Carousel Maker Brings Art Form, His Dream to Life

As a child living in Mexico, Augustin Rodiles would watch for hours as the old man who lived across the street transformed lifeless hunks of wood into Madonnas, crucifixes and other religious symbols worshiped by the townspeople.

“It was like magic,” Rodiles says. “That man was more respected than the town’s mayor. I wanted to be like him.”

Now he is. Neighborhood children gather in Rodiles’ one-car garage on a tree-lined street in Pasadena as the bespectacled 35-year-old works his own magic, sculpting blocks of wood into enchanting carousel horses.

Rodiles, a cabinetmaker by trade, on Monday started teaching a series of classes in what he calls “the lost art of carousel making.”

“I am going to teach them how to bring this wood to life,” Rodiles says. “When it happens . . . when it begins to take shape, it is really very exciting.”

The response to the course offering has been so overwhelming that the Pasadena Recreation Department decided to offer four series of 10 evening classes each, instead of the one series that was planned. All will be held at the Victory Park Center in Pasadena.

“I don’t know anybody who doesn’t think the carousel is wonderful and romantic,” says Nancy Wood, a 38-year-old Pasadena resident who signed up for Rodiles’ course. “They are beautiful objects, rich in detail and color. As a child, riding the carousel was my favorite thing.”

It was Rodiles’ passion.

“Every year the fair would come to town and there were always many rides,” Rodiles recalls. “But the one that attracted me most was the carousel. I would listen to the organ music and watch the horses go round and round. I would spend all of my money on that one ride.”

Although he made his first carving tool when he was 10--a rudimentary metal instrument for gouging wooden slabs--it wasn’t until two decades later that Rodiles turned his devotion into a real craft, carving feisty stallions with prancing gaits, flowing manes and jewel-bedecked wooden bits and saddles.

He came to the United States in 1967 with his family and, at the age of 12, labored with his father and older brother in the vegetable fields of Oxnard. During lunch breaks, the boy would carve small animals out of tree branches. “One day my boss saw me and asked if he could buy one,” Rodiles recalls. “I gave it to him, and the next day he brought me professional carving tools. I didn’t even know how to use them because I had never seen professional tools before.”

It didn’t take him long to learn, however. Rodiles quickly turned his idle hobby into a job as a woodworker. In 1985, Rodiles stumbled upon a shop in Ventura where carousel horses were made. “The owner didn’t believe me that I knew how to carve,” Rodiles says. “I told him to let me try and if he didn’t like what I did, he wouldn’t have to pay me.”

Rodiles was hired on the spot. And he spent the next year carving reproductions of the wooden carousel horses before going back to the more lucrative trade of building cabinets. Today he is employed by a woodworking shop in Pasadena and at night and on weekends he shaves, chips and whittles away at the magnificent carousel horses in his garage.

“I build cabinets to support my family,” Rodiles says. “But I build the horses for my own pleasure.”

It takes about three months for Rodiles to complete a horse, which is made of pine and is about 5 feet tall and 5 feet long. He sells them for $4,000 unpainted and $5,000 painted.

In his cluttered workshop, littered with wood shavings, Rodiles is working on a full-sized horse as well as a miniature one, which is 3 feet long and 30 inches tall. It is the smaller horse that he will teach his students to make.

First, they will learn to make drawings, like the full-scale blueprints that cover Rodiles’ garage walls. Then, he says, he will teach the students how to carve the horses, block by block, “just like in the old days.” Each horse is assembled from about 60 pieces of wood and then glued together to form the whole. Rodiles has studied how carousel animals originally were made, and he is dedicated to preserving such methods.

“Today they make them out of plastic,” Rodiles says. “The way I make them is the way they made them 100 years ago. The old ones are beautiful art pieces and the people who used to make them were real artists.”

The people taking Rodiles’ classes are a mixture of artists, amateur woodworkers and the merely curious. But most of all, they are people who have ridden the carousel and remember the pleasure it brought them.

“I always thought the horses on merry-go-rounds were pretty, kind of magical and dreamlike,” says 13-year-old Shelby Makeel. “I think it’s great that I’ll be able to make one of my own.”