Fantastic Whirligigs to Get a New Home

When a breeze brushes through the field just below Vollis Simpson's machine shop, you can hear the sounds of metal clanging against metal and of Ferris wheel-like contraptions turning.
But the cacophony of sound from the 29 whirligigs that Simpson built over a period of 10 years has ebbed: The buggy rider's whip no longer moves, the horse's legs don't trot and his ears don't flap. The two men sawing on another whirligig don't move back and forth. The guitar player no longer strums and has slowed the pat of his foot. Tree limbs grow through a Ferris wheel lined inside with hundreds of stainless steel milkshake cups that still shimmer in the sun despite their decades of exposure.
The works have fallen victim to the 91-year-old's health problems that have left him unable to climb as high as 50 feet to keep the mechanisms greased, and the red, white and blue paint that dominates his work shiny and new.
"I'm not able to look after it now," Simpson said on a hot summer morning, sitting in a lawn chair in the shade of the field about 50 miles east of Raleigh. "I can't climb. If I could climb, I wouldn't let it go. My knees are wore out."
Simpson is letting go of the 29 masterpiece whirligigs that have stood in this field in eastern North Carolina since the early 1980s. The city of Wilson, with the help of the North Carolina Arts Council, hopes to buy, move and conserve the whirligigs, relocating them to a 2-acre park in downtown Wilson by November 2012.
Organizers say they're already receiving private pledges, and the arts council has provided a $10,000 grant.

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