Round and round we ride on his artistic vision
Few of us are brave enough to ever pursue a dream. Fewer still have the vision, tenacity and good luck to succeed. Bud Ellis, humble and soft-spoken at 83, is the rare example of someone who did just that.
Bud’s dream was to build a carousel for the city of Chattanooga. This summer, that carousel celebrates its 20th anniversary as the centerpiece of Coolidge Park. But at various points during the 12-year journey from dream to reality, it seemed like the whole project might fall apart.
Bud recalls potential locations at the Aquarium, the Hunter Museum, and the Theatre Center falling through. The project suffered a few false starts with funding. Finally, he convinced the City Council to loan him $250,000. A fifth of that budget was used to purchase the skeleton of a century-old carousel that had been retired from Atlanta’s Grant Park in 1978. Years of neglect and water damage had rotted away the carousel’s original carved animals.
To replace them, Bud opened the doors of his shop to a team of volunteers, most of whom had no carving experience. “At our peak we had 15 carvers,” Bud recalls. “The real story for me is who they were.” Each of those stories can be told through the animals they carved.
Mother and son team Teresa and Jon Harris began their work on a galloping sea horse before his deployment with the Navy. Years later, Teresa finished it with her husband Skip to celebrate the arrival of their grandchildren.
Rick Jacob’s love for hang gliding and the Grateful Dead inspired some of the details on his prancing bear. When Pat Miller passed away before completing her horse, fellow carver James Bacon finished it, adorning it with a Hospice medal to honor those who had cared for Pat during her final days.
The process of realizing Bud’s carousel took twelve years. “The day it opened we had all the animals looking out the windows,” Bud recalls. “We hadn’t put them on the machine yet, and you could look at the windows and see nose and finger prints—thousands of ‘em, all around—where the kids had pushed up against the glass to look at them.”
Before the carousel was open to the public, Bud and the volunteer carvers joined him for a maiden voyage. “We had a guy tie a rope to one of the beams, and he pulled the carousel to make it turn for us,” Bud recalls with a chuckle. “That was the very first ride.”
The carousel was an immediate success, and the city recouped its entire investment within the first eight months. “There was an article in the Atlanta Business Journal about how they couldn’t believe how fast we paid it off,” Bud remembers. Other cities in the area followed Chattanooga’s lead and developed carousels of their own.
These days, Bud Ellis spends his free time painting animals in the workshop behind his quaint home. Every so often he’s asked to recall the story of the Coolidge Park Carousel for a local reporter. He is always happy to oblige. “How many people get the chance to do something like that?” he marvels. “To make something for the next two or three generations?”
The story of Bud’s carousel was lovingly preserved by local author Carol Lannon in her book “Carving a Dream: The Story of the Chattanooga Carousel”, which is available at local bookstores. It will be also the subject of an upcoming podcast series from NPR reporter Michael Edward Miller, son of the late carver Pat Miller.