A Hundred Thousand Hours

In nineteen eighty-eight, a Missoula cabinet maker named Chuck Kaparich visited a carousel in Spokane and came home with an idea. He wanted a carousel horse of his own, not an antique but a carved one. He contacted a carousel expert in New York who told him to carve it himself. By August of nineteen ninety-one, Kaparich had carved four ponies.

He took the project to the Missoula City Council with a proposal: he would provide the mechanical works, the frame, the horses, and the chariots, if the city would give the carousel a permanent home in downtown. The council agreed. The Missoula Redevelopment Agency formed an oversight board, and the community took it from there.

Families, businesses, and individuals could adopt a carousel pony for two thousand five hundred dollars, earning the right to name it, design it, and claim it. By July of nineteen ninety-two, all thirty-eight horses and both chariots had been adopted, raising a hundred thousand dollars in pledges. Volunteer carvers attended classes, learned to shape basswood, and put in hour after hour on ponies that weighed between a hundred and twenty and two hundred pounds finished. The number of volunteer hours logged by opening day on May twenty-seventh, nineteen ninety-five, was over a hundred thousand.

The carousel operates in Caras Park along the Clark Fork, adjacent to downtown. It holds what is described as the largest band organ in continuous use in the United States. The horses rotate at the speed they were carved at, slowly and deliberately, the way you make something by hand that is meant to last. Missoula has a reputation for the unusual kind of civic commitment that builds a carousel from scratch for no commercial reason. This is where it lives.