We have our own businesses and work in the Valley. You always hear about guys going back to help the community, and very few do it. Now we’re doing it.”

As a youngster, Medrano recalled, his uncle would constantly mention the fact that he helped build a bridge in Sepulveda in the early 1930s.

“Whenever we drove past it,” Medrano said, “he would tell us about when he built it. And we’d say, ‘Sure, Uncle, right.’ But now I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren that I helped to build this playground. . . . We built it ourselves.”

At first, when work began March 20, wood they desperately needed hadn’t arrived and organizers worried that the rain would keep volunteers away. Only a few showed up in the morning, but the weather stayed clear, and by afternoon, dozens of volunteers had arrived.

Two independent contractors were hired to organize the volunteers. They gave workers small, manageable chores without explaining too much. “If you give them the big picture, they can get lost,” said Ed Franquemont, a contractor. By the second day, portable lights had been installed because volunteers didn’t want to stop working when darkness fell.

Jauron said over the next few months she will be busy collecting the remaining funds for the playground, even holding “a spaghetti dinner at my house if people will come.”

She said the playground, which was completed over the weekend, should create a whole new series of memories for future generations. Already, youngsters are getting a head start.

“They built it so nice,” said Frankie Garcia, 8, who had just finished making his way through one of the tunnels. “I love the bridges.”