Happy Saturday. We thought that for today's Saturday Classic we would choose a topic that's on the lighter side, and this one mostly is a couple of moments, not as like, but mostly on the lighter side. It is our history of Carousels, which originally came out March. And we usually snip out the listener mail segment of our Saturday Classics since they're usually referencing some other long ago episode that people may not have heard recently and it could just be a little jarring. But in this case, the listener mail inspired the episode, so stay tuned for it at the end, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today we're doing another listener request hooray, and it's a really delightful one. But I'm actually going to save the information about the listener email that requested it for the end of the episode. It'll be our listener mail segment because it adds a nice coda to the whole story. Uh So, Tracy, I am sure you remember writing a carousel or Merry go around as a child, maybe even as an adult. It is, or at least was a pretty common part of childhood, but carousels have kind of become a less and less of an of the moment kind of part of childhood, even though there are still a number around and people do still enjoy them, but they are in some ways part of history, and they have their own really interesting history there by no means gone, and we're going to talk about some of the modern developments in them at the end, but their prevalence in the entertainment landscape is not what it once was. They used to be much more of like an event item and centerpiece to amusement parks, and so we're actually going to talk about a few things in this episode. We're going to talk first about general carousel history, and then we're gonna talk briefly about a couple of key innovators in carousels, and then at the very end there's kind of a neat story that we're going to talk about about one particular carousel that has its own history that's related to the civil rights movement. So it sounds like a lot, but we're doing, you know, they're kind of the brief versions of any of those stories. So this first chuncolate that we're talking about is consistently told anytime you look at a history of carousels, But in terms of hard substantiation, it's difficult to come by. It's almost one of those things that it could be all completely true, but it could also be one of those things that's been repeated so much that people accepted as history. Uh. But like I said, we don't have like so much hard proof on this one. So yes, and it's so delightful that it would be such a shame not to talk about it. So the possible, the possibly apocryphal story of carousels actually starts back in the twelfth century with a game played by Turkish and Arabian horsemen. And to play this game, the riders would toss a clay ball containing perfume back and forth while they were on horseback, and if a player didn't successfully catch the ball, it would break and it would cover him in the scent of failure. Yeah, he would smell good, presumably it was a perfume, but everyone would know that he had lost. So it's it's kind of an awkward consolation prize to smell lovely. But uh, that being kind of the identifier that you were not as skilled as your challengers. Italian and Spanish crusaders are said to have witnessed this game taking place, and that they eventually brought it back to Europe and there it took on the name Catrocella or Gero slo uh, depending on which language you're speaking, and that translated at that time to little War. Later on, the French adopted this game and they expanded their play to include multiple equestrian challenges. These developed into competitions called carousels, and participants needed to practice for their matches, so a training mechanism was developed that had wooden horses mounted on arms that were suspended from big poles or chains, and they rotated around a central central point. There wasn't really a floor on these carousels. Yeah, it's really um. You know, they're all kind of dangling from above, So not quite the way you would think of a Carouselar and Merry go around today, but you know, again dangling. There are other um rides that have have become popular that are similar where you spin ours, but I'm like, this is it's like the swings at the carnival, where you sit in the swing and it turns and you swing out. Yes, but for a long time, that's how carousels worked, so uh. Some versions of these training carousels were pulled by horses or mules, others were powered by humans. There would often be a hand crank or a pull rope that created the movement, and the horsemen would participate in various games while they were riding these training steeds. And I'm being very generous because apparently they were very rudimentary quote horses. Uh. And one of the games that they would play included trying to spear a ring with a jousting lance. So if you have ever been on a carousel with a ring for riders to grab as they pass under or buy it, uh, this is a callback allegedly to this game, although those have become less and less popular. This is also where that expression grabbed the brass ring comes from, as the brass ring to be the most prized of the rings on a carousel game like this. More often you would see iron rings and then there would be an occasional brass ring. So that association of grabbing the brass ring with you know, going after the big prize or going after something is comes all from this. So watching sports has been a pastime for as long as there have been sports, and so spectators watched the horsemen practice, and they're said to have grown interested in trying it out for themselves. So where there's the demand, there are usually people who are ready to fill it for a price. And by the late seventeen hundreds carousels were being made not for sports training but for entertainment, and for the next hundred years or so, these simple man and mule power divertisements because they worked pretty much exactly the same way as the training ones, they were just gussied up in a more fun way. Uh, we're appearing at European festivals and fairs pretty consistently. But because they were powered either by man or animal, they had to stay pretty much on the small side. Victorian circus entrepreneur Lord George Sanger described the early hand cranked carousels his father once made in his book Seventy Years a Showman. These rudimentary, early merrygarounds had horses that weren't realistic, but they were colorful. The horses manes and tails are made using rabbit fur, and because these still required a living creature, to power them. Kids were generally employed to push carousels like singers to get these mechanisms to spin. So these were usually the kids that could not afford to pay for a ride themselves, so they would push for the day and then at the end of the day they would be paid with free rides. There are some sort of dicey tails, mostly apocryphal, but I'm sure some of this happened of sort of near slave labor at some fairs where kids weren't really treated all that well. Uh, But for the most part it seems to have been like a pay for play situation. You come and do this work, and then at the end of the day you get rewarded with a ride on the carousel. And some mechanisms did not involve children, and they were turned by horses or, more often at fairs, ponies. The velocipede was an interesting variation on this idea. Bicycles mounted around the outside edge of the carousel would generate the circular motion. Those things look so fun to me now. I'm reminded for a moment of a ride at the Georgia Renaissance Festival where you sit in it and it's mounted from a pole. In the center and the people push it to turn it all the way up the pole and it rises up as the thing that's suspending it gets after on the pole and then they let go and you spin on the way down. Oh I don't I'm having trouble recalling that one. But I maybe never paid attention to the rides at the Renaisance Festival. I was probably too busy eating. Uh. In eighteen sixty one, there was a major leap forward when steam entered the picture as a way to power carousels without direct man or animal power. On New Year's Day, Thomas Bradshaw debuted his steam driven carousel in Bolton, England, and it contained a London built boiler unit, an engine, and horses that have been made by Bradshaw himself, and he patented his carousel design in eighteen sixty three. A similar carousel, which may actually have been the same one from the eighteen sixty one Bolton debut, was operating at a fair in Halifax in eighteen sixty three, and while carousel technology was moving forward, it wasn't really met with universal enthusiasm at the outset. Yeah. A journalist who was describing this installation in Halifax described the mechanism as mammoth and overpowered, and he wondered how riders were not shot off their mounts like cannon balls. Uh. Local residents also fretted over the possibility that the whole thing would explode explode from the pressure of the boiler unit, and there were some claims and accusations made that they were endangering children by having this ride available. However, there were not any explosions, and people did continue to be interested in carousels, and the next couple of years several more of them appeared around Britain. There's even a newspaper report of a stay a steam driven velocipede at King's lynmart in eighteen sixty six, although the records of the mechanism are incomplete, and I'm a little like, how do you combine the bicycles and the steam? Yeah, I don't know, but it sounded so fascinating to me. Um. And then once carousels crossed the Atlantic to the US, they really underwent a huge transformation and they became bigger and flashier and more color full, and the horses became far more intricate and detailed. Uh. There it was a little bit of a shift to sort of the art of it in many ways. Because the late eighteen hundred saw major advancements and technology and industry, it wasn't long before the carousel saw them too. The so called Golden Age of carousel's started around eighteen eighty and this was when merry grounds integrated flooring platforms and up and down movement of the animals as they circled the central mechanism. Other variations were tried, including coiled springs to add bounce, and even animals mounted on undulating tracks to create an up and down movement. The carousel at the Little Rock, Arkansas Zoo, which is called Over the Jumps, still uses an undulating track and it's been fully refurbished. If you ever want to ride one, yeah, so that one instead of like the pole sort of moving up and down, it just follows this nice wave pattern track, so you just go up and down. It's a little more of a rolling hill effect. It's quite gentle, and as well as all of the technical advancements, there were some pretty amazing artistic strides going on. So in the US, carousels UH did not restrict themselves to featuring horses alone, so soon unicorns lions, guerrillas, dolphins, giraffes, and a host of other animals made appearances as mounts on carousels. For five decades, carousels stood as the main attraction affairs and amusement parks throughout the United States, and people marveled at their beauty and their craftsmanship. Carousel rides were a much consumed entertainment diversion for adults as well as kids, and several different styles developed in the carousel world in the US. UH. The Coney Island style it's sometimes called, is sort of a show ear style. The horses are painted in really bright colors, and they often have jewels attached and metallic leaf and the rest of the unit, like the the central part in the ceilings often feature multitudes of light catching mirror. And then the Philadelphia style UH is a little bit more realistic in the way its animals are painted and created and carved, and it's associated usually with really exquisite craftsmanship. The county fair style is populated with much simpler designs. UH. These merrygo rounds are usually intended to move from place to place like county fairs do, so they are by necessity a lot less complex and they don't have as much decoration. And then just as the culture of carousels had really embedded itself in the Americana landscape, the Great Depression happened. Like a lot of industries, carousel production was hit really hard, and a lot of companies significantly reduced their output or closed up shop altogether. The Golden Age of carousels had ended. And it's estimated that more than four thousand carousels were made in the United States during the Golden Age. Fewer than a hundred and fifty of these are still intact. Uh And we'll talk a little bit about some restoration efforts later on. But next we're going to talk about a couple of important men in carousel history. There's certainly more than two, but in the interests of time, we had to kind of pick two that are important. But before we talk about them, let's pause for a quick sponsor break. One of the big names in carousel's is Gustave Denzel, and he was originally from Germany and he immigrated to the US in the mid eighteen hundreds, and as a boy, Denzel had traveled throughout Germany with his family in the summers, helping them run their carousel ride. In the eighteen sixties, Gustave's father shipped the young man, his brothers, and a carousel to America on a steamer. When they got there, they brought Philadelphia one of the first carousels in the United States and they set up shop there. Yeah, so that's uh, you know, happening at the same time that things like the steam power are coming into being. It's a little bit after that, uh uh you know. So while England is having this little boom of of carousels, it is shipping across the Atlantic at the same time, and there it was certainly happening in other parts of Europe as well. The Denzel family built this reputation of incredible craftsmanship and they set the tone of realism that came to be associated with the Philadelphia style of carousels. And what's really interesting is that their style stayed really consistent throughout the years, even with changes in leadership to the company. Gustave died in nineteen o nine, at which point his son's William and Edward, took over the family business. In nineteen twenty, Edward moved to California to run a West Coast carousel business and Williams stayed in Philadelphia, and after almost twenty years helming the Denzel Carousel Company, William died in seven and the company folded soon thereafter, and Edward decided to remain in California. He eventually became mayor of Beverly Hills. Eventually, Edward's son, who was also named William, restarted the family business, and his son, William Denzel the third still continues this five generation tradition of elegance, both crafting new pieces and restoring older hair cells. Yeah, one of the things that you'll find if you start looking around online is that a lot of these companies have had sort of a resurgence, and often it's it's family members that have reopened them or have just kind of bolstered them when they were struggling and are now running them again, which is kind of a lovely, sort of heartwarming part of it. Um. The other man that we're going to talk about today is Charles I. D. Loof, and, like Denzel, Luf was originally from Europe. He was born in Denmark in eighteen fifty two, and he moved to the US in eighteen seventy at the age of eighteen and at first, he started as a furniture carver. His carousel carving actually started as a hobby. It was something he did with his furniture making skills in his off hours, but it soon sort of started to become a passion, and just five years after arriving in New York, he opened his first Coney Island carousel for business. Luke saw the potential of an amusement destination and he was instrumental in developing Coney Island as a permanent attraction. Yeah. He also is often credited with developing or being a major contributor to the Coney Island style of carousel horses. And five years after he opened his carousel and Coney Island, he opened a carousel factory in Brooklyn and he stayed in that location from eighteen eighty until sometime in late nineteen o four or early nineteen o five, and at that point he moved the business to Riverside, Rhode Island. In nineteen ten, he moved again, but this time much further. He went across the country to California, and there he was instrumental in the development of Venice Beach and the Santa Monica Piers amusement attractions. Unfortunately, Luf's work building up the role of amusement parks in America turned out to be part of the carousel's downfall. Working with his son Arthur Charles Luf and the Wholesome Entertainment News he helped build created this perfect platform for the rise in popularity of a different attraction, the roller coaster. And as roller coasters became more and more common, they already existed before this, but they really started to get a groundhold in terms of popularity in the amusement industry, in large part due to Luf creating these sort of parks where people would go uh. They started drawing more and more crowds and interesting carousels started to wane because this was a much more exciting and thrilling ride uh. And to try to regain some market share, the marketing for carousels sort of shifted to be like more about kids and children's entertainment, Whereas, as we mentioned prior to that, they were touted as diversions for children and adults equally. But between the newer and more thrilling options and the onset of the Great Depression, there just wasn't anyway for merry grounds to keep their previous status, and when Luke died in all management of their California Here ventures went to his son, and Arthur eventually sold off the portion of the Peer that the family owned, although he continued to operate attractions there for several years. But eventually the Loof's contracts they're all expired and their mini empire was dismantled. Uh The carousel, which had originally been part of Loose Santa Monica amusement center called the Hippodrome, was sold off in parts to collectors. The Hippodrome incidentally, was actually saved from demolition in the nineteen seventies when Robert Redford and Paul Newman, as well as other local activists saved it, and it still stands today. It's been renovated a few times and it has a different carousel in it. So before we delve into one carousel's significance in civil rights history, let's have a quick word from a sponsor that sounds super duper. So there's one particular carousel that's connected to the history of the US civil rights movement. Yeah, it's not like it had a huge, big impact, but it's kind of just a really beautiful story um and it's a carousel that still exists today. So as the March on Washington was taking place in August nineteen sixty three, a smaller but still important event was taking place forty miles north of the city, and on that day, a white, solely amusement park called gwyn Oak allowed black children in for the first time. Sharon Langley, he was only eleven months old at the time and was held in place on the saddle by her father, was the first African American child to ride the carousel at the park, along with white children. And unfortunately, just a few years after the amusement park desegregated, it actually closed for good, and after a few more years, the carousel that had stood at Gwynn Park was purchased by the Smithsonian that was in and at that point it was moved to the National Mall. Seven years after it's moved to the mall, standing Donna Hunter purchased the carousel uh and they have since barrated it there on the mall. But during all that time, no one knew of this kind of interesting little piece of history attached to it. Amy Nathan and author researching civil rights history, finally put all the pieces together in two thousand eleven and notified the hunters of their merriagor rounds historical significance. It became part of Nathan's book Round and Round Together, Taking Your Ride into Civil Rights History, and the Nathan's have repainted the horse that Langley rode that day to commemorate the Civil rights movement. The National Park Service has also included the carousel in educational programming about civil rights. Yeah. I just love that there's this wonderful piece of like children's history that's also a part of the civil rights movement. There's a really sweet picture of Langley writing it with her dad holding her when she's eleven months old, and then as an adult, once they figured out this little piece of history, she went back and wrote it again and it's just so heartwarming. Uh So, while carousels did not vanish completely with a great depression, they certainly experience is to drop in terms of their presence and their popularity. And once the economy picked back up, so did production to some degree. But the hand carved carousel horses that had been sort of this amazing art that was developing were replaced by fiberglass and aluminum versions. No more steam powered carousels were made, they had shifted over to electric. Yeah, definitely. When I was a kid, the thing that we were riding into County Fair was a fiber last carousel run on electricity, and I was like, why are you making meatus? But now as an adult, when I'm somewhere and I see some like beautifully restored, handmade wooden carousel, I think it's very lovely. Yeah, there are still some of those hand carved beauties remaining, and the restoration projects have been undertaken to keep a lot of them around. Yeah, some of them are um mounted by you know, just private people that sometimes start collecting carousel horses and then decided they want to put carousels by together others who are handled by companies. But in the last four decades, interesting carousels and carousel horses as collectors items has really swelled, Like in the nineteen seventies, sort of this kickoff just happened where people started to become really into them again. And unfortunately, part of the problem with keeping carousels going is that in many cases it is more profitable to sell off the amazing horses than it is to try to keep a carousel running, they have to run at a profit. There are also some interesting innovations and modern carousels. Washington's National Zoo now has one that runs on solar power, and all of the animals that are represented there are endangered species, so it's in line with the Zoo's theme of conservation. Uh So, if you love carousels, this is our p s A. And you want to see them stick around again. They have to operate in a way that makes money and makes sense for them to keep going. So go ride one. Seriously, if you have a local carousel, go buy a ticket to ride, help keep it going, visit off, and bring your friends. That's what's going to keep this piece of history alive. And so now we're gonna tie some things that we've talked about together with the listener mail that Holly reference at the top of the episode. Uh she or we both actually got this email last year. So when we tell you that sometimes it takes a while, uh I would say almost always said almost always takes a while. Uh yeah, I mean I wanna. I know we always say it, but I do want to reassure people that even if we haven't gotten to your request yet, we may or may not, but we're trying to. So we're working through it. And this is one of those things that I love the second we got it, and then it just kind of got back Bernard by other things for a while. So and we also do read every single email that we get, although we are not nearly as good about answering no. Well, it's hard to keep up with as well as you know. Unfortunately, the podcast is not our only job here, so there's we're juggling some stuff. So I hope no one feels slighted if they don't get a sill reply. We try too as many as we can. But anyway, that's the story. So this listener mail is from our listener Ashley, and she says, hello, ladies. I love your podcast and I laugh at your love affairs with delicious food in historical clothing, both things I wish I knew more about. I have a happy topic for you since you asked for them. So recently my job I worked for the world's largest manufacturer of wooden carousels, the Carousel Works, incorporated in Mansfield, Ohio. This is site of the historic Ohio State Reformatory where they filled in the Shawshank Redemption. Our carousels are handbuilt, hand carved, and hand painted. We are one of the few companies in the world that still does this. And in addition to having a carousel in nearly every state in the Union, we have a carousel in Canada to in South Korea, and the only two carousels at sea on cruise ships with Royal Caribbeans Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas. We're putting up our fifty five new carousel later in our third in South Korea. Right now, we are restoring the historic Euclid Beach Park Rand carousel that was once located in Cleveland, Ohio, just one in a long line of restorations we've taken part in. It's also known as PTC Number nineteen. The Philadelphia Toboggan Company was one of the premier carousel makers in the States, and their name is tossed around with historic carvers such as Eleon, Herschel, Spielman, dentzel, Loof, and Parker. Many of the wood carvers were immigrants who came from Europe and found work in the States. Many of these carousels were richly decorated and painted. However, after the Great Depression, they almost all went away and were replaced with a luminium fiberglass. It was actually the Carousel Works that created the first new hand carved carousel in to have been built since the nineteen thirties, using an antique frame but all new figures, murals and gears. I grew up riding that carousel. This is a really cool part about her job. It's all cool, but she says, I myself am a painter at the Carousel Works, having painted figures and murals for almost three years now. You can actually see my paint jobs on a carousel near you at the Birmingham Sux. It's kind of near a day trip maybe. Um. We built that carousel in two thousand two and repainted the figures recently. In I painted the clouded leopard and the jaguar. That is the coolest thing actually, I actually cyberstocked her work and went looking for pictures of the clouded leopard and the jaguar at the Birmingham Zoo carousel and they're gorgeous. It's so beautiful. I am so thankful for this listener mail and the inspiration of it, because it's one of those topics that it is really beautiful part of history, and I always like supporting artists, and carousels are in many cases amazing works of art. So I also kind of want to return to the days where we played a game of riding horses and throwing perfume at each other. I would play that. Well, we can mount that as our own game. Can have this sort of horrible office game where we all smell like perfume. My thing is that, you know, I would want it to be good perfume, but that gets really expensive. We can just delete an oil. That's what we'll do. They go. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. We thought that for today's Saturday Classic we would choose a topic that's on the lighter side, and this one mostly is a couple of moments, not as like, but mostly on the lighter side. It is our history of Carousels, which originally came out March. And we usually snip out the listener mail segment of our Saturday Classics since they're usually referencing some other long ago episode that people may not have heard recently and it could just be a little jarring. But in this case, the listener mail inspired the episode, so stay tuned for it at the end, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today we're doing another listener request hooray, and it's a really delightful one. But I'm actually going to save the information about the listener email that requested it for the end of the episode. It'll be our listener mail segment because it adds a nice coda to the whole story. Uh So, Tracy, I am sure you remember writing a carousel or Merry go around as a child, maybe even as an adult. It is, or at least was a pretty common part of childhood, but carousels have kind of become a less and less of an of the moment kind of part of childhood, even though there are still a number around and people do still enjoy them, but they are in some ways part of history, and they have their own really interesting history there by no means gone, and we're going to talk about some of the modern developments in them at the end, but their prevalence in the entertainment landscape is not what it once was. They used to be much more of like an event item and centerpiece to amusement parks, and so we're actually going to talk about a few things in this episode. We're going to talk first about general carousel history, and then we're gonna talk briefly about a couple of key innovators in carousels, and then at the very end there's kind of a neat story that we're going to talk about about one particular carousel that has its own history that's related to the civil rights movement. So it sounds like a lot, but we're doing, you know, they're kind of the brief versions of any of those stories. So this first chuncolate that we're talking about is consistently told anytime you look at a history of carousels, But in terms of hard substantiation, it's difficult to come by. It's almost one of those things that it could be all completely true, but it could also be one of those things that's been repeated so much that people accepted as history. Uh. But like I said, we don't have like so much hard proof on this one. So yes, and it's so delightful that it would be such a shame not to talk about it. So the possible, the possibly apocryphal story of carousels actually starts back in the twelfth century with a game played by Turkish and Arabian horsemen. And to play this game, the riders would toss a clay ball containing perfume back and forth while they were on horseback, and if a player didn't successfully catch the ball, it would break and it would cover him in the scent of failure. Yeah, he would smell good, presumably it was a perfume, but everyone would know that he had lost. So it's it's kind of an awkward consolation prize to smell lovely. But uh, that being kind of the identifier that you were not as skilled as your challengers. Italian and Spanish crusaders are said to have witnessed this game taking place, and that they eventually brought it back to Europe and there it took on the name Catrocella or Gero slo uh, depending on which language you're speaking, and that translated at that time to little War. Later on, the French adopted this game and they expanded their play to include multiple equestrian challenges. These developed into competitions called carousels, and participants needed to practice for their matches, so a training mechanism was developed that had wooden horses mounted on arms that were suspended from big poles or chains, and they rotated around a central central point. There wasn't really a floor on these carousels. Yeah, it's really um. You know, they're all kind of dangling from above, So not quite the way you would think of a Carouselar and Merry go around today, but you know, again dangling. There are other um rides that have have become popular that are similar where you spin ours, but I'm like, this is it's like the swings at the carnival, where you sit in the swing and it turns and you swing out. Yes, but for a long time, that's how carousels worked, so uh. Some versions of these training carousels were pulled by horses or mules, others were powered by humans. There would often be a hand crank or a pull rope that created the movement, and the horsemen would participate in various games while they were riding these training steeds. And I'm being very generous because apparently they were very rudimentary quote horses. Uh. And one of the games that they would play included trying to spear a ring with a jousting lance. So if you have ever been on a carousel with a ring for riders to grab as they pass under or buy it, uh, this is a callback allegedly to this game, although those have become less and less popular. This is also where that expression grabbed the brass ring comes from, as the brass ring to be the most prized of the rings on a carousel game like this. More often you would see iron rings and then there would be an occasional brass ring. So that association of grabbing the brass ring with you know, going after the big prize or going after something is comes all from this. So watching sports has been a pastime for as long as there have been sports, and so spectators watched the horsemen practice, and they're said to have grown interested in trying it out for themselves. So where there's the demand, there are usually people who are ready to fill it for a price. And by the late seventeen hundreds carousels were being made not for sports training but for entertainment, and for the next hundred years or so, these simple man and mule power divertisements because they worked pretty much exactly the same way as the training ones, they were just gussied up in a more fun way. Uh, we're appearing at European festivals and fairs pretty consistently. But because they were powered either by man or animal, they had to stay pretty much on the small side. Victorian circus entrepreneur Lord George Sanger described the early hand cranked carousels his father once made in his book Seventy Years a Showman. These rudimentary, early merrygarounds had horses that weren't realistic, but they were colorful. The horses manes and tails are made using rabbit fur, and because these still required a living creature, to power them. Kids were generally employed to push carousels like singers to get these mechanisms to spin. So these were usually the kids that could not afford to pay for a ride themselves, so they would push for the day and then at the end of the day they would be paid with free rides. There are some sort of dicey tails, mostly apocryphal, but I'm sure some of this happened of sort of near slave labor at some fairs where kids weren't really treated all that well. Uh, But for the most part it seems to have been like a pay for play situation. You come and do this work, and then at the end of the day you get rewarded with a ride on the carousel. And some mechanisms did not involve children, and they were turned by horses or, more often at fairs, ponies. The velocipede was an interesting variation on this idea. Bicycles mounted around the outside edge of the carousel would generate the circular motion. Those things look so fun to me now. I'm reminded for a moment of a ride at the Georgia Renaissance Festival where you sit in it and it's mounted from a pole. In the center and the people push it to turn it all the way up the pole and it rises up as the thing that's suspending it gets after on the pole and then they let go and you spin on the way down. Oh I don't I'm having trouble recalling that one. But I maybe never paid attention to the rides at the Renaisance Festival. I was probably too busy eating. Uh. In eighteen sixty one, there was a major leap forward when steam entered the picture as a way to power carousels without direct man or animal power. On New Year's Day, Thomas Bradshaw debuted his steam driven carousel in Bolton, England, and it contained a London built boiler unit, an engine, and horses that have been made by Bradshaw himself, and he patented his carousel design in eighteen sixty three. A similar carousel, which may actually have been the same one from the eighteen sixty one Bolton debut, was operating at a fair in Halifax in eighteen sixty three, and while carousel technology was moving forward, it wasn't really met with universal enthusiasm at the outset. Yeah. A journalist who was describing this installation in Halifax described the mechanism as mammoth and overpowered, and he wondered how riders were not shot off their mounts like cannon balls. Uh. Local residents also fretted over the possibility that the whole thing would explode explode from the pressure of the boiler unit, and there were some claims and accusations made that they were endangering children by having this ride available. However, there were not any explosions, and people did continue to be interested in carousels, and the next couple of years several more of them appeared around Britain. There's even a newspaper report of a stay a steam driven velocipede at King's lynmart in eighteen sixty six, although the records of the mechanism are incomplete, and I'm a little like, how do you combine the bicycles and the steam? Yeah, I don't know, but it sounded so fascinating to me. Um. And then once carousels crossed the Atlantic to the US, they really underwent a huge transformation and they became bigger and flashier and more color full, and the horses became far more intricate and detailed. Uh. There it was a little bit of a shift to sort of the art of it in many ways. Because the late eighteen hundred saw major advancements and technology and industry, it wasn't long before the carousel saw them too. The so called Golden Age of carousel's started around eighteen eighty and this was when merry grounds integrated flooring platforms and up and down movement of the animals as they circled the central mechanism. Other variations were tried, including coiled springs to add bounce, and even animals mounted on undulating tracks to create an up and down movement. The carousel at the Little Rock, Arkansas Zoo, which is called Over the Jumps, still uses an undulating track and it's been fully refurbished. If you ever want to ride one, yeah, so that one instead of like the pole sort of moving up and down, it just follows this nice wave pattern track, so you just go up and down. It's a little more of a rolling hill effect. It's quite gentle, and as well as all of the technical advancements, there were some pretty amazing artistic strides going on. So in the US, carousels UH did not restrict themselves to featuring horses alone, so soon unicorns lions, guerrillas, dolphins, giraffes, and a host of other animals made appearances as mounts on carousels. For five decades, carousels stood as the main attraction affairs and amusement parks throughout the United States, and people marveled at their beauty and their craftsmanship. Carousel rides were a much consumed entertainment diversion for adults as well as kids, and several different styles developed in the carousel world in the US. UH. The Coney Island style it's sometimes called, is sort of a show ear style. The horses are painted in really bright colors, and they often have jewels attached and metallic leaf and the rest of the unit, like the the central part in the ceilings often feature multitudes of light catching mirror. And then the Philadelphia style UH is a little bit more realistic in the way its animals are painted and created and carved, and it's associated usually with really exquisite craftsmanship. The county fair style is populated with much simpler designs. UH. These merrygo rounds are usually intended to move from place to place like county fairs do, so they are by necessity a lot less complex and they don't have as much decoration. And then just as the culture of carousels had really embedded itself in the Americana landscape, the Great Depression happened. Like a lot of industries, carousel production was hit really hard, and a lot of companies significantly reduced their output or closed up shop altogether. The Golden Age of carousels had ended. And it's estimated that more than four thousand carousels were made in the United States during the Golden Age. Fewer than a hundred and fifty of these are still intact. Uh And we'll talk a little bit about some restoration efforts later on. But next we're going to talk about a couple of important men in carousel history. There's certainly more than two, but in the interests of time, we had to kind of pick two that are important. But before we talk about them, let's pause for a quick sponsor break. One of the big names in carousel's is Gustave Denzel, and he was originally from Germany and he immigrated to the US in the mid eighteen hundreds, and as a boy, Denzel had traveled throughout Germany with his family in the summers, helping them run their carousel ride. In the eighteen sixties, Gustave's father shipped the young man, his brothers, and a carousel to America on a steamer. When they got there, they brought Philadelphia one of the first carousels in the United States and they set up shop there. Yeah, so that's uh, you know, happening at the same time that things like the steam power are coming into being. It's a little bit after that, uh uh you know. So while England is having this little boom of of carousels, it is shipping across the Atlantic at the same time, and there it was certainly happening in other parts of Europe as well. The Denzel family built this reputation of incredible craftsmanship and they set the tone of realism that came to be associated with the Philadelphia style of carousels. And what's really interesting is that their style stayed really consistent throughout the years, even with changes in leadership to the company. Gustave died in nineteen o nine, at which point his son's William and Edward, took over the family business. In nineteen twenty, Edward moved to California to run a West Coast carousel business and Williams stayed in Philadelphia, and after almost twenty years helming the Denzel Carousel Company, William died in seven and the company folded soon thereafter, and Edward decided to remain in California. He eventually became mayor of Beverly Hills. Eventually, Edward's son, who was also named William, restarted the family business, and his son, William Denzel the third still continues this five generation tradition of elegance, both crafting new pieces and restoring older hair cells. Yeah, one of the things that you'll find if you start looking around online is that a lot of these companies have had sort of a resurgence, and often it's it's family members that have reopened them or have just kind of bolstered them when they were struggling and are now running them again, which is kind of a lovely, sort of heartwarming part of it. Um. The other man that we're going to talk about today is Charles I. D. Loof, and, like Denzel, Luf was originally from Europe. He was born in Denmark in eighteen fifty two, and he moved to the US in eighteen seventy at the age of eighteen and at first, he started as a furniture carver. His carousel carving actually started as a hobby. It was something he did with his furniture making skills in his off hours, but it soon sort of started to become a passion, and just five years after arriving in New York, he opened his first Coney Island carousel for business. Luke saw the potential of an amusement destination and he was instrumental in developing Coney Island as a permanent attraction. Yeah. He also is often credited with developing or being a major contributor to the Coney Island style of carousel horses. And five years after he opened his carousel and Coney Island, he opened a carousel factory in Brooklyn and he stayed in that location from eighteen eighty until sometime in late nineteen o four or early nineteen o five, and at that point he moved the business to Riverside, Rhode Island. In nineteen ten, he moved again, but this time much further. He went across the country to California, and there he was instrumental in the development of Venice Beach and the Santa Monica Piers amusement attractions. Unfortunately, Luf's work building up the role of amusement parks in America turned out to be part of the carousel's downfall. Working with his son Arthur Charles Luf and the Wholesome Entertainment News he helped build created this perfect platform for the rise in popularity of a different attraction, the roller coaster. And as roller coasters became more and more common, they already existed before this, but they really started to get a groundhold in terms of popularity in the amusement industry, in large part due to Luf creating these sort of parks where people would go uh. They started drawing more and more crowds and interesting carousels started to wane because this was a much more exciting and thrilling ride uh. And to try to regain some market share, the marketing for carousels sort of shifted to be like more about kids and children's entertainment, Whereas, as we mentioned prior to that, they were touted as diversions for children and adults equally. But between the newer and more thrilling options and the onset of the Great Depression, there just wasn't anyway for merry grounds to keep their previous status, and when Luke died in all management of their California Here ventures went to his son, and Arthur eventually sold off the portion of the Peer that the family owned, although he continued to operate attractions there for several years. But eventually the Loof's contracts they're all expired and their mini empire was dismantled. Uh The carousel, which had originally been part of Loose Santa Monica amusement center called the Hippodrome, was sold off in parts to collectors. The Hippodrome incidentally, was actually saved from demolition in the nineteen seventies when Robert Redford and Paul Newman, as well as other local activists saved it, and it still stands today. It's been renovated a few times and it has a different carousel in it. So before we delve into one carousel's significance in civil rights history, let's have a quick word from a sponsor that sounds super duper. So there's one particular carousel that's connected to the history of the US civil rights movement. Yeah, it's not like it had a huge, big impact, but it's kind of just a really beautiful story um and it's a carousel that still exists today. So as the March on Washington was taking place in August nineteen sixty three, a smaller but still important event was taking place forty miles north of the city, and on that day, a white, solely amusement park called gwyn Oak allowed black children in for the first time. Sharon Langley, he was only eleven months old at the time and was held in place on the saddle by her father, was the first African American child to ride the carousel at the park, along with white children. And unfortunately, just a few years after the amusement park desegregated, it actually closed for good, and after a few more years, the carousel that had stood at Gwynn Park was purchased by the Smithsonian that was in and at that point it was moved to the National Mall. Seven years after it's moved to the mall, standing Donna Hunter purchased the carousel uh and they have since barrated it there on the mall. But during all that time, no one knew of this kind of interesting little piece of history attached to it. Amy Nathan and author researching civil rights history, finally put all the pieces together in two thousand eleven and notified the hunters of their merriagor rounds historical significance. It became part of Nathan's book Round and Round Together, Taking Your Ride into Civil Rights History, and the Nathan's have repainted the horse that Langley rode that day to commemorate the Civil rights movement. The National Park Service has also included the carousel in educational programming about civil rights. Yeah. I just love that there's this wonderful piece of like children's history that's also a part of the civil rights movement. There's a really sweet picture of Langley writing it with her dad holding her when she's eleven months old, and then as an adult, once they figured out this little piece of history, she went back and wrote it again and it's just so heartwarming. Uh So, while carousels did not vanish completely with a great depression, they certainly experience is to drop in terms of their presence and their popularity. And once the economy picked back up, so did production to some degree. But the hand carved carousel horses that had been sort of this amazing art that was developing were replaced by fiberglass and aluminum versions. No more steam powered carousels were made, they had shifted over to electric. Yeah, definitely. When I was a kid, the thing that we were riding into County Fair was a fiber last carousel run on electricity, and I was like, why are you making meatus? But now as an adult, when I'm somewhere and I see some like beautifully restored, handmade wooden carousel, I think it's very lovely. Yeah, there are still some of those hand carved beauties remaining, and the restoration projects have been undertaken to keep a lot of them around. Yeah, some of them are um mounted by you know, just private people that sometimes start collecting carousel horses and then decided they want to put carousels by together others who are handled by companies. But in the last four decades, interesting carousels and carousel horses as collectors items has really swelled, Like in the nineteen seventies, sort of this kickoff just happened where people started to become really into them again. And unfortunately, part of the problem with keeping carousels going is that in many cases it is more profitable to sell off the amazing horses than it is to try to keep a carousel running, they have to run at a profit. There are also some interesting innovations and modern carousels. Washington's National Zoo now has one that runs on solar power, and all of the animals that are represented there are endangered species, so it's in line with the Zoo's theme of conservation. Uh So, if you love carousels, this is our p s A. And you want to see them stick around again. They have to operate in a way that makes money and makes sense for them to keep going. So go ride one. Seriously, if you have a local carousel, go buy a ticket to ride, help keep it going, visit off, and bring your friends. That's what's going to keep this piece of history alive. And so now we're gonna tie some things that we've talked about together with the listener mail that Holly reference at the top of the episode. Uh she or we both actually got this email last year. So when we tell you that sometimes it takes a while, uh I would say almost always said almost always takes a while. Uh yeah, I mean I wanna. I know we always say it, but I do want to reassure people that even if we haven't gotten to your request yet, we may or may not, but we're trying to. So we're working through it. And this is one of those things that I love the second we got it, and then it just kind of got back Bernard by other things for a while. So and we also do read every single email that we get, although we are not nearly as good about answering no. Well, it's hard to keep up with as well as you know. Unfortunately, the podcast is not our only job here, so there's we're juggling some stuff. So I hope no one feels slighted if they don't get a sill reply. We try too as many as we can. But anyway, that's the story. So this listener mail is from our listener Ashley, and she says, hello, ladies. I love your podcast and I laugh at your love affairs with delicious food in historical clothing, both things I wish I knew more about. I have a happy topic for you since you asked for them. So recently my job I worked for the world's largest manufacturer of wooden carousels, the Carousel Works, incorporated in Mansfield, Ohio. This is site of the historic Ohio State Reformatory where they filled in the Shawshank Redemption. Our carousels are handbuilt, hand carved, and hand painted. We are one of the few companies in the world that still does this. And in addition to having a carousel in nearly every state in the Union, we have a carousel in Canada to in South Korea, and the only two carousels at sea on cruise ships with Royal Caribbeans Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas. We're putting up our fifty five new carousel later in our third in South Korea. Right now, we are restoring the historic Euclid Beach Park Rand carousel that was once located in Cleveland, Ohio, just one in a long line of restorations we've taken part in. It's also known as PTC Number nineteen. The Philadelphia Toboggan Company was one of the premier carousel makers in the States, and their name is tossed around with historic carvers such as Eleon, Herschel, Spielman, dentzel, Loof, and Parker. Many of the wood carvers were immigrants who came from Europe and found work in the States. Many of these carousels were richly decorated and painted. However, after the Great Depression, they almost all went away and were replaced with a luminium fiberglass. It was actually the Carousel Works that created the first new hand carved carousel in to have been built since the nineteen thirties, using an antique frame but all new figures, murals and gears. I grew up riding that carousel. This is a really cool part about her job. It's all cool, but she says, I myself am a painter at the Carousel Works, having painted figures and murals for almost three years now. You can actually see my paint jobs on a carousel near you at the Birmingham Sux. It's kind of near a day trip maybe. Um. We built that carousel in two thousand two and repainted the figures recently. In I painted the clouded leopard and the jaguar. That is the coolest thing actually, I actually cyberstocked her work and went looking for pictures of the clouded leopard and the jaguar at the Birmingham Zoo carousel and they're gorgeous. It's so beautiful. I am so thankful for this listener mail and the inspiration of it, because it's one of those topics that it is really beautiful part of history, and I always like supporting artists, and carousels are in many cases amazing works of art. So I also kind of want to return to the days where we played a game of riding horses and throwing perfume at each other. I would play that. Well, we can mount that as our own game. Can have this sort of horrible office game where we all smell like perfume. My thing is that, you know, I would want it to be good perfume, but that gets really expensive. We can just delete an oil. That's what we'll do. They go. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. 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