Some years ago, my wife Pat and I acquired some un-restored carved wooden carousel horses, which we intended to refurbish and then sell. Having had some professional experience refinishing antique furniture, Pat undertook to do the paintwork needed to transform these horses back to their former appearance and glory. |
Monday, January 13, 2014
Pat's Painted Ponies #1 (From Eric Beheim)
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As found, our “horses” were actually an assortment of body parts: heads, legs, torsos, etc. It took us some effort to sort out which parts belonged to which horse, and even then we were never totally sure that all of the parts ended up back with the horse they originally came from!
Here's my carousel horse story:
Many years ago, the street car company here operated a park out at the end of the line called Glendale Park. My mother used to go there when she was a kid in the twenties. When the park closed during the Great Depression, the carousel was dismantled and stored.
Fast forward some years: Fred Harvey, late of Marshall Fields in Chicago, came to Nashville in 1942 and bought the former Denton's Department Store, later adding the former Lebeck's Store and eventually had Nashville's only block-long department store: "Harvey's."
Fred Harvey knew how to run a department store and made the other merchants dance to his tune. For example no store had accepted returns until he came here with his "No sale is finished until the customer is satisfied" policy.
Old men ramble so forgive me. Anyway Harvey heard about the old Glendale carousel and bought it solely for the purpose of using the horses to decorate the store. They were everywhere in the store, at escalator landings, on display cases, in the window displays and soon they appeared in the store's logo in newspaper ads.
Sometime in the early fifties a friend of my dad's wrote and asked him to contact Fred Harvey and see if he would sell a horse to him. My dad called Mr Harvey and explained his mission and Mr Harvey said, "Tell your friend to wrote me; I might just give him a horse." Unfortunately this old man's tale must end there as I never heard if the man got the horse or not.
Just remember that someday you will get old and tell long long stories. I hope people are as courteous to you as you have been to me.
Ole Ole Whitey
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