The Chris Hess Flier

I had a really rough day today. Actually, the whole week has been suboptimal.

Imagine baking a cake just to be nice, and it turns out great, but nobody in the house wants to eat it? For no particular reason, either?

That’s the kind of week I’ve been having. The worst part? The cake isn’t even metaphorical.

(If there’s anyone within driving distance of my house, I have free Applesauce Spice Cake to give away. Not joking.)

Anyway, rather than bore you with any more details of my I-just-can’t-even kind of week, I’ll present a transcription of the flier from the 1996 Breakfast with Peter Stone held at the Holiday Inn-North on July 27, 1996.

I transcribed it a while ago, as I was getting a number of requests for more biographical information about Chris Hess. It seemed to make more sense to just publish the text from the flier than to quote and paraphrase it. Scanning it wouldn't have made it as searchable as text, either.

There’s much more to his story, of course. But this will help put a little bit more of his life and legacy on the Internet:

Welcome to 

“A Tribute to Christian Hess”

Christian Hess was a handy man to have around. According to his son Chris, Christian could repair anything and everything. Combine those talented hands with a love for art, and it’s not surprising that you’ll have someone who sculpted hundreds of horses and animals that continue to delight collectors today.

Christian Hess was born in Chicago in 1918. After studying art at the Art Institute of Chicago, Christian began a career as a commercial artist. He started as a wood carver, creating decorations for buildings, and eventually turned his talents to mold making. According to Chris, his father made more than 100 molds for Breyer, his first being the Western Horse #57 in 1950. Some accounts have that number as high as 118 including traditional, classic and Little Bits models. His last piece was Secretariat in 1987.

Christian also made over 50 other animals and figures for other companies, including the children’s riding toy known as the “Wonder Horse”, Santa Claus figures, art and advertising pieces. Christian was the sculptor and mold maker responsible for many of those familiar plastic pink yard flamingos.

Christian was married to Elizabeth for 55 years. They have 4 children, Barbara, Christian, Pamela and Lisa, and are the proud grandparents of 10 and great-grandparents of 4. Chris, who worked with his father in their company from 1963 to 1988, describes him as hard working and conscientious, always thinking about his business. Chris says his father hated to go on vacation because he didn’t like to be away from the business for very long!

Though Chris died in 1988, his art lives on in the models he produced. His sculpture “Trouble” is the basis for the first model of the new Peter Stone Collection.

(Note: there are some obvious errors and typos in the text itself, but they have been left as-is.)

Boxer Day

Cripes, not again. I swear, when I posted this on Christmas Day:

A 40-piece Special Run Wedgewood Blue Pronghorn Antelope? Didn't see that coming. (What I thought might be coming? Either the Elk, or the Boxer.)

I had no idea that they would actually be doing a Boxer a few days later. Here’s Rolly:

He was available only to people who didn't buy Glacier, so I couldn't have gotten him anyway - which is good, because my follow-up doctor's appointment was that afternoon, and it would have bugged the bananas out of me to think I missed it-missed it!

(All is well on that health issue, BTW. It was something rare, unusual, and benign. And now gone for good.)

I like that they offered him only to people who did not order Glacier - that’s a nice way to spread the wealth around a bit. It’s an interesting and potentially viable workaround for future Vault Sales: drag it out during the holiday week when most people have some extra time and/or money, and limit the rarities to one per person.

It’s sort of like "Let’s Make a Deal"! Do I choose the contents of Door Number One, or pass it up for what might be behind Door Number Two?

My only complaint with being excluded from the Rolly sale is that I wasn’t able to directly print out the offer page for my archives, as I usually do.

I’ve seen some people compare these sales to what Peter Stone has been doing, but I think the comparison is a little off. What’s true: they are superpremium models with prices that reflect both the esoteric nature of the mold and paint selections, and the amount of detail that goes into creating them. Like with Ghost Moose’s eyes:

On the other hand, it’s Peter Stone who is duplicating himself, not the other way around. As I’ve mentioned before (most recently, here) Breyer has been doing these "Micro Runs" for years - some as early as the 1960s and 1970s. Surely all of the various prize models over the years - live shows, JAH contests and BreyerFest - also count. (Anything under 100 pieces, or 50? I can’t recall if I defined a piece threshold.)

And as for other differences, there are lots, and entire forums dedicated to arguing about it. The most fundamental difference is in the marketing. Running a boutique operation where every run is either a Micro Run or Factory Custom is basically Peter Stone’s business model. Reeves sells models of every production level and price point to everyone, and their Micro Runs are just one of the ways they market their product to the higher end/more dedicated segment of their customers.

Rolly's neat, and I had been planning on working on gaps in my dog collection next year anyway: looks like another one just opened up! I'll have to do a trade of some sort down the road, because the original $250 price tag would have been a stretch for me, regardless.

If I had the time - or the mind - to do it, I’d call up Reeves and ask if they are just deliberately messing with me now. If you guys are, could you please hold off on the Special Run Elk a few more days?

The bank account is a little low, and I don’t get paid until Friday. 

Had to Laugh

So I’m down in the basement yesterday, scanning and recreating some Breyer logos and stuff, mostly for illustrative purposes - and because it keeps my Illustrator skills sharp.

(Just to make it extra clear: for educational use and for fun. They don't go on anything I can sell.)

Plus it’s kind of an interesting design challenge in and of itself. By recreating the logos, sometimes you find little clues about the thinking that went into the design.

 

I’m recreating the most recent logo - the "blue pill", I like to call it - and I’m poking around for the matching typeface, or something close enough to tweak into shape.

When I found the match, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.

It’s Stone Sans Serif, Semi-Bold.

Stone? Really?

Good graphic designers know that research is as important - if not moreso - as your technical skills, especially when it comes to brand or corporate identity projects. The more you know about a company or brand, the thinking is, the better able to are to capture its essence in a logo.

I am 99.95% sure that the person or persons involved in the logo redesign didn’t know anything about Peter Stone; Reeves has done a pretty good job of disappearing him from their version of Breyer History.

Someone who only has a passing interest or knowledge of Breyers or the Hobby - and who most likely wasn’t around in the Signing Party heydays of the 1980s and 1990, either - isn’t going to know about him. Heck, even many newer hobbyists think that Peter was just some guy who worked for Breyer for a while.

Yeah, only for the first fifty or so years of his life.

So anyway, I had a good giggle fit over that for about 15 minutes, imagining the tiny possibility that it might not be a coincidence.

The Birthday Horse

Had a quiet, boring birthday: homemade birthday cake and steak. Steak was a little overdone, but hey, steak is steak.

I briefly considered buying a horse or two, but the closest I got to that was a copy of Duel for the Crown: Affirmed, Alydar and Racing’s Greatest Rivalry, in a brief shopping spree at the Barnes and Noble. I also picked up a couple of quilting magazines and a copy of Christopher Moore’s latest (because it’s Christopher Moore).

It has occurred to me that I haven’t introduced you all yet to the horse that started it all - on my birthday, way too long ago for me to admit. My Chalky Traditional Man o’ War:

He’s the only model I ever had Peter Stone sign for me, personally. All my other signed horses I have either came that way, or were made specifically for Signing Party Events.

My Man o’ War was the only model I had that I felt merited the honor of his signature. By the time Peter had started doing Signing Parties, I already had his signature on the multiple letters that he had sent in reply to my (all too numerous) annoying letters to Breyer.

And besides, I had seen - and heard of - other hobbyists bringing multiple models to these events, and that made me a bit uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be one of those people, you know? I didn’t need someone’s signature on something to make it more valuable.

So I had signed the only model that I owned that truly had no price.

He’s still in relatively good shape, except for the blaze on his face. A seam split was forming there, and back before I knew better, I tried fixing it with nail polish remover. So now he has …a much bigger blaze.

I didn’t exactly get him for my birthday; the story is a little more complicated than that. Several months prior to that birthday I had been hospitalized with appendicitis, which in turn had enough complications that I ended up with a footlong scar and two weeks vacation from school.

The only other awesome thing about the ordeal - besides the vacation - was that everyone not only remembered my birthday, but sent money, too! I can’t remember the exact amount I received, but it seemed like a fortune to a nine year old.

So I went to Circus World - a local toy store chain - on my special day, and bought a pair of roller skates and the Man o’ War. Because I loved horse racing! And I thought he was pretty.

Dad approved of my choice. He loved horse racing as a kid, too.

I finally decided to take the plunge and join the model horse world right around the time of the Affirmed-Alydar Triple Crown duel, a few years later. It wasn’t the primary motivator, but it definitely played a part in getting me here.

The roller skates were eventually cobbled onto a homemade scooter made out of a couple of two-by-fours, painted green, and decorated with leftover stickers my Uncle Fred had given me from his Record-of-the-Month Club subscription.

I could have sworn that I still had those roller skates somewhere, though my brother says we sold the scooter they were attached to ages ago, at a yard sale. Probably to someone who thought they were buying some fabulous piece of American Folk Art.

Which would be ironic, if it were to be so, because Dad was the only member of the family who considered himself utterly uncreative. (Not that it was true, but that was what he believed.)