Like many life-altering moments, the news about the carousel came in the middle of the night. It was 1971 and Tom Phillips and his father were asleep in a hotel in London, England, on a holiday. At 3 a.m. his mother Nancy, who wasn’t great with time zones, gave them a ring from Toronto.

She had seen an ad in the newspaper for a merry-go-round for sale near Queensville, Ont. — “Any reasonable offer accepted.” She had driven there and met a “tough old carny,” who led her to a junkyard, where 32 broken animals were piled on flatbed trucks. Nancy wanted to rescue them, fix them up — maybe decorate the house with them.

In the London hotel, her husband “turned the phone half over and gave the crazy sign,” Tom recalls.“ He obviously thought it was a wild idea, but he was smart enough to say yes, go ahead. He understood her in that way.”

The horses, roosters and cats were delivered soon after to the family’s Lytton Park home, and Nancy visited paint-stripping shops to learn the trade.

(“I didn’t know that,” Tom says, reading aloud from his mother’s notes he recently found. “This is 1971, pre-pre-pre-Google. So somehow she apprenticed herself.”)

That is how the large vat of chemicals came to be in the garage that summer. Nancy and Derek, both around 50, wore face masks and dipped each animal, carved from basswood, into the mixture to strip the paint. There were decades of cheap fixes and layers of lead paint to scrape off. Afterward, they were sanded, and Nancy painted each one in cheerful colours.

As horses and pigs jammed up the corridors of the family home, Tom remembers his father issuing the eviction notice: the animals had to go outside. The family had long discussed whether they’d install a swimming pool in the backyard. They decided to build a carousel instead.

They hired an architect to design a 12-sided gazebo where the flower bed used to be, and oldest son Mark, then a pilot in the RCAF, designed the mechanics. “I was sort of dragooned into it,” he says, laughing from his Belwood home, north of Guelph.

Derek helped with the build and Nancy decked out the interior with knick-knacks she had collected, made horsetails out of wigs, and when it was finally finished three years later, she put up a sign: “Cherish this Carousel — It is my gift to the child in each of us.” Every summer, neighbourhood children went for a ride, and for the better part of 45 years, the creative types who attended the fabulous soirees at the Phillips home made a post-meal pilgrimage. Party guest Pierre Berton was said to favour the pig.

“They’d all profess that they really didn’t want to do the carousel, and they were too old … but then the child in everyone had to get out on the carousel,” says family friend Kristin Basso.

Phillips was 91 when she died four years ago, and her son Tom had put off selling the family home until this year. It’s always a time-consuming job dealing with an estate, but Nancy was trickier, owing to the carousel and the handful of wooden creatures inside the home. “Hello?” her son laughs, pointing to a four-and-a-half-foot ostrich in the corner of the study. “You mean you don’t have an ostrich?”

(Real estate agent Jimmy Molloy said the flightless bird earned a few double takes at the showings. “You’re laughing just thinking about it,” he says, “And I think that’s what the house was. The house was contagious with good humour.”)

The carousel animals were not included in the sale, but Molloy turned the merry-go-round on a few times, because how could you not? The sale closed in March, and the carousel has been dismantled. Tom said his mother wanted the creatures to stay together, hopefully in Canada. They had delighted Nancy for half of her life, and she saw no reason why the fun had to end with her death.

From the beginning, Nancy designed the home she shared with her husband and two boys with a narrative vision that filmmaker Wes Anderson would appreciate. She loved coral, couches with busy floral patterns, perfectly spherical topiary trees, and eccentric touches like the brass hand door knocker on the front door. A reporter found Nancy in the yard one day in 1956, wheelbarrow in hand, building a terrace. The Globe and Mail reporter noted that Derek was a “master carpenter” and Nancy was the “idea woman, painter and decorator,” with a “passion for ferreting out unusual little shops.”

“That house was always the embodiment of everything she loved and could do,” says her niece Nancy Penny. “She was fabulous at doing everything: painting, sanding, you name it.”

Nancy McClenaghan was born in Ottawa in 1923 and grew up in Toronto, attended Bishop Strachan School and graduated from the Ontario College of Art. (“I have been totally independent since I was 18 despite coming from a well-to-do family, BSS, the whole bit,” she once told the Star.) During the Second World War, she was a commercial artist in the advertising department of Simpson’s, and in her early 20s, she moved to New York and worked for a Madison Ave. ad agency. Her first marriage didn’t work out, but in 1950, she married Derek Phillips, a Toronto-based engineer.

They lived in Brazil for a time but came back to Toronto in the mid-1950s, moving into the imposing Georgian-style home near Bathurst St. and Lawrence Ave. Built in 1937, it was a belated wedding gift from Derek’s parents. His father, Eric Phillips, was a “leading industrialist and financier,” the Star said, and a former chairman of the board of governors at University of Toronto.

The home was a lifelong work in progress, and Nancy was adept at tilework, masonry and decorative flourishes. She was addicted to creative things, and her husband Derek was easygoing and “very much in love,” Tom says. They loved to host parties, and in the 1970s, the family added a large dining room to the back of the house that gave them more room for just that. Nancy chose an eye-catching coral wallpaper with two kinds of bird for the grand room: one with a bug in its mouth, and the other, resting on a branch.

It was just a touch too dark for her liking, so she hand-painted all of the resting birds green. She left one bird alone, so children could make a game of finding it. She was thoughtful like that.

People still talk about the parties with a mixture of wistfulness and disbelief: the carousel, the dancing, the individual gifts waiting at the front door. Tom remembers sitting at the top of the stairs as a child, listening to the ice clinking in the glasses, the bossa nova music, the laughter.

In Debrett’s Illustrated Guide to the Canadian Establishment, author Peter C. Newman named Nancy Phillips among the two dozen leaders of Toronto’s social set in 1983. “Instead of being like their mothers — who still keep neurotic Lhasa Apsos or Labs, shy away from real work, and always removed their earrings before answering the phone — the new breed of Toronto society women is energetic, gregarious, ambitious and tough,” he wrote.

Nancy wore her hair coiffed just so, her makeup perfect with her statement coral lipstick, whether she was caulking tile or hosting a backyard social. She spoke with aplomb, her speech festooned with darlings, as in, “Darling, my guests can do anything they want,” and “Oh darling, do not ask anything about me, it’s so boring, tell me what you’re doing,” her niece remembers.

She was also a writer with a wit as dry as the martinis she served before dinner. She had an illustrated a column called “One Woman’s View” for the Toronto Telegram. She wrote for Toronto Life, and the Toronto Star magazine “Elegance,” where she wrote that she was “partial to the idea of adding as many predatory divorcées as possible” to a party because “they create a kind of subterranean angst, a tension which is felt by even the most happily married.”

The backyard popped with pink impatiens, softly lit by romantic lighting and candles at night. There was music playing at just the right volume, cocktails to warm up the crowd, and guests seated strategically around small tables. In the winter, the carousel was lit up, glowing in a backyard carpeted with snow.

Her son Mark calls his mother the “most unprejudiced person” he knew, someone who would happily spend time with a ditch digger or prince, so long as they were nice and thoughtful. The party guest list leaned toward actors, musicians and artists, but it wouldn’t be odd to see a judge, politician, journalist, lawyer, architect, economist, gynecologist, stockbroker, balloonist or soldier perched on a zebra. Well, it was actually a horse with a creative paint job. (“I just want to get that out there,” Tom says, in the interest of full disclosure.)

In 1985, Judge Robert F. Reid. wrote a poem about the merry-go-round in City and Country Home magazine: “Oh say can you see that beneath yonder tree/ In defiance of natural law;/ Escaped from a circus hall, saved from the wrecker’s ball/ Is un manège de chevaux de bois?/ There are parties and dances and frolics and routs/ And diversions and gambols as well;/ But the best of such pleasures (that can be no doubts)/ Is a ride on that sweet carousel.”

The magazine featured an article on the carousel, and noted prominent riders such as Harold Town, author Pierre Berton, cartoonist Ben Wicks, actor Jack Creley and former mayor David Crombie, among others. (“I remember the carousel for sure,” says Crombie. “It was the only one around.”)

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She wrote a few plays (One was called Friends, Lovers and Husbands — “I had a colourful collection of men,” she told the Star, “Don’t we all?”) After Derek died in 2001, Nancy kept busy. She and her niece, Nancy Penny, went on a few jazz cruises to the Caribbean. Phillips hosted a backyard soiree for the musicians afterward. When her niece invited them, a few said they’d bring their instruments. “You misunderstand,” Penny told them. “Aunt Nancy wants to entertain you.”

Jazz musician Barry Elmes said that by the second and third events at the Phillips house, the guests knew what was coming after dessert.

“She loved this, you could tell,” he recalls, remembering how Nancy beamed just before she announced it was time for the carousel ride. As they slowly wandered to the gazebo, martinis in hand, Nancy pulled him aside. “ ‘Barry, I think you should ride the pig because you know Pierre Berton, he always insisted on riding the pig, I think you should ride it, too.’ ” (After her death he created a song to match the spirit of Nancy and her parties. He called it “Pierre Berton’s Pig.”)

Her age was a mystery and her voice was distinct. “I don’t know how to describe it, but I used to feel like I’d be talking to Kitty Carlisle from the 1960s,” he says, referencing the American actress. “Baaaarry, you muuust ride the pig,” he says, lingering on some of the vowels.

In all the best ways, she was like a character in a novel.

“I’d wake up the next day, I’d feel like I was part of some F. Scott Fitzgerald dream,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if some rabbit in a top hat walked by.”

Standing in the backyard, Tom Phillips points to the fibreglass pineapple on the roof of the pavilion, which turns when the carousel turns.

“Again completely unnecessary, a gratuitous addition,” he says, relishing these last days in the kingdom his parents built. “This is pure whimsy.”

Inside, everything is just as Nancy left it. A lace umbrella leans against the middle pillar, and the bucket of whirligigs that Nancy passed out to guests sits on a shelf, near a sign that reads: “Nancy’s Golden Gallopers. Ten cents a ride. Please do not engage in Amorous Dalliance While the Machine is in Motion.” Tom opens a cabinet that has a tape deck. He presses a few buttons, a tinny waltz plays, and the wild-eyed horse resumes its chase, never catching that goofy old rooster.

At the showings, many people came through with a connection to the carousel, and the people who didn’t know Nancy felt like they did by the time they left. There was still some residue of that old magic. “You walked through the looking glass and you were in a different place,” says the realtor, Jimmy Molloy.

“She was kind of the nexus of good taste, charm and joy, and that’s what the house became for so many people,” he adds.

From his home in Belwood, where a prancing white horse decorates his office, Mark Phillips says he is a little bit sad that the house is no longer part of the family, but he understands.

“I’ve discovered in life that you just cannot go back,” he says. “Hopefully somebody else will enjoy it or tear it down and start all over.”

Nancy Phillips restored the carousel animals herself before assembling the carousel in her Toronto backyard.

Back in 1907, the Scarboro Beach Park, “A Gay City of Light by the Lake,” offered a carousel as one of its “Hundred Novel Attractions.” Hanlan’s Point Amusement Park had one, and so did Sunnyside Park.

Patrick Wentzel, the president of the National Carousel Association, said there were about 3,500 “classic wood carousels” made in North America by the Great Depression. The industry was developed and strengthened by European immigrants, such as Gustav Dentzel, who hired Salvatore Cernigliaro, an Italian man who had carved wood furniture in Italy, and soon became a “master carver” of animals in the United States.

There are roughly 225 of those classic carousels still in active use, and Southwestern Ontario has five of these “real treasures,” including Centreville Amusement Park’s 1907 Dentzel. (It almost sold to Carmel, Ind., for $3 million in 2017, but Carmel’s city council rejected the deal.) Some of Nancy’s carousel figures, like the ostrich, pig and cat, are similar to the Centreville animals. Looking at photos of them, Wentzel says they look like Dentzel figures. (In a 1986 story, Nancy mentioned the cat was carved by the famed Cernigliaro of Dentzel Co.)

There was a time when nearly every amusement park had a carousel, but “now a lot of the big parks” don’t want them because of the upkeep they require, Wentzel says from his home in West Virginia.

Canada’s Wonderland has a 1928 model from the Philadelphia Toboggan Co., a beloved ride that has been in the park since opening day. Every off-season a staff member inspects the 68 creatures to see who needs restoration work, which involves sanding, hand painting and airbrushing — a two- to three-week process per animal. Wentzel says that municipalities and Rotary clubs often get behind the purchase of a carousel, but the antique machines are difficult to place because they need a climate-controlled building, which is another expense. (The National Carousel Association awards grants for carousel preservation to help offset costs, he says.)

Tom Phillips says carousel madness peaked in his parents’ house in the 1970s, when they had restored about 66 wooden animals, which were originally carved sometime between 1900 and 1920, he says. Over the years, two-thirds of the animals were given away, sold or traded, and at the time of Nancy’s death there were 20 in the carousel, and a few in the home, which are staying with the family. Phillips hopes to sell the animals as a group or possibly donate them to a worthy institution. Failing that, he plans to put them up for auction as American folk art.

The National Carousel Association does not advocate collecting individual figures. Wentzel says someone like Nancy would have been an exception, since she created a carousel that operated for nearly 50 years.

He keeps records of “lost carousels” that are missing in action because of fire, auction, dismantling or dispersal. There is a chance that Nancy’s animals came from a lost carousel, “that we really don’t know about, and here 40 years later, (they are) resurfacing again, and we have a chance to capture that history.”

He hopes they stay together: “Carousels are meant to be ridden, they are not to be put away someplace where you can’t enjoy them,” he says.

Tom Phillips will do his best to keep the gang united. Any reasonable offer accepted.

In the world of carousels, everything comes full circle.