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The Carousel Of Happiness: History
 
Charles I. D. Looff

 

Charles I.D. Looff was one of the great carousel makers of the 19th and 20th century. He had arrived in New York City from Denmark in 1870 at the age of 18, a skilled woodcarver, and by 1876 had manufactured the first carousel for New York’s Coney Island. During his lifetime he produced carousels for parks all across the nation. In 1910, he delivered one to Saltair Park, just outside Salt Lake City, Utah.

 

During its 49 years of operation, the Saltair carousel survived fires and wind storms. Once, it was the only attraction to survive a devastating park fire unharmed.After a wind storm, during which the roller coaster was blown over onto the carousel, it was rebuilt with 2 rows of animals from the original 4 rows.

In 1959, the park was declared bankrupt and Utah’s governor gave the Looff carousel to the Utah State Training School in American Fork, not far away. Nearby striking steelworkers and company management officers came together to set up the carousel on the grounds of the state school. Residents enjoyed it for another 27 years. In 1976, school residents restored the animals under supervision.

Saltair Park, Utah
State School story

For the first few decades of the 1900’s, during the golden age of carousels in America, there were between 5,000 to 6,000 hand-carved wooden merry-go-rounds. Beginning in the 1970’s and continuing to the present, many carousels were sold to buyers who would then auction off the animals separately to collectors. Currently, there is a small revival of the carousel art, with many of the old carousel frames being restored and then populated with newly-carved wooden animals. This is what has been done to create the Carousel of Happiness. There are now only a few hundred hand-carved, wooden carousels left in the United States.
In 1986, when the Utah State School carousel was sold to a buyer who only wanted the wooden animals to re-sell, Scott Harrison, a Nederland, Colorado resident, learned that the empty frame was still standing and available. With the help of a friend, he took it apart and trucked it to Nederland.

 

Scott Harrison had come upon his desire to construct a carousel years earlier, as a young Marine serving his first and last tour of duty in Vietnam. His sister had sent him a music box that he got into the habit of listening to when there was idle time for it. It played a bit of a Chopin composition often called 'Tristes' because it is as sad as it is beautiful. Decades later the sound of it could still fill him with sorrow, yet it brought to his imagination the image of a carousel in a mountain meadow.
Scott as a Marine

Some years after he was well-away from the experience of that war he began to carve the animals that would populate the carousel he had not yet found. A few carvings later, the Looff carousel came his way.

During the next 22 years, again with the help of friends, Scott restored the carousel frame and carved a complete menagerie of 38 wooden animals to populate the machine.

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The original electric motor and controller will be available to turn the carousel although we are also planning to use a modern, more efficient motor. All the original bearings, gears, and metal work have been restored or rebuilt for continued use. A few pieces have been replaced because of safety concerns.

A new floor has been built using Southern Yellow Pine, a material that was used in many original carousel floors. The wood we have used was cut down in 1890 and used as cribbing for whiskey barrels for a Seagrams plant in Peoria, Illinois. When that plant was taken down in the 1990’s, this wood was resold and used as floor planks for the Carousel of Happiness.

Rounding Boards, decorative panels which surround the top of the carousel, were missing by the time the carousel was taken apart in 1986, so rounding board paintings from another carousel have been restored and used with a series of sculptures of swans, frogs and girls which will appear to change into each other when the carousel is turning.

The Carousel of Happiness is the result of new and old creations, the spirit of the century-old carousel combined with new carvings, to encourage a new set of smiles and giggles. The floorboards, even older than the carousel frame itself, have their own story and now, a second life providing a platform for the wooden menagerie. The history of this machine continues . .

 

 

The first photo, of Charles I.D. Looff, is from family archives. The second and third are from the Utah State Historical Society. All others provided by Scott Harrison.

 

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