Playing Catch Up

I took the day off (for the most part) from blogifying yesterday. Even though I worked fewer hours this week, I was even more tired by the end of it. Some (confidential for now, sorry) stuff came up that complicated things, but I think it was mostly Morpheus playing catching up with me. 

Continuing on that theme…

In case you didn’t already know, there’s a special drawing for Vintage Club members this weekend for 80 pieces of the Special Run Balking Mule Lucy, in Gloss. I don’t know if this represents the portion of the run that wasn’t officially ordered by club members, or just a random number they pulled out of the air. Been putting my entries in, regardless, because ooh, shiny.

The BreyerFest survey forms have also been sent out, via e-mail. I always laugh about "confidentiality" part; I have a fairly distinctive writing voice, so I assume they know it’s me, anyway, and write with that assumption in mind.

There’s a small, blurry, Facebook-derived picture floating around of an alleged new Breyer mold coming out soon, a portrait of Harley D Zip. I didn’t find out about it until the Blab forum topic had reached well over a hundred posts, running the gamut from "OMG I LUV IT!" to "Meh". I think I’ll wait until I see a larger and more official picture before I give it the thumbs up or down. 

I also found a bunch of neat stuff at the flea market last weekend that I never got around to talking about. There were a couple of decent bodies, a Lomonosov Polar Bear Cub, a Limited Edition Royal Doulton Bunnykins figurine, and a book about Draft Horses illustrated by Francis Eustis (going straight to the reference library). The "biggest" finds were a pair of Mastercrafters clocks - one of those mysterious "Quarter Horse Yearling" clocks, and a Swinger with an Onyx case:

I can’t recall if I’ve mentioned it here or not before, but we’re still unsure of the relationship between the QH Yearling and the goldtoned clock above. The clock clearly predates the Yearling: this example has a postal zone, rather than a zip code in the company address listed on the back. Zones were phased out in the 1960s, but the Quarter Horse Yearling didn’t officially debut until 1970.

Breyer’s relationship with Mastercrafters lasted well beyond the Western Horse/Davy Crockett era, but for how long, and in what capacities, we are not sure.

The Yearling clock is an upgrade, but the Swinger is technically "new" for me - I have had several in the Brown Burl case, but none in the Green Onyx before. In my excitement, I didn’t examine the clock as closely as I should have when I negotiated for it: it is still partially disassembled because it required extensive cleaning.

This is a polite way of saying that it was possibly one of the grossest things I have ever bought at the flea market. (Not The Grossest Thing Ever. You really don’t need to know about that. All I can say is that it wasn’t a horse.)

When I got it home and took it out of the bag, I initially thought that the previous owner had lined the bottom of it with felt.

It was not felt.

It was an encrusted layer of dust, dirt, cigarette smoke, and cat hair. Upon closer examination, it looked like something you’d see getting shoveled out of a window on the TV show Hoarders. The saddest part is that I found an address label under the crud indicating that the previous owner had purchased it, reconditioned, from a clock shop not even ten years ago.

Most of the gross is gone, but it still needs more cleaning and repair work. It’s been an interesting restoration challenge, if nothing else.

(Ooh, freaky. I just noticed that they are stopped at exactly the same time, even though I bought them from two different vendors!)

Certifiable

I did a little office cleaning yesterday; it feels good to be able to set something on my desk without worrying about something else falling off. And look what I found in the process!

 It’s the warranty certificate that came with that crazy Lucky Ranger Mastercrafters Clock I picked up a couple years ago:

(The discussion of that clock, if you missed it the first time: http://breyerhistorydiva.blogspot.com/2010/08/lucky-ranger-clock.html)

The certificate was crumpled up in the bottom of the box when I found it, so I put it in the nearest, biggest and heaviest book I could find to press it flat. And then promptly forgot where it was until yesterday.

(That sort of thing happens just frequently enough that it only moderately bothers me now. I've found that worrying about it doesn’t make the process of finding it go any faster. Whatever I’m looking for always turns up eventually.)

It’s basically the same certificate/warranty that came with most Mastercrafters clocks of the era, if you’re lucky enough to find one. It’s not my most obscure bit of Breyer ephemera (oh, where do I even begin?) but it’s definitely up there.

Now if I could only find that one strippy quilt project I’ve been wanting to work on…

Breyer's Davy Crockett, Part 2

Sorry about the brief hiatus. I was feeling a little bit down the past couple of days, with the crummy weather and all that. Finding out that the rerelease Man o' Wars finally sold out at the WEG didn’t help, either.

(Everything I needed to say about the crazy-stupid prices some of the rereleases have been bringing on eBay, I said on Blab. I said what I felt, and I meant it. It didn’t win me any friends, I’m sure, but so be it.)

So, let’s get back to Davy Crockett.

As I demonstrated in my last post, we’ve finally determined that Breyer’s Davy Crockett was a 1955 release, and was probably a part of the fad spawned by Disney’s Davy Crockett episodes on Disneyland. Now comes the question: what happened after that?

Disney had come up with a couple of new Davy episodes by the fall of 1955, and would re-air all the Davy Crockett episodes for some time to come, but the fad was pretty much over by the end of 1955. Crockett-themed merchandise was still selling - but not at the insane pace it was at the height of the craze, and not enough to justify continued production.

That probably included Breyer’s Davy Crockett, too.

It’s certainly possible that Breyer continued production of the Davy Crockett somewhat into 1956 to fill late Christmas 1955 catalog orders, but by the spring of 1956, the Davy Crockett mold has already been rebranded - repainted, retooled, with a new horse and accessories - as Kit Carson:


So while we can’t determine when Davy was discontinued with absolute certainty, it appears that he was almost exclusively a 1955 release. The Kit Carson set remained in production considerably longer, through at least 1958; he appears in both the Pricelist, and the Dealer’s Catalog from that year.

In spite of the longer production run, the Kit Carson is a harder set to find than the Davy Crockett. It’s not so odd, when you give it more than a moment’s thought: Breyer’s Davy Crockett was released at the height of the fad. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if all of Breyer’s resources, for the summer of 1955, were dedicated exclusively to meeting the demand.

There’s some tangential evidence of that: the 1956 Breyer line. Breyer released not one or two, but at least five new molds in 1956:

• Brahma Bull
• Horned Hereford Bull
• Lassie
• Rin Tin Tin
• Robin Hood

The money to make and market all of these molds had to come from somewhere, and the most obvious source is the windfall from the Davy Crockett.

What about the MasterCrafters Davy Crockett Clocks - where do they fit in? I’m not sure. The theory that they might have engineered another models for mold tradeoff, just like the Western Horse, is still a viable one. It would have been much quicker - and neater - to simply make the necessary arrangements between each other, rather than get the banks involved in the first place.

If that’s the case, then it would mean that the Clocks and the freestanding Davy Crockett figurines could have been released simultaneously, allowing both of them to cash in. And in Breyer’s case, cash in enough to significantly expand the business.

Ah, if only I had more evidence!

We’ll finish up next time, with Kit Carson. (More to him than meets the eye? You bet!)

Lucky Ranger Clock

Ever have one of those weekends where you don’t manage to get a darn thing done?

Yeah, it was one of those. Evil discovered my quilt frame - and the unfinished quilt in it - and, well, it looks like I’ll have to finish that project now, before she does. (As for what she did in retaliation for taking away her favorite new toy - the less said, the better.)

Slow day at the flea market; it would have been decent pickings for most folks, but since I have a rather scary-looking credit card statement arriving in my mailbox this week, I decided to be picky. There was an interesting clock - not a MasterCrafters one, but possibly related - but the dealer seemed more interested in conversating than in selling, so my money went elsewhere. I can only hope his own credit card statement will motivate him to be a little more customer-friendly next week.

Before I forget completely, let’s finish up the conversation we began just before BreyerFest, with the mysterious MasterCrafters Lucky Ranger Clock. This one, in case you’ve forgotten:


So, what’s up with THAT?

I don’t know.

When I first ran across the reference for this clock, on a list of trademarked MasterCrafters names, I assumed that it referred somehow to a clock similar to the Davy Crockett one - with a Lucky Ranger mounted on it, instead of a Davy. The link in question:

http://www.clockswatches.com/foreign/showpage.php?em=1544

Since I had never seen such a clock, I assumed it was either very, very rare, or possibly never put into production. Then I found the clock in question: the case is obviously Breyer-molded, but the horse and rider part? It’s a cast pot metal pendulum, in the shape of a bucking bronco and rider.

Obviously, there has to be some sort of connection between the Breyer Lucky Ranger and the MasterCrafters Lucky Ranger. It’s just too much of a coincidence not to be! The real question is what that connection was.

First off, I don’t think there was any sort of legal or financial dispute over it, or at least one acrimonious enough to end the working relationship between the two companies, as it did with MasterCrafters and Hartland. According to Peter Stone (via Nancy Young, of course), Breyer was still manufacturing cases for MasterCrafters when he formally started working for Breyer in the mid-1960s.

Personally I think the Lucky Ranger connection, combined with an extended work history, suggests that the relationship between Breyer and MasterCrafters was more than merely one of custom molder to client. It may have been collaborative, as well.

A more collaborative relationship, for example, might explain the similarities between the metallic gold/bronze high relief wall clock and the Quarter Horse Yearling. Were the early "Bronze Glo" experiments also related to it?

It might help explain the origins of the Davy Crockett clock, too. Could the Davy Crockett figurine another MasterCrafters commission, "sold back" to Breyer in an arrangement like the original Western Horse?

It's an intriguing possibility.

From what little information I've been able to gather about this specific clock, it is rare, even by MasterCrafters standards. I think the bizarre design is mostly to blame for that: a log cabin, surrounded by cactus, on top of a horseshoe, framing a scene of the Oregon Trail, propped up with metal fencing? You almost get the feeling this thing was cobbled together with spare parts.

And, We're Off!

Nothing significant to report from the flea market, mercifully. There was a beautiful, immaculate pot metal horse clock - you know, the one similar to the "Side Stander" MasterCrafters clock - but it wasn't a must have. The dealer is a regular one of mine, so I might be able to negotiate the price down a bit if I feel the need.

I have been meaning to look into those clocks to see what the exact relationship between them and the MasterCrafters version is (Before, during or after? Same suppliers? What about that plastic base?) but it's just another topic on my very long list.

Everything else was overpriced, or bodies. Don't need anymore bodies.


I'm now at the "randomly throwing things in the car" phase of the trip; something will be forgotten, I'm sure. I kept waking up last night thinking. "Did I pack that? And that? Oh crud, I think I forgot the spoons!" Ah, to sleep as soundly as little Vita. Gonna miss you, my little piglet.

(She's a bit of a picky eater, but she makes the most delightful little piggie noises when she's happy-excited-frustrated. Which is most of the time!)

See y'all in Kentucky.

Running Out of Time

So tired! It’s not just the puppy, either - in addition to all the BreyerFest preparations, they’ve scheduled me with double shifts this week at work. I appreciate the moolah, but the lack of sleep is becoming a problem. The Little One had a little accident in the house yesterday while I was puppysitting, because I fell asleep almost literally the moment I sat down.

(Hey, it’s a really, really comfy chair. Sometimes I fall asleep in it even when I’m not exhausted.)

I also had to rewrite a portion of the partially printed Samplers because of what I found at the flea market on Sunday. Here’s a picture:


I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version of the story next week, once I’m settled in the HIN. Or you can read the full story in the Sampler.

One of the other things I found at the market this week: another slightly obscure piece of reference material. It’s a promotional brochure from the International Arabian Horse Association, extolling the awesomeness of Arabian Horses.


I used to love these sorts of things when I was in elementary school. When I discovered that you could get free stuff if you wrote to various organizations, I spent a big chunk of my allowance on stamps writing to every single breed association listed in the back of the All-Breed issue of Western Horseman. Nothing is more thrilling than a big fat envelope in the mailbox with your name on it!

I compiled all this free stuff into huge multimedia scrapbooks, with stickers, cutouts, envelopes, glitter and other embellishments - several decades before it was the cool thing to do. I carried them around me everywhere: even then, I wore my weirdness openly. I still have them, carefully stored in archival boxes in the closet, fragile artifacts of a compulsively creative childhood.

I can’t recall if I got anything from the IAHA, though. I don’t think so, but I’m in no condition right now to plow through some of my most treasured possessions to be sure. I’m pretty sure if they did, this wasn’t one of the pieces they sent me. The illustration on the cover, by Gladys Brown Edwards, should tell the story why I would have remembered: it’s one of the main references Chris Hess used to create the Proud Arabian Stallion!


Did Hess work from this brochure specifically, or was it among other reference materials he picked up along the way?

He did take a few liberties, not out of a lack of sculpting prowess, but probably to make the mold a little sturdier as a plaything, and more practical for production. Lots of hobbyists bag on the Proud Arabian Stallion, but outside of the Maureen Love-based Arabians, there aren’t any Breyer Arabians that escape that ire.

Getting Warmer

Okay, now I’m convinced that the flea market is (a) sentient, and (b) consciously messing with my head:


At least this one has a horse on it!

It’s pretty trashed, but it was cheap, and the clock mechanism works. I won’t be discussing it any further here since, by sheer coincidence, it’s a crucial part of an article I had just happened to be working on the night before for the Sampler. (Actually, I was kinda worried how I was going to illustrate the article, since I didn’t have one of the key pieces I writing about. Problem solved!) So y’all will have to wait.

(The Sampler’s about half done. As are the two contest entries. Looks like I won’t be getting much sleep for the next two weeks.)

Man, I really feel sorry for the BreyerWest Escondido. He doesn’t look anything at all like the model he’s being compared to, the inexplicably popular palomino Tesoro. The #867 Tesoro had an almost unprecedented four year run in the Breyer line - from 1992 through 1995 - at a time when many models were lucky to stick around for two.

I found it inexplicable because I thought Tesoro’s paint job back then was underwhelming. He looks great in that color, no doubt, but there was no "there" there. There were no crazy markings, shading, or hoof details to distinguish it from any other palomino paint job. He was just a plain palomino.

He obviously struck enough of a chord to be able to stick around for a leisurely four years. I haven’t picked one up yet; I have just about every other El Pastor, some of them in multiple variations, but not Tesoro. I’d hate to pay "retail" for him, only to find one for substantially less at the flea market. It’s nothing personal; it just happens often enough that I’m leery of buying almost any regular run models straight from the store, unless the shading or detail are really exceptional.

I’m still on the fence about buying Escondido. It’s not the price that’s putting me off - the limited quantity and level of detail just about justify it - but ‘Fest is just around the corner. Maybe there’ll be a few in the NPOD, or I can work a trade for one. I’d hate to buy one now, only to discover I could have saved myself the postage.

Condition Issues

Would you believe I found another MasterCrafters Clock? This one is the "Swinging Playmates:"


I’ve wanted to start a collection of the Breyer-based MasterCrafters stuff for years, but most of the pieces I found were either way too expensive, or way too trashed. And now I’ve found three in the space of one year!

That sort of nonsense happens to me all the time. I spent many fruitless years searching for a Balking Mule, only to find three in the space of a week. There were several consecutive years where my flea market season was not complete without at least one Charcoal Fighting Stallion turning up. And let’s not even get into my issues with the Black Stretched Morgan: I love the mold dearly, but I find so many of them I sometimes feel like they’re stalking me. (Why can’t one - just one! - of them be a Woodgrain?)

I found lots of other good stuff, too, including a gorgeous and extremely matte-finished early Bay Fighting Stallion with footpads; I was a little hesitant to buy him at first because he seemed a bit rough, but he cleaned up well. The only sure keeper in the bunch for me, besides the Clock, is this Classic Arabian Foal cull:


I suspect he was an honest accident, and not a hobbyist’s piece that arrived there via an estate or garage sale. Every once and a great while an unfinished piece will turn up in a family set from the 1970s or 1980s. It was nothing nefarious; quality control was just a little more lax back then.

I bought models off the shelf in the 1970s: rough seams, painting bloopers, fuzzy gray socks were a par for the course. When you were shopping for a potential show horse, you didn’t worry so much about conformation or breed type: what you hoped for was something reasonably free of major paint or body flaws. I roll my eyes every time someone whines that "they don’t make Breyers the way they used to." Yeah, they sure don’t: they make them better.

Speaking of condition issues, the Foal was found in a rather large collection of horses, mostly dating from the 1980s. They were a reasonably decent lot, quality wise, except for one thing: most of them were mildew dappled. It was a shame, since some of them had beautiful paint jobs. The prices were reasonable, so I picked out a few of the choicer items, and left the rest behind.

Mildew dappling is most often seen on models with matte-finished bay, chestnut or palomino paint jobs, usually from the 1970s or 1980s. The mildew attacks and eats at the topmost surface of the paint, creating an effect not unlike resist dapples. Whenever I see a listing on eBay or MHSP that mentions dappling on a vintage model that’s not supposed to be, I almost always assume mildew is at fault. There are a few genuine vintage test colors of dappled non-grays, but they’re pretty rare and fairly distinctive.

Why models of that time period are prone to mildew is unknown. By that time, the clear topcoat that was sprayed over most matte-finished models had been discontinued, and I suspect that that’s what was preventing the mildew from forming before. It "sealed" the plastic from direct exposure to the mildew spores. That might explain the absence of widespread mildew damage on Alabasters and Dapple Grays: they continued to get this topcoat for some time after it was discontinued elsewhere.

There’s not a lot that can be done to reverse mildew damage. I’ve found that a quick, modestly strong bleach bath helps. It doesn’t eliminate much of the dappling, but it does kill off the mildew and keep it from spreading.

My clock also had some condition issues, but they’re mostly internal: like my previous find, the clock mechanism doesn’t work. Oh, the irony - the only one of my three Swingers that works is the rather sad one now residing on my saleslist.

Swing Time

In honor of Daylight Savings Time, let’s talk about clocks today. Let's begin with this beautiful little wreck I found at the flea market last week: a MasterCrafters Swinger!


(Photo lightened somewhat to show the detail - the clock doesn't actually look like it's molded out of chocolate, in person.)

They’re known as "Swinger" clocks because they have a figurine attached to a pendulum mechanism that would swing back and forth. Most of them - including this one - had a girl on a swing, but some have both a boy and a girl, or a bird on a perch. Someone swiped the figurine from this particular example, which partly explains why I was able to snag it for a mere 5 bucks. (It was also dirty, greasy, cracked, and covered in duct tape.)

Most collectors know that Breyer’s first horse was designed as a component for a clock manufactured by the MasterCrafters Clock Company. Mike Jackson, at his Hartland History web site Hartland Westerns, goes into the history of the MasterCrafters Horse Clocks, and there’s no need to duplicate the effort here. (I have a few quibbles with it, but I’m in no mood to start a catfight over tone or details.)

Lesser known is the fact that Breyer made more than just the horse for MasterCrafters. It’s been difficult to track down which parts, and for which clocks precisely: the records (as always) are virtually nonexistent. So far only one clock - one that I discussed in one of my first posts - bears what appears to be an early Breyer mold mark. The clock in question:


It’s possible that the plastic components of the Swinger Clock were also manufactured by Breyer. Nancy Young notes in Breyer Molds & Models that Steve Ryan, during his brief tenure at Reeves in the early 1990s, claimed that Breyer molded those components, but in a footnote comments that Hartland expert Gail Fitch believes Hartland did. I took the opportunity of having a trashed and partially disassembled Swinger Clock to see if I could find any physical evidence one way or another.

Nothing. I found neither Hartland’s Iolite mark nor Breyer’s wavy-ribbon mark. The clock had been messed with before, so it’s possible something was lost or somewhere along the way. It’s also possible that I’m not looking in the right places, that my eyesight is shot, or that it never received any recognizable mold stamps in the first place.

It didn’t hurt to look; it was only a five dollar investment, and I had a fun afternoon disassembling, cleaning and repairing it, at least. (It’s my favorite part of the flea market process!) Once I’m finished repairing and rewiring it, I’ll probably stick something in the empty space left by the missing Swinger. But should it be a Stablemate, or a Tinymite? Decisions, decisions…

The First Breyer Mold Mark?

Most collectors are familiar with the Breyer mold mark, the one that I like to refer to as the "copyright horseshoe." This mold mark, phased in sometime around 1960, is basically a large copyright mark encircled by lettering: "Breyer Molding Co." on earlier pieces, and "Breyer Reeves" on more recent items (more or less.)

There have been many other marks, signatures, and changes since that time; some molds have mold mark histories that are almost comical in their intricacy - Family Arabian Foal, anyone? However, the Breyer Molding Company existed long before they produced their first horse. Surely they had to have had something they stamped or imprinted on at least some of its non-equine products, right? What, if anything, came before?

Well, I think I found it - and it wasn’t on a horse! It was on a Mastercrafter clock - and not the clock you’re thinking of, either. It was this one:


Confused? Let me explain.

Most hobbyists are familiar with the basic story of Breyer’s start in the horsemaking business: they created a Western Horse mold for the Mastercrafter Clock Company, and allegedly received the mold back after production, in lieu of payment. The actual story isn’t as simple and straightforward as that, but that’s yet another topic, for another day.

Slightly less well known is the fact that Breyer made many other nonhorse items for this company, too - like cases, bases and knobs. So when this clock turned up on eBay, with a casual mention of a "small Breyer mold mark" in the description, I knew it was something very, very significant.

The logo itself is very small - less than a quarter of an inch high, in fact, and just about unphotographable. I’ve redrawn/reconstructed it here, greatly enlarged:

What’s really interesting is how this mold mark shares so many similarities with the early Breyer logo. This "wavy ribbon" logo and theme can be found on early Breyer stationery, promotional materials, and some of their early proprietary products like the checkers and poker chips. This theme was also echoed in the squarish shape and wavy, rippled edge of the gold foil "Tenite" stickers introduced in the late 1950s that slightly predate the introduction of the copyright horseshoe.

So in a way, this mold mark did eventually make it on some Breyer models, in a roundabout fashion.

I still have a little more research to do on this topic, believe it or not - I have a couple more leads that go even deeper in time, possibly to the very beginning of the Breyer Molding Company itself. But I haven’t had the time to do follow up on them yet, and there are plenty of other, and horsier, topics to cover in the meantime.