The Jam Sham

I am actually pretty annoyed that Reeves decided to sell most of the “good” stuff they had set aside for Black Friday several days before the actual Black Friday. 

I realize that I have had a really, really good year model-wise and I don’t need to be spending any more money. And I get it that this week/s long Black Friday sale thing has become a thing with sellers of all stripes this season.

But it is kind of a bummer to wake up on Black Friday and not have anything to look forward to, especially when you do have the fundage. And especially when your shopping in the previous week was almost a total bust. 

(Let’s just say both Plan A and Plan B for my vacation-that-is-not-BreyerFest next year are completely out of the question. First world problems, but still ugh…)

I did have a tiny bit of success today – just an itty-bitty bit – when I did venture out of the house on Saturday to buy a few necessities. I found a couple of books at the Salvation Army Store that always has a good selection:

The Brighty is a Scholastic first printing, which is a nice plus. Both books will probably end up on my saleslist, though the Mustang book has an interesting inscription that will greatly amuse a couple of my friends… 

Since I am also still feeling a little crappy because of my back – which is making it hard as heck to get any of the crafting I had planned for the weekend done – today is another picture day. And that picture is the #410994 Jamboree Sham from 1994!

Due to the introduction of several newer Arabian and Arabian-ish Traditional molds in recent years, Sham has fallen slightly out of favor; he’s also come in a bajillion colors, which has made it difficult to find something new to dress him up in, though they did do a mighty fine job on the BreyerFest release of Lugh in 2020.

The Jamboree Sham came out only about ten years after the mold’s introduction, when there were still many options to explore, though most of them still veered into “just another shade of Bay” territory. So a Flaxen Dark Liver Chestnut was a delightful surprise!

They only made about 550 of him, which may seem like a lot for a mid-1990s Special Run release. He was still a little tough to acquire though, especially if you were living on the East Coast: after the initial hullabaloo, I was able to get one for not too much more than retail.

And Now, A Nonadventure!

It’s October and all I want to do is hibernate! Alas, I have no time for that silliness.

Speaking of silliness, I suppose I should tell you about my desperate and ultimately failed attempt at trying to get on Antiques Roadshow earlier this year. To bring Breyers, or horses, or frankly anything other than rusty old Civil War guns and pawn shop guitars to the masses…

One of their shooting locations this year was less than 20 minutes (!) from the house, so I applied for free tickets.

Didn’t get drawn for them. I was not expecting to, but still annoying, and disappointing.

Then they made more tickets available. Didn’t get drawn for those, either.

Then they offered “free” tickets if you made a donation to the local PBS station. That was a no-go from the start, since the amount they were asking as a suitable donation was greater than my BreyerFest budget.

Then they offered tickets to people who could write a compelling enough essay about an object that they wanted to bring. There were a significant number of tickets available (150, I think?) and I can write things.

Surely I could thwart my lack of luck with the power of my words! So I did write ups on three horse-related items.

First, the large, hand-colored photograph I have of Midnight Sun. Aside from the strangeness of an obvious relic from Harlinsdale Farm turning up in a flea market in Michigan, I thought it’d also make for an excellent segue into educating the public about the ongoing efforts to save the breed from the scourge of the Big Lick. And I could bring a Breyer Midnight Sun as part of the package!

Nope.

Second, on the letter I have written by Wild Horse Annie to Marguerite Henry talking about the newly-released Breyer Hobo (among other things). One equine legend writing to another equine legend about a third equine legend (Breyer, ahem). Aside from the sheer uniqueness of the letter, I could also have brought along a Classic Hobo and possibly other Marguerite Henry-inspired models for illustrative purposes.

Nope on that one, too.

Third, I wrote about the horse-themed photo album I found a couple years ago, featuring photos of the previous owner’s horses, his trip to Cheyenne Frontier Days (in 1946!), carefully annotated photos from a day at the racetrack in June 1942, all that good stuff. And there was a photograph in the album of a WWII-era Navy baseball team that might have included Yogi Berra, too.

If they weren’t interested in any of the horse stuff, surely the baseball angle would have drawn them in, right? I mean, after guitars and Civil War relics, there seems to be baseball stuff in every episode of Antiques Roadshow, am I right?

Nope. Strike three.

Sorry guys, but apparently they didn’t find me or my stuff interesting enough. This I found a little more devastating than losing a random lottery-type thing: I expect to lose random lotteries, but I pride myself on being at least minimally interesting to almost everybody!

I suppose if I had something horse-related that was also Detroit-related, like Seabiscuit (who started his “comeback” here) or Man o’ War (the Match Race against Sir Barton was just across the river, in Windsor), or The Lone Ranger (which originated in Detroit), or a verifiable piece of a local carousel, because Detroit’s Golden Age corresponded almost exactly with the Golden Age of Carousels, and there were probably more wooden carousels here per capita than any other place on Earth, y’all.
 
But I didn’t have any of that. So like most my other attempts to bring attention to the hobby to the masses, I found myself sitting home. Again.

So many people in the hobby try to hide their interest in the hobby from the public eye. Ironically, I do everything short of tap-dancing down I-75 in a hot pink tutu during rush hour, and I see nary a shrug in my direction.

Sigh. 

More Additions to the Reference Shelf

Here’s an unusual and unexpected addition I made to my Marguerite Henry First Edition collection. Though, as you will plainly see, I rather doubt they’ll ever be making a model or gift set out of this one:

There are no horses in Geraldine Belinda, just a selfish little girl who learns how to share. It’s from 1942, a few years before Henry wrote Justin Morgan Had a Horse.

I found it while poking around a dollar table at the local flea market; I only happened to pick it up because my mother’s name is Geraldine. She’s never been fond of it, but I thought it might cheer her up a bit to know that her name was at one time considered pretty enough to grace the cover of a children’s book.

(And who knows? Maybe that’s really where Grandma Jankowiak got the name. It’s from the same time period. Though Mom’s middle name is actually Virginia, not Belinda.)

Another fun addition to the library was this hobby catalog from 1959/60. I was really excited when I found it, since it falls within that largely undocumented period of Breyer History. It’s an engrossing read but alas, animals of any kind are scarce within.

Horses are rather complicated creatures, anatomically, and not easy to “make right” even as preassembled pieces. Most kit horses that do turn up (that aren’t “The Visible Horse”) are usually a part of Western-themed or historical kits. Throughout the 1960s, however, both Aurora and Revell came out with a small line of 1/8 horse kits:

http://www.oldmodelkits.com/index.php?detail=13160&page=1
http://www.oldmodelkits.com/index.php?detail=9581&page=71

(Breyer had the license for Fury through 1966, so Aurora’s kit was clearly not considered direct competition.)

I’ve always wanted to find just one of these kits – assembled or otherwise – for my collection, but this is a fairly big area for modellers, and vintage kits of any kind tend to be scarce and/or expensive.

Breyer didn’t start making kits of their own until the 1970s, and of accessories, not the horses themselves. But I’ll take about that some other time.

The B Word

The last official "flea market find" last year was an H-R Donkey Harry; this year’s first official find?

A #376 Brighty - 1991! He’s not a rare animal - they made him up through 2005 in this particular version of brownish-gray - but he is a reliable seller in the aftermarket, as most Marguerite Henry-inspired molds are.

Other than one ear rub and a few bits of house paint splatter, he seems to be in excellent condition. That’s a bit unusual, considering I found him at the local Salvation Army Store, sitting next to the extremely scary dollar-store clown figurine that’s been terrorizing that store for about a month now. (Brighty was holding his own, but I’m sure the save was appreciated!)

What’s nice about the Brighty mold is that he doesn’t have any significant mold marks, so casual shoppers and other non-Breyer-obsessed people will tend to pass over him. Not without a quizzical look or two, though, including the cashier who rang him up for me yesterday:

"Is he…plastic?"

"Yes, he is."

Hey, she never brought up the "B" word, so I didn’t offer. It doesn’t seem to matter too much in my part of the country anyway, but I know I am extremely lucky to be in that situation. (More than once at my local dirt malls have I heard the cry "Hey, Horse Lady, I got something for ya!" And miraculously, they often do.)

There were some other equine-themed things in the store, but nothing else worth bringing home, other than some crafting supplies.

Alas, this little Brighty probably won’t be staying; I promised myself to keep my model purchases to a minimum for the front half of the year, at least. If he had been the 2007 model and book set rerelease (#1295) with that happy, self-satisfied little smile painted on his face, it’d be another story. That one has become my favorite of all the Brighty releases, outside of the original Chalky Gift Set ones.

Since I’m possibly going on overnights (and overtime) for the next month or so, it’ll be a while before I get him or anything else listed.

Though if anyone has a body-quality Traditional Kitten (or two) they’d be willing to trade for him, I’d be willing to make the time. I am so enamored of my Chartreux idea that want to make my own, regardless of Reeves’s plans. Maybe a Silver Filigree one, too.

Team Misty

One of the first things I noticed during the inventory cull: my goodness, I have a lot of Misty Variations. I don’t have the exact number at my fingertips, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was enough to field a baseball team. Here’s a somewhat more common member of Team Misty:

What’s notable about this collection is that it doesn’t include the Cold Cast Porcelain, the Special Run Flocky, or the more recent reissues with fancier shading. All of mine are Variations of the standard #20 Misty of Chincoteague.

I’m not giving any of them up, either. This isn’t a case of unconditional love or obsessive obscure Variation-hunting: each one of them is clearly and obviously different from each other even to the less-attentive among us. Hand-airbrushed, 3-Eyed, 4-Eyed, Matte-Finished, Gloss-Finished, Bi-eyed …

Everything except Chalky: Misty is probably one of the rarest Chalky Era Chalkies out there. The 4-eyed Gloss Misty - the alleged Gold Standard of rare Mistys - is positively common compared to the Chalky. I can’t even recall the last time I saw one for sale outright, and it wasn’t a pretty sight the last time one came up on eBay. (Except to the seller, maybe!)

The funny thing is that I’m really not all that into Misty herself - the book, or the mold. (FWIW, Born to Trot is my favorite Marguerite Henry book.) It’s the history of the mold, and all its changes through time that fascinate me.

I’ve been lucky enough to run across most of my Misty models via my usual cheapskate channels: the flea market, the Salvation Army, in box lots. The only one I had to pay "retail" for was for the hand-airbrushed one I found on eBay. For reasons I’d rather not elaborate here, I felt justified in making an exception in her case.

I am sometimes baffled by some hobbyists’ need to collect multiple variations of more recent molds. I understand the love, but the variations are often so minute (It’s slightly Semi-Gloss! The points are dark gray, not black!) that I sometimes find myself scratching my head. Really?

Some of it is the residue of our history: Regular Run models hung around long enough (decades, sometimes!) that legitimately distinct Variations did emerge over time. We could justify having multiple examples of the same release because they really didn’t look the same.

Nowadays releases come and go in an eyeblink - like that odd-looking Pinto Sporthorse Gem Twist - so the opportunity for true Variations to arise is rare. So the standard drops: what would have been considered within the normal range of variation suddenly becomes A Variation. 

Sometimes I get some flak for not "seeing" some variations as Variations, especially in more modern releases. You have to look at it from my perspective: it’s not that I don’t see them, it’s that I had to make a choice between width and depth. Neither choice is perfect: you’re going to lose some data either way.

You can’t focus on both either, because that’ll drive you crazy. There are already enough subtleties to Breyer History that I don't need to complicate it with even more.

Hobo's Bundle

The dentist appointment went well, though I probably shouldn’t have celebrated on the way home by buying - and eating - an entire bag of chocolate-covered pretzels. (In my defense, I hadn’t eaten anything all day. Then I had a salad for dinner.)

I’ve been looking through that file on Hobo that I casually mentioned a couple of weeks back, trying to tease an appropriately shaped blog post or two out of it, but it’s been hard.

A lot of what’s in the file are your basic kind of background research materials: magazine and newspaper articles, fliers and brochures from various Mustang organizations, including WHOA (Wild Horse Organized Assistance), and so on. Some of them personally annotated by Velma Johnston (aka "Wild Horse Annie") herself.

This bundle of documents is more interesting as a collection than any one item in it.

Except for the letters. Included in the file are a small number of letters to and from Annie - mostly involving Peter Stone, Dick Lewis, and surprisingly, even a copy of a letter to Marguerite Henry herself!

Which are, in themselves, a bit problematic to discuss.

Most of the correspondence relates to the article that was written for an early (tri-fold brochure!) issue of Just About Horses featuring Wild Horse Annie, with the usual exchange of corrections, updates, and tender pleasantries.

There’s also a great deal of communication about details of her personal life that are best kept private. Reading those parts of the letters - even in the privacy of my office - sometimes makes me feel like I am intruding on something I shouldn’t.

There is one small piece of the letter I think I am comfortable with sharing. In the letter from Annie to Marguerite, she acknowledges the receipt of a half dozen Breyer Hobos, a gift from Marguerite.

The six Hobos came thundering through a foot of snow into my entrance hall yesterday …and what a handsome sight. I am pleased beyond belief …so what if he is a buckskin! I almost have myself convinced of it by now, anyway. And the tiny [double heart brand] on his left hip is just the right touch. Indeed it is a beautiful job of modeling, and the kit is so colorful, besides the story it tells.

Whenever I see any discussion of the adaptation of either a real-life or fictional horse into a Breyer model, hobbyists are quick to point out the deficiencies or inaccuracies in it, sometimes even citing the commentary of those associated with the horse in question in support of their argument.

The reality is usually far more complicated than that. Sometimes the complaints made public by the people involved are not about the interpretation per se, but about all the intangibles that went into creating it. If there was a flaw somewhere in that process - a poor choice of words, a lack of acknowledgement or thanks, or even a missed phone call - that sort of thing can make a small problem seem so much more annoying than it originally was.

Obviously things went right, in this instance.