The Maple Street Review

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"When this last panel is cut up, that's it." — Linda (74) is selling the last sets of six hand-painted Halloween figures at a special price.

For half a century Linda Brockway painted the fronts of carnival rides. In 2010 the ghost train she had painted in 1978 came down, and she bought the scenery walls off the demolition crew. She has been cutting them into small figures ever since. The last panel is on the saw table now, and nobody is painting these faces anymore.

North Tonawanda, September. The workshop is a rented bay in an old freight building on the Erie Canal. It smells of sawdust and linseed oil. Against the back wall lean the scenery panels, taller than she is, the original paint still on them in patches — a piece of a moon here, half a bat's wing there. On the bench sits a cut-out pumpkin, primed, waiting for its face. Linda Brockway works the way she has since 1971. But this is the last of it.

"It's my eyes," she says, without looking up. "For the outline you need to see at eight inches, sharp, for hours. I've got that until about eleven in the morning now. After that the line starts to wander, and a wandering line ruins the face. So I paint mornings — and when the mornings run out, that's the end of it."

Then she says the part that seems to bother her more. "Nobody pays for a painted face anymore. Go to any carnival and look at the fronts — it's vinyl. Somebody emails a file to a print shop and they squeegee it on overnight. What I do is just — gone."

Fifty-five years of faces — and one ride that came back to her

She started in 1971, nineteen years old, in a shop that refitted rides for traveling carnivals. First base coats. Then lettering. Then, because the man who did the faces retired and nobody else wanted the job, the faces.

In 1978 the Haunted Hollow opened at Lockridge Park, on the water. Linda painted the whole front of it — six characters across the facade, each about eight feet tall: a jack-o'-lantern in a witch's hat, an owl, a black cat, a bat, a ghost with a bow tie, a skeleton in a top hat. She was twenty-six. The ride ran thirty-two seasons.

"They called me in the spring of 2010 and said it was coming down," she says. "The crew already had the front off, lying face-up in the grass. Six-ply, poplar core — you can't buy that grade now. I asked the foreman what he was doing with it. He said the dumpster. I gave him two hundred dollars and made four trips in my husband's truck."

Eleven panels went into the back of the workshop. For a year she had no idea what for.

"I'd painted those six faces when I was twenty-six. Then I was fifty-eight and they were lying in the grass. I wasn't going to let them go in a dumpster." — Linda Brockway

The answer came from her granddaughter. In the autumn of 2011 Josie, then seven, asked whether Grandma could make her "one of your faces" for the top of her dresser. Linda traced the jack-o'-lantern down to six inches, cut it out of the first panel and painted it. Then she made the other five, because Josie wanted the whole set.

Neighbors saw them. Then the harvest market in town asked. She has made a few every autumn since — never a catalogue, never a plan.

What makes Linda's figures different from what's in the seasonal aisle

It isn't the shapes. Anybody can cut those. It's how the face gets onto the wood — and the wood underneath it.

How each one is built: the shape is traced onto the old panel and cut on a scroll saw, one at a time, then sanded by hand until the edges are soft to the touch. Then primer, base colors, and the part that takes the skill — the black outline, drawn freehand in a single stroke. Lift the brush halfway and you get a bump in the line, and the face never looks right again. The white highlight dots in the eyes go on last. They take four seconds each and they are what makes a face look alive instead of printed.

Then the wax, worked in by hand along the edges and high spots — that's the carnival-weathered look, and it keeps moisture out of the grain. She works in batches, cutting and priming a dozen blanks at a time, but the faces still go on one by one. A set of six is the best part of a week.

It doesn't get thrown out. It comes back out every year.

The difference doesn't show in October. It shows in the third November, when the box goes back up to the attic — and the October after that, when it comes down again.

Printed decoration is ink on a film, glued to pressboard. One cold attic, one damp basement, and the board swells and the corners lift. The next time you unpack it, part of the face has come away with the tape.

Linda's are solid six-ply poplar, the paint driven into primed wood with wax over the top. Nothing peels off, because nothing is stuck on. When the edges soften after a decade it reads as age, not damage — the way a wooden spoon gets better-looking with handling.

"I never painted for one season in my life. A ride front stands outside twenty years in the rain and the salt and still has to look like something. That's the standard I learned. Unpack one of mine next October and it should look exactly the same — and in ten years it still will." — Linda Brockway

"Some of my customers have been setting these out for fifteen years"

She lifts a wooden box onto the bench, full of cards and printed photographs — people's kitchens, mantels, hallway tables. "They send pictures," she says. "Same people, most years, when they take them out of the box." She finds one from 2019: "Dear Mrs. Brockway, the cat is on our hall table for the sixth year running and my son refuses to let us put up anything else. He says the other stuff looks fake next to it."

Under the bench she keeps a crate she calls the mending box: things people brought her hoping she could fix them. A printed pumpkin sign with the face lifting off in a sheet. A "wooden" sign that turned out to be foam with a paper skin.

"I can't do anything with any of it," she says. "Not because it's hard. Because there's nothing underneath. Sand it and the picture comes off and you've got a blank board. Sand one of mine and you get wood, and I can paint it again."

The last two panels

At the end of October Linda closes the bay for good. "There's nobody to hand it to," she says. "Nobody's going to spend ten years learning to pull a line by hand so they can compete with a print shop. And even if they did, I couldn't teach them now — not with these eyes."

The trouble with her eyes started five years ago, and she has been working ahead ever since — batch after batch, in the hours the mornings gave her. Most of the eleven panels had already gone into fifteen years of harvest markets. The last two became this run: 286 complete sets, six figures each, all out of the front of the Haunted Hollow. The wall at the back is bare now, and there is no second ride to buy.

"These are the last pieces of that ride. I'd rather they were standing on somebody's table in October than sitting in my shop." — Linda Brockway, North Tonawanda, New York

So the sets find homes before Halloween, she has done something she never did at the markets: put one clear price on all of them. At the harvest market a set of six sold for $69. For this last run they are $39.

"Josie does the online part," she says. "I can paint a ride front. Don't ask me to work a website."

It was Josie — the girl the first set was cut for — who photographed every figure and put the shop together over two weekends. "She said the first set was hers, so the last ones should be her job too. I couldn't argue with that."

What sets Linda's figures apart

• Hand-painted, every one: cut, sanded, primed and painted by Linda herself. No stencils, no transfers, no stickers.
• Freehand outlines: the black line goes on in a single stroke, the way show-front painters do it. No two faces are quite identical.
• Real ride wood: every figure is cut from the panels of the Haunted Hollow, the ride she painted in 1978 — six-ply poplar, a grade you can't buy today.
• All six characters, in every set: jack-o'-lantern, owl, black cat, bat, ghost and skeleton — the same six that stood on the ride, shrunk to table size. The figures are not sold separately.
• Built to keep, not to bin: paint driven into primed wood, hand-worked wax finish. Nothing laminated, nothing to peel.
• Not only for Halloween: most owners leave them out well past October — a shelf, a mantel, a tiered tray, right through the dark months.
• Limited: 286 sets from the last two panels. When they're gone there is no more of that wood.

What customers say about Linda's figures

"A gift for the kind of person who keeps things"

What makes one of these a good gift isn't only the work in it. It's where the board came from. "When you hand somebody one of these," Linda says, "you're handing them a piece of a ride that thousands of people went through on summer nights for thirty-two years. It doesn't exist anymore. This is what's left of it."

Renee T. (44) from Toledo agrees: "I gave a set to my sister and told her the wood came off a ghost train, and that a 74-year-old woman painted every face by hand. She went quiet and just held the little owl. It stopped being a decoration right there. I ordered a second set that night."

Where can you buy Linda's figures?

The sets are available exclusively through this page. Josie runs Linda's shop at Back Road Goods — the only place you will get a set out of the North Tonawanda workshop.

Be careful elsewhere. Look-alikes have started appearing on the big marketplaces. In a photo they pass. In your hand they're pressboard or foam with the face printed on a film. Run a thumbnail along the outline: on a printed one you feel nothing, because there is nothing there.

Every order comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If the set isn't right for your home, one email to info@backroad-goods.com is all it takes.