By SCOTT HADLY

NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER

Arriving on a wing and prayer Wednesday, the co-founder of a high-flying, high-tech company dropped into Las Positas Friendship Park rigged to a parasail to announce he was giving $1.5 million to help run the popular park.

In signature style, Virgil Elings, co-founder of Digital Instruments of Goleta, landed his parasail onto a soccer pitch in the park as members of Las Positas Park Foundation and local media watched. "I hope this will ease some of the financial burdens facing the park," Elings said after his safe touchdown. In honor of his donation, the 230-acre park, built 20 years ago upon an old city landfill, will be renamed "Elings Park."

Elings, a former UCSB science professor whose company makes high-powered microscopes, said his attachment to the park dates to when he and his son flew model planes on the land in the 1960s. The idea for the donation only came up after he took up parasailing a few months ago, Elings said." It was all rather serendipitous," said Elings, surrounded by smiling park foundation members. "I've never given a gift like this before ... I just sort of decided to do it."

Foundation members were a little overwhelmed by the gift, calling Elings "an angel from above."

Fred Clough, a local land-use attorney and foundation president, said that even with Elings' donation and other large contributions the park has received in the last two months, the foundation still needs to raise additional money.

It likely will cost another $1 million to build a new soccer field. And constructing a better road up to the west side of the property where hang gliders launch also will be expensive, Clough said.

Still, he counted the foundation lucky to be the recipient of so much good will."This will mean we can live other than hand-to-mouth," Clough said. Elings was only recently allowed to sell some of the stock he received as part of the sale of his company in June, he said. Digital Instruments was bought by Veeco Instruments for $165 million.

The gift - combined with $650,000 in donations from the Alice Tweed Tuohy Foundation, the Battistone Foundation and an anonymous donor - will become part of a $2.2 million endowment for the park. Interest earned from the endowment will amount to about $100,000 a year. The money will help cover the park's $350,000 yearly operating budget.

The gifts make up an unprecedented windfall for the park, which has softball and soccer fields, an amphitheater, picnic grounds, a BMX track and a large expanse of open space that people use for hiking and hang gliding. In the last three months, park fund-raisers have amassed $2.8 million in donations.

Just before Christmas the foundation received a $500,000 check from the B.

P. Moser Trust to help make the final $1 million balloon payment for a 136-acre portion of the park."Let me put this in perspective," said the foundation's fund-raising consultant, David Kaplan. "It took us three years to raise $1.5 million. We've raised $2.8 million in the last three months."

Jerry Harwin, the man who was instrumental in first building the park, said all the years of trying to raise money, construct new fields and improve the park have taught him to be ever optimistic."You never know where or when it's going to happen, but it always seems somebody comes out of the woodwork to help," he said. "It's great."