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.)

Affirmations

The weather is cold, damp and generally yucktastic - the perfect time to work on warm, fluffy things. So I pulled out the quilt that Vita the Destroyer almost killed and ate over the summer, and popped it into the "new" hoop I got over the weekend. The quilting is going to be of the quick and dirty kind - it’s not going to look as lovely as I hoped, but it will be done.

Imperfect, but completed > perfect, but unfinished.

Speaking of the unfinished, I continue to slog through the research note pile. It’s getting there. As usual, it’s the newer stuff that’s slowing me down - it’s all those itty-bitty details I failed to note when I had the chance. Details I didn’t think I needed, or thought I had written down, and didn’t.

I’ve been trying to clean them up as I go by spot checking on various Internet sites, with limited success. Three different sites will give me three different answers - or even worse, the same answer I know is just flat out wrong! The most disheartening part is many of the things I look up - obscure, and sometimes not so obscure SRs - have vanished entirely on the Internet. Not just things I’ve taken notes on, but things I’ve owned.

I often complain about the gaps in the historical records, but the bigger problem isn’t the gaps, it’s the volume. There’s sixty years of history, several hundred molds, several thousand releases, and variations after variations. With so much data to be known, it’s no wonder that so much data gets lost in the shuffle - or that so many hobbyists totally zone out of the subject altogether.

Until they run across something they think might be worth something. The assumption is always that previously unknown = rare. No, sometimes unknown is just unknown, or unrecognized: just because you’re not familiar with it doesn’t make it rare.

On the flip side, some of the things we deem as familiar and common are anything but. I’ve always been amused, for example, that the Brown Pinto Indian Pony with Indian markings is considered more desirable than the one without, because it’s the ones without that are more scarce.

One example from my personal experience is the original SR Affirmed. Not the Traditional release on Cigar, or the "accidental" SR Gloss, or the ornament: the one from the Classic Triple Crown Set, released through Hobby Center Toys in 1988. Here’s mine:


Notice something different about him? Yeah, he’s got a couple of hind stockings, something the real-life Affirmed did not. Since he was purchased shortly before my brief hiatus from the hobby - where my contact with other hobbyists and their models was rather limited - I made the assumption that that was the way all the Affirmeds had been made. The other horses in the Triple Crown Sets weren’t very accurate representations, either, so I shrugged it off as just one of those things.

A few years later, when I actually saw other sets that weren’t mine, I realized it wasn’t. It didn’t make that big a difference in the way I valued the model: the "real" Affirmed was one of my great loves back in the day, and I cherished this representation of him, rare or not.