Every year, a team comes together at the Ellis Carousel in Coolidge Park to maintain its structure, safety, and most importantly, its history.
Todd Goings, a carousel carver and restorationist, Beth McNelly, a jurisdictional safety inspector, and Larry Ridge, the instructor at Chattanooga’s Horsin’ Around Carousel Carving School, where the project first started; and a dedicated crew from Chattanooga Parks and Outdoors.
Ridge has been a woodcarver since his Sunday school teacher gave him his first X-ACTO Carving Set at 14-years-old. It was not until he met Bud Ellis, the founder of Horsin’ Around Carousel Carving School, that Ridge began to change gears and focus on carousel work.
Bud and his wife, Johnnie, birthed the idea of the Coolidge Carousel and built it from the ground up. “1985 was the year that it started coming together formally, but they’d been working for years before that point in time, said Ridge. “They would take it to the different clubs here in town, everybody he could get to listen and tell them about the possibility of what we could do if we made our own carousel.”…