What I did on my summer vacation - part the two

And so… the intrepid travelers make their way over the highways and byways of British Columbia to the Burnaby Village Museum where they find, much to the delight of the Campbell of record, a village, and this...

And so here I iz making another post about something that fascinates me. In fact, let’s just call this…

The Carousel Take Three

You know, I’ve been thinking about my interest in carousels and carousel horses and I believe I have isolated the when and the where of it all, when the fascination first hit me. Now, to tell you about it we have to get permission from Mr. Peabody in order to use his ‘Way Back Machine’ and go back a few decades in time. I’m thinking we’d have to go back possibly to the middle to late 1960’s at a guess.

I recall, when I was a yute back in Niagara Falls, standing on a sidewalk located on a street that was once quite infamous in its day. Its name was, and still is, Erie Avenue. This used to be, again an age gone by, where women of negotiable affection plied their trade. But that was years ago and business and custom had moved away from Erie Avenue to other locales; the street and the buildings that I remember as that youth looked grubby and were in disrepair.

I remember looking in the dirty front window of an old rundown storefront, what you might call an antique store if you were feeling generous, past the corpses of flies, and seeing amidst the rather squalid items inside (I sort of recall the huge metal ‘harp’ out of a piano lying on its’ side) a beat up wooden carousel horse. I thought it was, in the jargon of the day, very cool.

In my mind that store was always closed, so I never had the opportunity to go in or to find out how much the horse was (and probably not that I could afford to buy it even then), or from whence it came. Still, the memory lingers.

Ah, my first horsey love.

The day after I posted the story I came across this shot of the building in question shot around 2005

My second infusion, if memory is serving this up correctly, occurred in Springbank Park in London, Ontario. I was a rock’n’roll musician back then (we’re talking the mid 70’s now) and I was this tall skinny bass player with long permed hair and a beard. I was also into photography, as they say, and had photographed (and even attempted a painting of) the horses on the carousel that is located in the park. The painting, I admit, was not a very good one and has fortunately been lost to the ages. I still have many of the images I shot back then, including a few of the horses and carousel, but these have not been digitized and were shot mostly on slide film (which is beginning to fade now). It was back then that I really looked at the expressions on the horses’ faces for the first time.

I’ve written at some length on this topic in an earlier blog entry so I won’t redo the rant here.

So since then I’ve been a photographer of carousels when I could find them in my wanderings. These ones from Burnaby are a beautiful example of the woodcarver’s art.

As it turns out, I seem to have turned another corner or added another dimension to my interest in carousels and their horses. I’ve done more than just photograph; I’ve actually researched this carousel in particular and found out a bunch of interesting information about it.

I found out the who, the when, and the where of its manufacture.

The carousel was built in 1912 at Leavenworth, Kansas (yes, also home of the federal prison and the fort of the same name) by Charles Wallace Parker who owned the C. W. Parker Company. This was the 119th carousel made by that company and it was sold initially in 1913 for $5,886.00. Its speed on the outermost track is a rocketing 7 ½ mph (and about 5 mph on the inside track).

Hell, I’ve even found out the names the horses were given during the latest round of restoration work that was started in the 1990’s (the horses were named by the patrons who paid for their restoration. Their names appear in the article that is cited below).

And if you’re interested in more on it’s history see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._W._Parker_Carousel

The only problem with this list is that, at least online, there is no master diagram that shows you which horse is where on the carousel, or tells you where the numbering started in their tally. If I had this information I could tell you the names of all the horses I shot.

The exception to this is horse #37, known as "Old Paint". The horse was named for the "old paint" that was originally on the carousel before it was restored and is currently in a display case next to the carousel.

Another little tidbit of information is that Parker liked to use the term Carry-Us-All for the ride and some people mistakenly think that this is the origin of the word carousel. It isn’t. I believe that I also wrote about this at some length earlier in a previous posting.

Wow, what beauties these are. Go ahead, look at them all again. And there are more.

All photographs taken by me.