What happened to the Playmobile?

  In the summer of 1954, the Junior Chamber of Commerce looked into buying a portable playground for the city. They discovered Detroit had purchased one for $30,000. That was too much for their budget, so they set out to create one.

An Around the Town item on Aug. 1, 1954, described its construction: 

WE'VE COME ACROSS a few statistics on construction of the city's new Playmobile that you might be interested in. Members of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, which constructed the mobile playground and donated it to the city, put in 302 hours of work on the project-in addition to the Iowa Electric Welding Company's work under the direction of Henry Malek. It took 20 quarts of paint to cover it. Materials that went into it included 222 feet of channel iron and angle iron, 110 square feet of 12 gauge sheet steel, 80 feet of two and a half inch pipe, 320 square feet of marine plywood and 184 lineal feet of two-by-fours. It all adds up to a unique and useful addition to the city's recreational facilities.

   The Playmobile was used in the  Recreation Department's summer playground program into the mid-1970s.