The Merry-Go-Round Kings

Murmuring voices and laughter, mingling with the strains of band organ music and the rustling of long white skirts and crisply starched shirts, filled the sum­mer air of 1904 at Philadel­phia’s Woodside Park. A new carousel, one of the finest in America, had just introduced a kaleidoscope of festive color and design to the familiar old amusement grounds. It was, especially, the onset of evening that transformed Woodside Park’s carousel into a place of enchantment, a whirling con­stellation of multicolored lights against the stillness of tower­ing trees and deepening in­digo sky.

Plump cherubs and painted jesters looked on as the fifty­-four-foot platform began to turn. The dazzling brightness of twenty-four hundred bulbs flashed across the large mir­rors, reflecting a procession of riders circling in ornately carved chariots or astride the three-row menagerie of wooden beasts. And what beautiful beasts they were! Horses predominated, large ones carved with amazing realism. They were black, white, dappled and the ever­-popular gray, and their color­ful trappings – from shim­mering armor to garlands of flowers – identified each as the horse of a warrior, hunter, cowboy or lady. There were forty-two in all, and no two alike. Adding a touch of whimsey, two goats, two pigs, four playful cats and four rabbits frolicked among the stately horses, while a flirting rabbit, his ears slightly askew, extended a paw as if to beckon waiting riders.

Manufactured by the Dent­zel Carousel Company, this celebrated carousel was de­signed by William H. Dentzel and quickly became the favor­ite of his father and founder of the company, Gustav, who is said to have clinched many a sale by taking prospective buyers to see Woodside Park. Hailed as “the most joyful carousel in America,” the Woodside Park sensation was largely the work of Dentzel’s new master carver, Salvatore Cernigliaro, a young Italian immigrant whose English was halting and broken, but who spoke most eloquently with chisels and fine wood.

Today, carousels and their carved figures are highly re­garded as examples of Ameri­can folk art at its best, and cherished as nostalgic icons of a bygone era when amuse­ments somehow seemed more lavish, fanciful and innocent. During the heyday of the American carousel – from the mid-1880s to the mid-1920s­ – the major manufacturers num­bered fewer than a dozen, with their creations falling into what collector-historians iden­tify as three general styles. For their “country fair style” carousels, which were often de­signed to travel from fairground to fairground, the Herschell-Spillman Company of North Tonawanda, New York, and the Kansas-based C.W. Parker Company pro­duced sturdily built horses and menageries with simpler, “folkier” styling, plainer deco­ration, and Jess detailed carv­ing. In contrast, the flamboyant “Coney Island Style” of Brooklyn’s Stein and Goldstein, Charles Looff, M.C. Illions and Charles Car­mel featured showy, more stylized horses in dramatic poses and replete with opulent garland- and jewel-laden trap­pings. To many, however, the merry-go-rounds by which all others were measured were the elegant “Philadelphia Style” carousels produced in the city’s Germantown section by the Dentzel Carousel and Philadelphia Toboggan com­panies.

Crude forerunners of the carousel were built at least as early as August 15, 1825, when the Common Council of New York City issued John Sears the first permit to “establish a covered circus for a Flying Horse establishment.” By mid­century, they had become popular enough at amusement grounds for Eliphalet S. Scrip­ture to seek and obtain the first American carousel patent for an “Improvement in the Flying Horse.” The real story of the American carousel be­gins, however, in Philadelphia with a young German.

Arriving in the United States in 1864, eighteen-year­-old Gustav Dentzel opened a cabinet shop in Philadelphia at 433 Brown Street. Remembering his father’s modest success in building and operating carousels in Germany, Gustav decided to build a small one to test the idea in America. Al­though little more than a spin­ning circle of park benches suspended by chains, its suc­cess encouraged him in 1867 to move to a larger shop at Beach and Fairmount Avenues and hang a new sign announcing, G.A. Dentzel, Steam and Horse­power Carousell Builder.

In 1867, with his first carou­sel, featuring wooden horses on a revolving platform, Dent­zel secured his title as Ameri­ca’s carousel pioneer. Erected on Smith’s Island, a curious resort in the Delaware River notorious for the behavior it allowed, this ride was the first major amusement park carou­sel in the country. Its popular­ity inspired Dentzel to build more. His next stop was in Atlantic City, where it became a huge success as the seaside resort’s first carousel. Similar merry-go-rounds were usually turned by horses or mules, often in a pit beneath the plat­form, until Dentzel introduced the steam-driven carousel to America officially in 1881. From the very beginning, music made an important contribu­tion, but Dentzel discovered he had a few lessons to learn about appropriate band organ accompaniment. After his successes with a smaller travel­ing carousel in town after town, he was suddenly taken aback when jeering boys threw stones at it while police stood by in Richmond, Virginia. “Mister,” one policeman ex­plained, “if you want any business, don’t ever play Marching Through Georgia in the South.”

Success convinced him to increase production and, in 1885, to issue his first cata­logue. The rides it pictured were a far cry from spinning park benches: swan chariots, lions, giraffes and deer joined the horses on greatly enlarged, beautifully carved carousels costing thousands of dollars.

With his growing prosper­ity, Dentzel again moved to the still larger headquarters which would become the company’s permanent home – next to his own house – at 3635-41 Ger­mantown Avenue. By the turn of the century, this three-story location was a busy factory indeed, where floor by floor, Dentzel animals worked their way up toward the perfection for which they are still prized. On the first floor, Gustav’s nephew Harry E. Dentzel was in charge of the tooling and carving machinery. There, around a hollow center to reduce weight, carpenters laminated planks of poplar, apple and basswood together to outline the general shapes, and roughed out the emerging forms of the animals. It was upstairs, in the second-floor carving room, that each animal was given its own personality – with lovingly detailed attention to anatomi­cal realism, stance and facial expression – by some of the finest artists-craftsmen ever to wield a chisel. At last, in the third-floor paint shop, the creatures of Dentzel’s menageries received the final coats of paint that protected them – and gave them life!

Meanwhile, a large shed in the yard was also stirring with activity and its own share of magic. The corning of each spring was heralded by an old schooner mastmaker who appeared for work, made about a half-dozen center-poles, and then vanished until the following spring. Working from memory, without blue­prints or plans but with com­plete accuracy, Henry Paul supervised the heavy con­struction of the frames, platforms and other engineering aspects that transformed a waiting assembly of animals into a carousel.

In their day, the carvers who fashioned these magnifi­cent creations received rela­tively little compensation and even less public recognition. Only within the last thirty years have carousel admirers and preservationists begun to identify and gather what sparse information survives about these anonymous mas­ter craftsmen whose only signature was the beauty of their work.

A skilled woodcarver, Gus­tav Dentzel is believed to have carved some of his company’s earliest animals himself, using patterns made by enlarging pictures from old print books. His – or some other long­-forgotten carver’s­ – watchful deer with real antlers were stately.

His barrel-chested, heavily muscled horses were formidable. His enormous roaring lions with thick manes and bared teeth were fierce. Early Dentzel animals were bold, they were powerful, they were proud­ – one might dare say they were even Prussian – but above all they were realistic and undoubtedly made quite an impression. While others carved exaggerated poses and decorated with fancy trap­pings, Dentzel painted his anatomically realistic animals in natural colors and embel­lished them with understated trappings which never took away from the animals them­selves. This striving for realism became a company trademark to which other Dentzel carvers would soon add their own distinguishing marks.

Inspired by his friend Gus­tav’s success, John Henry Muller moved his family to America in 1882 and brought his carving skills to the Dentzel factory in 1888. As the 1880s faded into the nineties, Dentzel carvings seemed to exhibit a newfound delicacy and the animals a new serenity. Even the still-ferocious lions became less overpowering and frightening. Did John Henry Muller initiate this change along with his sons Daniel and Alfred, gifted carvers who also came to work for Dentzel? By now, Gustav’s nephew Harry and son’s Wil­liam H. and Edward Dentzel were also working in the carv­ing room. Did they share any of the credit? And what of the mysterious “very good wood­carver, Mr. Boory, a Tyrolean,” later remembered by Dentzel carver Salvatore Cernigliaro? Who was he and where did he fit in?

The taming of Dentzel’s menagerie is generally attrib­uted to the Mullers, and espe­cially to John Henry’s particularly gifted son Daniel. Held by Gustav Dentzel in the same gruff affection as second sons, the Muller brothers con­tinued to work for his firm after their father’s death in 1890. Daniel, born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1872, seems to have been one of the few carousel carvers who regarded himself as a sculptor in wood, a fine artist, not merely a craftsman. Carv­ing by day, he entered art competitions and studied by night, for many years with Charles Grafly at the Pennsyl­vania Academy of the Fine Arts. Throughout the nineties, Dentzel’s increasingly polished animals displayed a kind of classical elegance and refinement, an innovation in carousel carving that could easily be interpreted as a reflec­tion of the tastes of the classically trained Muller. Daniel’s interest in historical accuracy and attention to detail harmonized with Dentzel’s, but a young man with his ambitions undoubtedly grew restless under Dentzel and, when a new competitor, the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, opened its doors and offered the Mul­ler brothers more artistic free­dom, they grasped the opportunity. Gustav never forgave them.

The Philadelphia Toboggan Company was fortunate, indeed, in securing the talents of the gifted Mullers to help launch the new enterprise. Drawing and expanding on their more than ten years expe­rience with Dentzel, the broth­ers carved spirited and magni­ficently finished menagerie animals that quickly estab­lished the Philadelphia Tobog­gan Company as a leading carousel maker with a reputa­tion for quality and outstand­ing artistry. About 1906, the Mullers formed the D. C. Mul­ler & Brother Company, con­tinuing until wartime shortages of materials forced them to close in 1917. During those years, Daniel’s interest in history – and particularly mili­tary history – deepened and was reflected in the detailed trappings of his famous cav­alry horses and in an armored horse – now gracing the Cedar Point Carousel in Sandusky, Ohio – revered as one of the most magnificent carousel horses ever carved.

Meanwhile at Dentzel, the Mullers were missed, but not long lamented. In 1903, Gus­tav Dentzel hired the artisan acknowledged as possibly the greatest carousel carver of all. Salvatore Cernigliaro – known to carousel admirers as “Cerni” – was born in Palermo, Italy, in 1879 and spent seven years apprenticed to Maestro Valenti, whose studio was well known throughout Italy for its work in decorating palaces and villas. A measure of Cerni’s skill is that at the age of fifteen he was entrusted with carving the fretwork around the impe­rial box of Palermo’s Bellini Opera House, one of the larg­est in Italy. Attracted by excit­ing artistic developments in Paris, he lived briefly in the Latin Quarter and Montmartre before poverty and family responsibilities forced him to insure a steady income by sublimating art to craft.

Like the flirting rabbits he would later carve, America beckoned. Philadelphia, he heard, had jobs for cabinet makers. Despite his problems with a language which, he complained, “sounds like a machine going on!,” Cerni found his way to Philadelphia and into the employ of a man who hired him to carve a small merry-go-round. Enjoying the work, he asked if there was another carousel shop in Phila­delphia. Yes, he was told. There was Dentzel. Approach­ing Dentzel, who was in his yard next to the factory, Cerni recalled, “That time, I couldn’t speak English – only I could say three words – me wood­carver, job?” With Dentzel speaking no Italian and Cernigliaro understanding neither English nor German, Cerni left believing there was no job for him. Later, growing desperate for work, Cerni again found himself in Dent­zel’s neighborhood, which happened to be near St. Ste­fano’s Church. Going in, he recalled, “I said, Mr. Lord, I only have four dollars in my pocket – it is my last pay for my board and if I don’t find job they will throw me out.” Leaving”the church, Cerni, thirsty and hot, remembered the well in Dentzel’s yard. Recognizing him, Dentzel started speaking in German and motioned him inside, where Boory, the Tyrolean woodcarver, could speak a little Italian. “He told me that Mr. Dentzel one week ago, gave me job but I didn’t come … He told me to bring my tools and start work immediately. I went out of the shop to St. Stefano Church and I thank Lord.”

Cerni’s arrival marked an exciting change in Dentzel’s carousels. The old formulas of carving with the aid of pre-set patterns were tossed aside and Dentzel, appreciating Cerni’s artistry, adapted his carving­-room methods to accommo­date his new master carver. Fancy straps and flower gar­lands began gracing the Dent­zel menageries. Nymphs clung to their ribbons and elaborate drapery. And to the already large Dentzel menagerie, Cerni added his famous os­trich and the cat, rabbit and pig, which probably made their debut on the Woodside Park Carousel. Like the Mul­lers’, his creatures were gentle, but less formal. They were vivacious and often playful. They seemed to move even when standing perfectly still. In spite of their elaborateness, his trappings never over­whelmed his animals and, despite the speed and sensu­ousness of his carving, Cerni’s animals always remained remarkably realistic.

Gustav Dentzel died in 1909 and while the factory was temporarily closed, Cerni found work across the river at the Victor Talking Machine Company carving custom cabinets. Reopening the plant with his younger brother Edward, Gustav’s son William, affectionately known as “Hobby Horse Bill,” took the Dentzel Carousel Company to new heights constructing carousels of his own design, with Cerni, of course, as mas­ter carver. When World War I brought the carousel business to a virtual standstill, Cerni applied his skills to one of the most unusual assignments of his long and varied career: carving airplane propellers for the United States government at Hog Island. There was an art to that, too, for each had to be precisely balanced; years later Cerni still took pride in his ability to carve over twenty a day. After the war, he went briefly to the Philadelphia Toboggan Company before opening his own carousel in Wildwood, New Jersey, and working under contract to Dentzel during the winter months. During the Great Depression, which broke the carousel industry, Cerni be­came a teacher for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) before retiring to Cali­fornia to be near his daughter. In California he taught sculp­ture for the Los Angeles school system until the age of eighty-seven. He died in April 1974 at the age of ninety-four.

Carving did not make Salvatore Cernigliaro rich. Like his fellow master carvers, he was lucky to earn thirty-five dollars an animal. Although he lived long enough to enjoy long-overdue recognition for his artistry, he was happier in knowing the pleasure he cre­ated for thousands of young carousel aficionados with the case of carving tools he proudly called his “box of gold.”

The Dentzel brothers did not share their father’s old hurts and, in 1917, when the Muller brothers closed the door of their company, the Dentzel’s rehired them. They remained until the company’s closing in 1928 and, during those years, Daniel carved some of the strangest, most striking horses of his career. Unlike the spirited but gentle creations of his youth, many of Muller’s postwar horses were like tightly coiled springs. Never had they seemed more real, and in their faces – and especially in their eyes – were reflected moods rarely encountered on any carousel. Seem­ingly startled and perhaps even afraid, they stood wild eyed and ready to rear or recoil from some unseen danger.

“Hobby Horse Bill” Dentzel died in 1928 and, with him, the Dentzel Carousel Com­pany. Daniel Muller retired to New Jersey where, more and more, he turned from carving to fishing until his death in 1951 at the age of seventy-nine. The Dentzel Company’s stock was dispensed at auction in January 1929 and purchased by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company. “A King is dead,” wrote a Philadelphia newspaper reporter in a final tribute to William Dentzel that could also have applied to his father Gustav, the carousel pioneer. “Does it matter after all that the medium he employed was nothing more than a ring of painted horses, to which a lot of laughing, shouting young­sters clung madly as they swung around a pole in dizzy­ing circles? Merry Go Round King is no slight sobriquet to be remembered by.”

The Philadelphia Toboggan Company was, in many ways, the rightful heir to the indus­try and reputation for excellence established by Dentzel. Co-founder Henry B. Auchy, born in 1861 in Lower Salford, Montgomery County, had moved gradually from the liquor business to investments in amusements, trading as the Gray Amusement Company in partnership with carousel­-organ importer Louis Berni. He founded Chestnut Hill Park and, inspired by Gustav Dentzel’s success, installed his first carousel there in 1899. With engineering and financial advisor Chester E. Albright, Auchy formed the Philadel­phia Toboggan Company-also known simply as “PTC” – in 1903 to “build finer and better carousels and coasters.” To honor their slogan, “The Fin­est Carousels in the World,” they set out to secure the finest artisans in the business, the first of which were the Muller brothers.

With exquisitely carved, naturalistic animals of every description, the Mullers cre­ated carousels that were truly an exaltation of ornament. Exuberant sprays of flowers and swags of drapery adorned the animals themselves, while all manner of fanciful little beasts and faces began to peek from behind their saddles. Lavishly designed chariots, crestings and carved mirrors on their circular showcases created a sense of movement through mythical rooms of a roccoco palace. Orders flowed in from everywhere – Virginia and Massachusetts, Chicago and Cleveland, Topeka, Mil­waukee and, from Elitch Gar­dens in Denver, a commission for “the finest carousel in the West.” When the Mullers left Philadelphia Toboggan Company about 1906 to begin their own business, they were sorely missed. Their departure also marked the end of menag­erie carousels at the Philadel­phia Toboggan Company. From that time on, the new Germantown-based compa­ny’s carousels would feature only horses.

Although many of the Phil­adelphia Toboggan Company records survive, they reveal surprisingly little about the individual carvers. Only in recent years has Leo B. Zoller been identified as the master carver who succeeded the Mullers, from approximately 1906 to 1912, and who, in 1908, created one of PTC’s greatest showpieces, Chicago’s River­view Park Carousel, which is now restored and operating in Atlanta.

Although Zoller carved only horses, there was tremen­dous variety in his large, proud steeds whose graceful, curving lines and rippled manes made them seem as if they were not so much run­ning or jumping as flowing. Grace, too, was the keynote of their floral, animal skin and even armored trappings. For carving seventy of these won­derful creatures for the Phila­delphia Toboggan Company’s five-row Riverview showpiece, Zoller received an average of twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents per horse for a “grand” total of less than two thousand dollars.

Perhaps even more than for their horses, the Philadelphia Toboggan Company’s carou­sels were famous for their chariots. Designed for the comfort of less-adventurous riders, they gave a striking focal point and mood to each carousel. Although certain images and themes were recurrent – imperial Rome, the goddess Columbia, the pro­tecting eagle – no two were ever exactly alike. Among the most celebrated of all chariots was the dazzling “Lover’s Chariot” Zoller carved for the Riverview Park Carousel. Large enough to seat thirteen people in three rows, his awe­some creation was dominated by the two lovers themselves, life-size classical nudes em­bracing on a billowing cloud of delicately scalloped carving, while a secretive cherub and little animals looked on.

Unfortunately, very little is known about Leo Zoller him­self. He left the Philadelphia Toboggan Company around 1911, leaving behind a few scattered entries in the com­pany account ledgers and some of the greatest master­pieces of the carver’s art.

After a period of decline, during which the company produced some very bizarre­-looking horses, the firm was revived by two carvers whose styles were nearly as different as night and day. The first, a former furniture carver, Frank Carretta, was born in Milan and, like the majority of his fellow carvers, an immigrant. Within a year of joining the Philadelphia Toboggan Com­pany sometime about 1912, Carretta was made carving foreman and was designing new patterns, as well as exe­cuting most of the important carving himself. Frank Carretta was a realist and a perfection­ist. His naturalistic horses seemed to be made of flesh and blood, not the applewood upon which he always in­sisted. They were large; even the jumpers gave the appear­ance of being firmly grounded, although they obviously didn’t like that one bit, for Carretta’s horses were impatient beasts.

His colleague John Zalar’s were not. Large and white, with wind-tossed manes, Zalar’s inspired horses seemed to escape the bonds of gravity and float blithely through air as if in a dream. Born in Aus­tria in 1874, Zalar was an ap­prentice sculptor of religious statues before coming to America in 1902. His first work as a carousel carver was for Charles Looff, and the element of fantasy that characterized Looff’s “Coney Island Style” animals remained an impor­tant part of Zalar’s work. Zalar joined the Philadelphia Tobog­gan Company about 1916 and remained in Philadelphia until tuberculosis forced him to move to California four years later. On the West Coast, en­sconced in a backyard work­room, he continued to carve horses for the Philadelphia Toboggan Company. Using a simple set of tools, he carved each animal entirely by hand, without the aid of machines to even rough out the basic form. His horses were shipped from California through the Panama Canal to Philadelphia. Failing health made him stop around 1923 and he died two years later. The most ethereal of all the Philadelphia Toboggan Company’s creations, many of Zalar’s dreamy horses have been lost, but some still float in graceful circles on the few of the carousels that have been saved.

Although few attending the annual convention of the Na­tional Association of Amuse­ment Parks in Chicago in 1927 could have realized it, the great age of the carousel would soon be closing. The Philadel­phia Toboggan Company’s exhibit featured Frank Carretta carving a horse, and together they were the stars of the show. Covering the conven­tion, a Philadelphia Bulletin reporter wrote, “How many has he made? One every week for many years. And every one is different. It is the way they paw the ground, the magnifi­cent impatient arch of their heads, or the snuffing lift of their nostrils that makes them different … All over the world are Signor Carretta’s horses. How old will they grow? Can you tell, ah? New gilt on the saddle and they live forever.”

Rising costs and the Great Depression dealt a swift and crushing blow to the carousel industry. Dentzel had already closed in 1928. The Philadel­phia Toboggan Company made its last carousel in 1932. As a manufacturer of roller coasters and skee-ball amuse­ments, the Philadelphia To­boggan Company, now headquartered in Lansdale, maintains a small company archive whose fading photos offer a wistful look at a lost art.

Over the years, the ele­ments have not been kind to these beautiful creations of wood and imagination. In 1938, more than a dozen car­ousels along the East Coast were destroyed by a hurricane. In its wake, one lovely Muller horse was found floating in a tidal pool. Only two horses, again, were spared from an early Dentzel carousel at Sea Isle City when it was de­stroyed by yet another hurri­cane that savaged the New Jersey shore in 1962. Forty-four other animals were bulldozed by engineers racing to build a seawall to protect the town. One of the most elaborate and beautiful of all the Philadel­phia Toboggan Company car­ousels was lost in a 1983 fire at Allentown’s Dorney Park.

Carousels are, indeed, an endangered species. Many of those not already victims to fire and storm are being bro­ken apart and sold, piece by piece, to collectors, as were Pennsylvania’s Pine Grove Park, Philadelphia Toboggan Company creation, carved by the Mullers in 1905, the name Dentzel at Pittsburgh’s West View Park. As the toll mounts, preservation efforts are in­creasing and a number of carousels have been entered in the National Register of His­toric Places, including a rare 1906 Philadelphia Toboggan Company menagerie carousel which is the’J)ride of Burlington, Colorado. In Penn­sylvania, West Mifflin’s historic Kennywood Park boasts one of the most lovely carousels Dentzel carvers ever produced, and, at Hershey Park, a grand 1919 Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel, once painted chocolate brown, is now the joyful focus of the sprawling amusement grounds.

Dentzel’s favorite carousel continued to turn at Woodside Park until the park’s dosing in 1954. Boxed and moved to Rockaway, Long Island, it was purchased by Frederick Fried and erected at the Lambertville Music Circus in New Jersey, where it continued to delight visitors until its purchase in 1966 by the Smithsonian Insti­tution, Washington, D.C. Now imprisoned in an old brick warehouse in Massachusetts, the carousel still languishes. Estimates for restoring it and constructing a suitable shelter now run to nearly one and a half million dollars. Seven of the animals have been restored and are scattered throughout the museum complex. Cerni’s flirting rabbit now greets visi­tors to the bookstore, where he still raises his paw as a gesture of greeting and, perhaps, of hope.

For Further Reading

Cerny, Marguerite. “In Memory of Salvatore Cernigliaro.” Merry­-Go-Roundup. 6, 4 (1979).

Dinger, Charlotte. Art of the Carousel. Green Village, N.J.: Carousel Art, Inc., 1983.

Fraley, Nina. The American Carousel. Berkeley, Ca.: Redbug Workshop, 1979.

Fried, Frederick. “Daniel Carl Muller.” Merry-Go-Roundup. 5, 3 (1978).

Fried, Frederick. A Pictorial History of the Carousel. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1964.

Jacques, Charles J., Jr. “The Car­ousels of the Philadelphia Tobog­gan Company.” Amusement Park Journal. 5, 4 (1984).

Williams, Barbara. “John Zalar, ‘The Master Carver.'” Merry-Go­-Roundup. 7, 2 (1980).

Williams, Barbara, ed. “Merry­-Go-Rounding in Pennsylvania.” Merry-Go-Roundup. 7, 4 (1980).

Winfield, Barbara LaBarge, ed. Carvers and Their Merry-Go­-Rounds. West Babylon, N. Y.: National Carousel Roundtable, 1974.

For their kindness and generosity in providing valuable information and photographs, the author wishes to thank William H. and Marion Dentzel; Sam High III of the Philadelphia Toboggan Com­pany; Gail Hall and Anne Hinds of the National Carousel Associa­tion; Maryjo Downey and Will Morton of the Kit Carson County Carousel Association; and Bushkill Park’s Mabel Long.

Linda Kowall is a frequent contrib­utor to this magazine. A graduate of Beaver College and a longtime resident of the Philadelphia area, she is a freelance writer specializ­ing in the history of filmmaking, photography and popular culture. Her articles have appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Ameri­can Film, Films in Review and numerous publications. A docu­mentary she wrote recently ap­peared on cable television. She is writing a book on filmmaker Siegmund (“Pop “) Lubin, the founder of the Lubin Studios and innovative movie producer.