With the loss of Lourinda Bray in November 2024, the deep-dive world of carousel culture dimmed.
Bray fell asleep during our interview last year. For a typical journalist doing a typical story, this would have been an embarrassment for both reporter and subject. But I knew better then, and now.
Bray was the founder and chief of Running Horse Studio, and we did share a chuckle about her equine surname. “Believe me, I’ve heard them all before,” she smiled gently from her wheelchair as a couple of workshop cats made biscuits in the shoulders of her plaid flannel shirt.
She shared the corniest: “She was only a stableman’s daughter, but all the horse manure.”
For four decades, Bray corralled carved wooden carousel horses and a menagerie of other whimsical beasts in her vast Irwindale workshop, restoring them to their former glory.
Most if not all were bound for galleries and private collections, never to be straddled again. These steeds had done their time in the ring, so to speak, rhythmically rising and descending to loopy calliope music in a scalloped circle, picking up speed as the ride peaked, then easing to a graceful stop when time was up. Bray told me, “These animals have had everything happen to them – drinks spilled on them, candy stuck to them. Bad paint touch-ups by people who didn’t know what they were doing.”
She was especially peeved by the vandalism endured by many of the creatures in her care, which included a fierce feline with a fish in its jaws, a giant praying mantis, a sparkly snail with a heart-shaped seat set into its iridescent silver-star strewn shell, dragons, dinosaurs, a glamorous Miss Piggy, angels and demons, a crowned, lipstick-lipped frog in search of a princess pulling a two-seat chariot for lovers, a giraffe or two, a crocodile with a Swarovski crystal teardrop—crocodile tear—on either scaly cheek, and variations on the equine theme including more than one silver-horned unicorn and pastel Pegasus.
“Unicorns are caprine,” she had corrected me. “They’re really more like goats than horses in terms of their physiology.”
The restoration undertaken by Bray and her team often addressed undoing tags and initials made with spray-paint, with a Sharpie, or with nail-polish. “That nail polish is really long-wearing,” she said calmly. The worst offense: carving or burning inanities into the wood or occasionally fiberglass body. “Really no biggie, though. We’ve got plenty of wood putty and sandpaper.”
Running a fingertip over a newly re-bonded seam where a prancing limb has been pinned back into space, she explained that a carousel animal’s back foot is typically the first site of serious damage, since riders tend to use that appendage as a handy step when mounting and dismounting.
Bray said that finding interns and apprentices who were willing to spend countless unpaid hours learning to make invisible repairs was difficult. “Most of them don’t see any payoff. Lots of people volunteer to do the decorative painting, but there’s so much more to restoration than a coat of paint.”
We talked about my helping her establish and promote the museum she’d dreamed of and worked toward manifesting, where all manner of carousel animals along with all of the carnival and circus ephemera that accompanied them would be not merely restored materially and mechanically, but celebrated for their historical meaning.
Looking across the vast warehouse-sized studio, she chuckled, “All I see are unfinished projects, lots of missing glass eyes that need replacing. ” Then she said “These animals really matter, not only because they’re charming, but also because they are part of culture that’s really going away. Life was slower, people enjoyed things more.”
Asked about the 90-year-old Griffith Park merry-go-round, installed when a ride cost a nickel, she shrugged. As we go to press amid wild winds and fire, the Griffith Park merry-go-round with its 17 quadrigas of leaping, hand-carved horses has been closed for repairs since January, 2022. The controversial pony-ride attraction shut down around the same time.
Bray had said, “They want more than $100,000 to fix everything. I don’t have that kind of money. I wish I did. I guess the carousel’s in probate. I hear that it might not even stay in Griffith Park.”
“I watched kids — young children — on the carousel, looking at their phones instead of enjoying the ride.”
We feel safe in saying: Bray enjoyed the ride.
Happy trails, Miss Lourinda.
Lourinda is (was) an old and dear friend. In “days of old” she worked with the the community theatres –
particularly the San Marino Players – as a set designer and builder and I worked many days with her.
Having seen less of her in recent years, I did see her exhibits at the Pasadena Historical Society, and attended one of her great parties at her Carousel Factory some years ago. Lourinda was intense and
focused, and fun and delightful to work with. Happy Trails, indeed, my friend.
Thank you, Peggy E. I enjoyed meeting her.