ourinda earned a BA in painting at Tennessee Wesleyan
College in Athens, Tennessee - in fact the first ever to be granted and
she holds an MA in technical theatre for television from Occidental College
in Los Angeles, CA. - the second ever granted
She says "I have had many jobs, some during college and some after." She was a lab technician at Caltech for Ari Haggenschmidt, (who did the first research on the effects of smog on rubber and tobacco plants.) for 6 months and then became the lab assistant for the botany department at Glendale College. After a year there, she went to Tennessee Wesleyan and spent the next three years completing her bachelor's degree. During Christmas vacations, she worked as a foreman on the Rose Parade floats, coordinating the painting (all floats are covered with a sprayed on cuccoon and painted the same colors as the expected floral material), signage and application of flowers, seeds, greenery and petals.
After
graduation, Lourinda took a year off and just did floats and some volunteer
work with social services. After a summer of working on paper floats (those
not covered with floral material) and playing pool while the floats were
in a parade, she recalls that she was tired of the whole thing and so
applied and was accepted at Occidental College as a master's candidate.
Her involvement with collecting carousels started in the mid Seventies, she says, after having made the usual investment in stocks, and bonds. She saw a listing for carousel horses from the Pomona fairground and bought the first of many animals - a military Illions with a wonderful waterfall mane and a sword and dagger. It was in very bad condition, but beautiful of line and face.
"I began purchasing horses up the coast through a broker in Sacramento," says Lourinda. Through a commercial broker, she found a new business park in Irwindale that suited her needs and she says it amazes her to think that she has been in that location for more than 25 years now.
Her love of carousels is much older and longer. As a child, her mother would take her to Long Beach, CA to visit the hotel her father had built and left her. This is where she would first take a ride in the bathysphere (a capsule that went under water in a tank that had starfish glued to the sides and paintings of fish) and then on to the carousel. It had enormous jumping horses on the outside row and small standing horses on the inside row and the whole affair was on an undulating track that shuddered as you went around.
She recalls, "I always rode a sea green horse with fish hanging off the rump and scrolled leaves on the shoulder. I rode until I had used up all but a dime of my allowance and then went to the gold fish toss." You can see this wonderful carousel in the movie "Gorilla at Large", a Black & White film that also shows the large Looff carousel briefly in the back ground.
Lourinda rode carousels wherever she could find them, preferring them to any other ride but she always took forever to choose just the right animal to ride and had to wait til she could get her turn, never a stander, or an armoured one - lots of flowers or feathers - and hopefully on the outside. The last took some convincing of her parents who thought the inside was safer. She says she can remember thinking that the best job of all would be to get to paint carousel horses and promised herself that someday she would own a carousel of her own.
She calls all of this her own speckled past with lots of jobs and activities along a meandering path that led to just playing with carousel ponies all day. Lourinda says, "I still take care of lots of animals; garden and do some volunteer work with my local botanic garden and work with handicapped kids on Saturday mornings. I never seem to have enough time and yet sometimes I can't account for the time spent."
She says the best part of the day is walking into the warehouse and greeting all the wooden folk and the two guard kitties, Smokey and Zephyr.