Historic carousel rides again
Donna Duffy can’t recall her favourite horse, but she’s sure she had one.
“I have my favourites,” she said. “I remember all of them ... but of course when I see it, it’s so exotic.”
She spent many warm summer days in the saddles of the 68 horses, giraffes, camels, lions and other wooden animals, among the menagerie under the pavilion that housed the Lakeside Park Carousel.
“To call it a ride really minimizes the experience,” said Duffy — one of former carousel owner Sydney Brookson’s 11 grandchildren.
Riding the carousel, she added, “was an opportunity to dig deep into our imaginations, it was entering a different world.”
Duffy recalled pretending to be riders in a horse race while sitting high on the backs of her brightly painted steed, “other times we were pet owners, preening and pawing our prized horse.”
“We never tired putting our hands in the mouth of the lion, pretending we were being attacked,” she said Saturday morning, as the Friends of the Carousel officially opened the carousel for the season.
Duffy described the “almost unexplainable allure of the ride on the merry-go-round, and the nickel that was a barrier to riding it.”
“On quieter days, this led us to the brave act of actually pestering the ride attendant to allow us to ride for free — even brazenly reminding him that our grandfather owned this park,” she said.
But the ride attendant refused, warned against allow even the grandkids to climb aboard without a five-cent ticket.
Duffy recalled bursting into her grandfather’s office and pleading to be allowed to ride the carousel. After awhile, she said her grandfather usually relented and “with a twinkly in his eye” offered his grandchildren each a nickel.
In 1970, Duffy’s grandfather sold the carousel to Dorothy Crabtree for $20,000 in community donations. And soon after, Crabtree, a local antiques dealer, donated the antique carousel to the city, with the conditions that it remain in the city and that ticket prices must never be raised above five cents.
Over the many years — including a fire and two floods — the historic carousel was showing its age.
Barry Casment, who as a child pitched in to help Crabtree buy the carousel, felt he could help again.
“In 1998, I read an article in the St. Catharines Standard — just a scathing report of how bad the condition of the carousel was,” he said.
Casment teamed up with other members of the woodcarvers association, and offered their services to the Friends of the Carousel. After a decade of work, all 68 animals were restored to pristine condition. And Friends of the Carousel continue to maintain “the absolute treasure that cannot be replaced.”
The organization’s secretary Katherine Nelson-Riley said as many as 300,000 people per season who ride the carousel.
“That’s an awful lot of bums that ride in the seats and that’s why we have an awful lot of strict rules, such as no wet bathing suits,” she said. “And one of the hardest things on the carousel are the grommets on the back of your jeans. You wouldn’t think about that would you, but it’s true.”
The carousel horses are also damaged when people use a leg as a foothold as they climb into the seats, “or they grab an ear to try to hoist themselves up. Well, we’re fixing that leg and those ears come off-season.”
Now, 120 years after workers at the Charles Looff Company first created the carousel — and decades after Donna Duffy was begging her grandfather for a ride — a new generation of children are picking out their favourite carousel horses.
“It’s just so great that the friends of the carousel have had the vision to revitalize it this way,” said Duffy, who now lives in Hamilton.