It’s been a merry-go-round for Bette Largent, retiring caretaker of the Looff Carrousel

When Bette Largent assumed caretaking duties for the historic Looff Carrousel in Riverfront Park nearly 30 years ago, her superiors had one simple request.

“The only instructions they told me were, ‘Make the tiger friendly,’ ” said Largent, who has been in charge of repairing and restoring the ponies, goat and, yes, even a slinking tiger on the attraction since 1992.

Largent, who had a background as an artist, an antiques restorer and a librarian, went straight to the source. Children who rode the carousel told her they feared the brown spider monkey draped on the tiger’s back. So it became a brighter-colored lemur. The tiger’s nose was also painted a bright shade of pink, and its eyelashes were extended.

The 4-year-old son of a park mechanic was the first test subject. He eyed the newly repainted tiger for a few minutes, then sauntered right up and patted the creature on the nose.

“Then he turned around to me and said, ‘Can you make me a buffalo?’ ” she said, laughing.

Largent has made a buffalo, and plenty of other creatures in a career that’s taken her carousel expertise far beyond Riverfront Park. Carousels in Helena and Missoula, and Kennewick and Seattle, just to name a few, have featured the brushstrokes and woodwork of Largent. She’s made the difficult decision, she said, to hand off the reins of the Looff Carrousel to a new generation of restoration workers, but isn’t quite ready to leave the world of twirling ponies yet.

On Friday, she watched as another generation of Spokane’s youth hopped aboard their favorite mounts and took a spin on the attraction built by Charles I.D. Looff in 1909. Though retired, she had plans to conduct a tail inventory – they’re made from real horse hair – in the coming week to help the team that will now take over her caretaking duties.

“I’m not leaving because I want to,” she said. “It’s just, physically, it’s difficult now.”

Largent’s love of the Looff Carrousel began on a trip to Spokane on May 17, 1980. That’s the day before Mount St. Helens blew its top and covered the region in ash, closing Riverfront Park and one of its signature attractions for several weeks during the summer. She moved back with her husband to Spokane from Lewiston in 1985, and seven years later found herself working part time in the carousel’s gift shop when the opportunity to repair the horses became available.

It was her daughter, Lissa Largent, who encouraged her to take the job. The younger Largent, then 11, made a personal appeal to Riverfront Park’s manager at the time, Hal McGlathery.

“She was self-taught, frankly,” said McGlathery of Bette Largent last week. “In those days, carousel owners didn’t like to share information about each other.”

Largent changed that. In 1997, she published a guidebook called “Painting the Ponies,” a guide to preserving carousel horses that is now out-of-print. Largent hopes to publish an updated version of the book, what McGlathery said was akin to “a Bible” for carousel restorers, soon.

Lissa Largent, who attended a ceremony honoring her mother before the Spokane Park Board on Thursday, remembered prodding her mother to work on the carousel three decades ago.

“I was 11. I thought it would be the coolest thing ever,” she said. “But had I known I would have had to move about 5 million horses,” she continued, trailing off and chuckling.

Throughout the decades, Largent admitted she’s recruited family members to lug wooden horses from one of her three studios – including Studio G for “garage” – into trucks for delivery to regional carousels.

Some of the helpers weren’t even human. Hagen, a female terrier/Rottweiler mix the family owned, would often lie at the foot of the wooden horses as Largent worked, she said. Painters, sanders and movers would have to check their feet to make sure they weren’t about to step on her.

Every time a delivery was made, Hagen would escort the horse out into the truck, then back again. Finally, Largent said, she took Hagen to the old Bavarian beer garden structure from Expo ’74 that housed the carousel in Riverfront Park from 1975 until 2017, when it was closed to move into its current, climate-conditioned home on the bank of the Spokane River.

“She saw all the carousel horses, and she was immediately on the deck,” Largent said. “She was checking on the tails, and all that.”

The Parks Department gave Largent a commemorative coin at the board meeting Thursday, and Parks Director Garrett Jones pledged that the city would immortalize Largent in some permanent way in the carousel’s new $9.5 million home in Riverfront Park.

“I can confidently say, what we see over there in Riverfront Park today, with the carousel, would not have happened if it wasn’t for Bette,” said Jones.

Largent said she’ll miss the quiet winter mornings, when the fog would roll in off the river and she was at peace with her horses. She’ll also miss the wildlife, including a blue heron she enjoyed watching overseeing the ducks while she worked.

She’ll also miss the carousel itself, though she plans to return frequently. The old-time attractions, nearly extinct a few decades ago, hold a hypnotic quality, Largent said, that transcends generations.

“Look at the generations who ride together,” said Largent, after pausing to greet a toddler with a pacifier who’d just completed her ride on that friendly-looking tiger. “We don’t do anything like that now. The kids have their own TVs, own cellphones, own XBoxes.”

“It’s an event, to get together,” she said.