The other Looff Carrousel: How one of the last remaining Looff rides ended up in the foothills of Boulder County and looking nothing like Riverfront Park’s amusement ride

This is the story of the Carousel of Happiness in Nederland, Colorado. It is a fairly long story, over a century in length … It starts in Utah, at an amusement park called Saltair, and then takes us south of Salt Lake City to a town called American Fork, where the carousel operated for a few decades. Then it moves to Colorado, to the town of Nederland. – Janette Keene Taylor in “Don’t Delay Joy: The Story of the Carousel of Happiness.”

Riverfront Park’s Looff Carrousel is one of 10 surviving rides crafted by Charles I.D. Looff in North America. The others are mostly on the East Coast, in Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts and Ontario, Canada. Seaport Village and Santa Cruz are home to two rides in California. And one is surrounded by the Roosevelt National Forest and Rocky Mountain National Park in Nederland, Colorado. How it got there is quite the horse tale.

‘The Coney Island of the West’

Just months before Looff’s death in 1918, his four-row creation was installed as one of three carousels at the Saltair Amusement Park, a boardwalk along the Great Salt Lake, founded by the Mormon Church. “The big carousel” was a combination of work by designer Looff and engineer Williams Mangels, after which the carousel’s mechanism is named and patented.

While the carousel was brought in 1918 to the park, which founders called “the Coney Island of the West,” it is not clear when the carousel was manufactured. Carousel of Happiness restorer Scott Harrison said, “Sections of it matched perfectly to 1909 and 1911 machines when I went to find missing pieces.” But more on him later – by about 80 years or so.

The Great Depression, receding Great Salt Lake waters and two fires led to financial issues at the park, as well as damage to the ride. A 1931 blaze burned the outer shell of the Looff and its hand-carved animals. Janette Keene Taylor wrote in “Don’t Delay Joy: The Story of Carousel of Happiness” that the carousel was cut up to trim away the burned portion, leaving two of the four rows of horses standing.

Saltair, with the diminished carousel, operated another 16 years. On Aug. 30, 1957, Keene Taylor wrote, an amusement enthusiast traveled from Tennessee to Saltair to see its grand roller coaster, “only to watch in horror” as 75-plus-mph winds knocked the coaster into the carousel. “The damage was so great that the park went into bankruptcy” and closed within two years. Much of the park was given to the state of Utah, but some pieces, like the carousel, were put into storage until three years later … when Fairyland got the call.

‘It filled their hearts with joy’

The Utah State Training School in American Fork was the main institution for children with developmental disabilities in Utah in the 20th century. The Utah Park and Recreation Commission, which took control of the abandoned Saltair, donated the carousel to Fairyland Park in American Fork to provide entertainment to the training school youth and the general public, the Citizen reported in 1960. Fairyland itself was founded in 1960 by Dr. Vernon Houston, who advocated for the recreation of training school youth in his care.

Heinz Leonhardt, the maintenance supervisor for the training school, called the carousel, “the crowning jewel to Fairyland,” in a 2003 film about the ride.

“It filled their hearts with joy, it filled all our hearts with joy, to have the carousel running at Fairyland.”

The carousel was located outside, and while the mechanism continued to operate, Keene Taylor wrote, the wooden horses didn’t fare well in the elements.

The repair job went to students at the Vocational Training Campus Workshop, Keene Taylor wrote. “They discovered, the hard way, that the horses had 20 layers of paint. Sanding by hand proved an impossible task, even for the school’s patient workers.”

The animals were stripped commercially, and the group repaired cracks and loose joints. A Fairyland maintenance worker undertook repair of the mechanism, which when rewired continued to work for another decade at the park. In 1986, the mechanism followed Dr. Houston in death, and the amusement park shuttered. The animals became the property of collector Charlotte Dinger and the failed mechanism was stashed under the deck of a retired Marine.

Hopping into carving

As a young Marine in Vietnam, Scott Harrison was gifted a tiny music box from his sister. He held it to his ear, “to distract him from the horror of the war going on around him,” according to the Carousel of Happiness organization’s website. The music, Chopin’s “Tristesse,” brought him a peaceful image of a carousel in a mountain meadow.

After returning home from war, the Nederland, Colorado, resident learned that the empty frame of the Fairyland Looff was still standing and available for purchase. Nederland is located near Barker Meadow Reservoir in the foothills of southwest Boulder County, about an hour’s drive from Denver. With the help of a friend, Harrison took the carousel apart and trucked it to Nederland, the organization wrote.

With no animals on the carousel, Harrison had a lot of work ahead of him and was battling with post-traumatic stress disorder from the war. He had never carved before, but got started as a form of self-healing – not with a horse, but a rabbit.

“Scott took his children to an exhibit in downtown Oakland, California, where carved animals were on display in the lobby of a skyscraper,” Keene Taylor wrote. He took several pictures of a rabbit and thought, “I want to carve that. It was the look on its face that I most wanted to capture.” The rabbit, more of an experiment, never would be ridden, but was on display for years.

The collector, Dinger, eventually sold the remains of the carousel to Harrison for $2,000.

“For the next 25 years, I kept carving wooden animals, all kinds, and I guess I should admit that I did get a little better at it along the way,” Harrison said in “Don’t Delay Joy.” Harrison went on to carve more than 50 animals, 35 of which can be ridden.

As Harrison finished, his small hometown of Nederland, population 1,500, came together to raise $700,000 to build the carousel a home. Other Boulder County residents chipped in, restoring the mechanism’s timbers, rewiring the original motor and belt, making the ride wheelchair accessible and volunteering for a barn raising of sorts, eventually forming a nonprofit.

The carousel opened, nearly a century after its first ride in Utah, on May 29, 2010.

A spinning menagerie

On a brisk February day in Nederland, Colorado, bright pops of color peek through grungy snow in the parking lot of the Caribou Village Shopping Center, just off the main drag of Nederland, Colorado.

A sign in front of a 12-sided building paneled with beetle-kill pine reads: “We are open for rides! Don’t delay joy.”

Inside, a quiet lobby is home to carousel collectibles, Looff memorabilia, stickers, postcards, mugs, T-shirts, stuffed animals, finger puppets and more. A puppet theater is reached by the stairs above the lobby. A single volunteer mans the front desk, while another is seen at the entrance to the carousel, set farther back into the building.

Ticket to ride? $3. Upon purchase, guests are herded toward the carousel. The ride is ready to begin once a small crowd appears. Three adults and three children step up to listen to a short history lesson from ride operator Charles Wood.

“The guy who really made this happen is Scott Harrison …,” Wood says, while the children stuff their faces through the slats of the metal fencing, just steps away from the brightly painted, hand-carved animals.

Under a canopy of wood there are many creatures to ride – an alpaca, camel, cat, coyote, dolphin, donkey, duck, elephant, peacock, St. Bernard and even a mermaid and dragon boat, to name a few. There are also ornamental animals dressing up the space. A ring-tailed lemur hangs in the rafters, while an upright seal greets visitors at the beginning of the line. One wall, dubbed “Somewhere Else” features a polar bear, giraffe and other animals seemingly melting into a cloudy wall – a portal of sorts. Just one horse, reminiscent of Riverfront Park’s Carrousel, stands on the ride: a Navajo pony.

“Everybody gave everything to a 501c3 nonprofit with the mission of just making people happy,” continues Wood, a volunteer of 15 years and member of the executive board committee. “It’s a great mission and we know for sure we’re successful, because in our first 10 years – we finished that 10 years just before COVID – those first 10 years we had over a million rides.

“So, all those riders got happy.”

With that, he opens the gate to let the guests take their pick of the menagerie. A father-son take to an immobile swan boat. A young girl takes to a rising-falling panda bear.

With a small grind of gears, the ride is off. The sound of a live German band blasts through the domed space: a Wurlitzer 125 Military Band Organ with 99 pipes sits inside the inner ring of the ride.

The children laugh and shriek, and a pang of nostalgia hits one woman who traveled over 1,000 miles from Spokane to ride another Looff Carrousel with her stepson, a kind of homecoming. A wide smile and a single tear streaks down her cheek, reminding her: Don’t delay joy.

“We need more heroes in the world who make, instead of break. A short, pleasurable moment, a three-minute amusement ride in a small mountain town, may not seem very much. But for many, it is a moment to remember that creating is a healing activity, and that whimsy is essential to shake up our daily routine. Giving, with the pure intention to make people happy, creates a magic all its own. And a lovely carousel, reborn again and again, is a potent symbol for belief in the value of human potential. – Keene Taylor in “Don’t Delay Joy: The Story of the Carousel of Happiness.”

For more information on the Carousel of Happiness, visit carouselofhappiness.org. “Don’t Delay Joy: The Story of the Carousel of Happiness” can by found on Amazon or on the organization’s website. To make a one-time or recurring tax-deductible donation to the carousel, visit carouselofhappiness.org/getinvolved. To learn more about Harrison, the documentary “Carving Joy” can be streamed on demand for $10 at vimeo.com/ondemand/carvingjoy.