It was a dark day in Michael Boock’s house when Wildcat Park was shut down early last year.

Both his children attend Wilson Elementary School, where the sprawling wooden play structure had been delighting mid-valley kids since 1989. They also live in the area, which made Wildcat their neighborhood park.

Which explains why Boock turned out Thursday afternoon to help build a replacement playground.

“We come up here just about every weekend to play catch, and we’ll probably come to use the park again” when it’s finished, Boock said.

That sort of personal connection is typical of many of the hundreds of people who have given their time and energy to the construction project, slated to continue through Sunday.

“A lot of them are neighbors,” said volunteer coordinator Darlene Kolb. “A lot of them, their kids go to school here at Wilson.”

Not everyone fits that profile, however. The truth is there are all kinds of people pitching in to build Wildcat II, for all kinds of reasons.

Some of the current crop of volunteers were involved in building the original Wildcat Park in 1989, Kolb said. Others come as part of employee or church groups, and some are Oregon State University students.

“OSU has sent us a lot of large groups,” Kolb said. “They need community-service hours.”

And some people just have nothing better to do.

Scott Nelson, an unemployed molecular biologist from Albany, was using a power saw Thursday afternoon to cut plastic lumber spacers for one of the playground’s suspension bridges with assistance from Boock.

“It beats sitting around at home,” Nelson said. “I’ve got a couple of inquiries out, and I can’t make the clock tick any faster.”

Nearby, Goverdhan Reddy Eluganti was filling in holes around the footings of the new play structure. He and his wife, Vijaya Eluganti, are in town from Hyderabad, India, to visit their daughter, Aradhana Reddy Eluganti, a control systems engineer at CH2M Hill.

“We are here for summer vacation,” said Eluganti, a retired police administrative officer. “We were sitting there idle.”

Idleness is not something the couple has much experience with, said his wife, the vice principal of a high school in Hyderabad.

“In India also we do so many volunteer works,” she said.

The couple struck up an on-the-job acquaintance with Geetha P. Bangalore, a transplant from Bangalore, India, who runs Turf Tech Inc., a seed-testing lab in Albany, with her husband. She got involved with the project because of her daughter, a fifth-grader at Wilson who can’t wait to play at the new Wildcat Park.

“My daughter goes to school here,” Bangalore said. “She wants to come and help on the weekend, but she’s under 10.”

Workers have to be at least 10 to come onto the construction site, so Bangalore’s daughter will have to settle for playing with the children of other volunteers in the supervised day care area while their parents and older siblings put the new play structure together.

Karly Osborne of Albany was part of a substantial contingent of Home Depot employees who volunteered their time to help with the project Thursday.

“I like spending my time doing this kind of stuff,” she said, taking a break from beveling the end of a plastic 2-by-6 with a router in the “tot lot” section of the new park.

As a captain of volunteers for the Albany Home Depot, Osborne was doing her bit to help the company connect with the community it serves. But she also had some other motives for signing up for this particular project.

“I used to come here as a kid, before it got torn down,” she confessed. “My parents used to bring us over here (from Albany), and I bring my kids here.”

The Wildcat Park project has been averaging about 300 volunteers a day since it started on Tuesday, but organizers say they need lots more help to meet their Sunday completion deadline.

Shifts start at 8 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. each day. No particular skills are needed — just a desire to help.

If you’d like to participate, you can register online at www. newwildcatpark.org or just show up at 2710 N.W. Satinwood St.

Thursday numbers

• Volunteers: 425

• Volunteer hours worked: 1,515

• Funds still needed: 11,700

• Bottles of water consumed: 52 cases

• Cookies eaten: 700

• Most urgent needs: Routers, whellbarrows, retractable utility knives, impact wrenches/drivers, food donations, more volunteers

• How to help: Go to www.newwildcatpark.org

Wildcat Park

Wildcat Park was built by volunteers in 1989 at Wilson Elementary School, where the elaborate wooden structure did double duty as a playground for the school and the community. Last year it was dismantled for safety reasons.

The Corvallis Gazette-Times is chronicling this communitywide effort in the newspaper and on the Internet. Go to www.gazettetimes.com for daily stories, photos, construction updates and Webcam images from the project site.