In 2012, I wrote about a late-1970s cassette recording of a dying carousel in Saint Paul, Minnesota, as part of the Reader‘s In Rotation series. It had been posted by a blog called Tape Findings in 2009, but in 2012 it wasn’t online in any form that I could embed on our website. I recently discovered that this situation had changed: in 2017, somebody named Shogun_Okami uploaded the tape to YouTube. Now I can make you listen to it—or, more accurately, I can put the choice to do so within a single click of your innocent ears.

The fairgrounds, which have been in their present location since 1885, are several blocks from Como Park and its zoo, though—which raises the question of why, in the late 70s, anyone would’ve called the state fair’s carousel the “Como zoo carousel.” As best as I can guess, either there was just the one carousel and Hurley or his dad conflated the two nearby locations, or else there was a second carousel at the zoo that really was permanently decommissioned in the late 70s. I haven’t been able to reach anyone at OFC to check—Cafesjian’s Carousel is doubly closed, due to COVID-19 and the winter. If you know, please comment!

  • The still image on this video is of Cafesjian’s Carousel, but I don’t consider that an authoritative identification.

Update: Within 12 hours of publishing this story, I heard from Tracy M. Tolzmann, president of Our Fair Carousel. (He’s also grand sheik of the Block-Heads tent of the international fraternal organization Sons of the Desert—in other words, president of the Twin Cities chapter of a worldwide Laurel & Hardy fan club.) This is about the best possible outcome of my questionable decision to write this in the first place, so I’m pretty excited!

The original band organ in what’s now Cafesjian’s Carousel was destroyed by fire in 1939. As part of the ride’s complete restoration, it was outfitted with a Wurlitzer 153 Band Organ, rebuilt by OFC board member Mike Merrick. “A Wurlitzer 153 is roughly twice as large as a 105, with a much wider range of musical capability within its achromatic scale,” says Tolzmann. “I assist Mike on annual spring tunings of the organ’s 163 wooden pipes, and we routinely touch up the tuning when it is obviously out of tune, which is rare. The Cafesjian’s Carousel Wurlitzer is considered one of the best-sounding 153 organs in the U.S.”