FAS Weathervane

The flea market was much better this week; super-busy, and filled with fun horsey things, though most of what I brought home were bodies. Not that I need them, but you never know when inspiration strikes, right?

(Like it did this past weekend, when I thought it was a good idea to go through some now-not-abandoned sewing projects.)

This little tidbit, however, was found earlier in the week at my one-stop costuming shop, shoe store, and craft supply outlet: aka the local Salvation Army store. I found a copy of the 1972/1973 Sturbridge Yankee Workshop Handbook and Catalog in the craft section, and look what I found within:

(Click to enlarge.)

Well, hello there Mr. Family Arabian Stallion! Hmm, I always assumed the term “Early American” meant 1650s or 1750s, not the 1950s, unless you’re specifically talking Model Horse History.

Here is the most interesting part of the description in the photo above; the “one man’s” name is not mentioned, by the way:

This one is a beauty, low in price only because the one man who makes it has concentrated almost entirely on making this one Arabian Horse vane.

Or maybe because he knew he was treading on thin ice re: copyright infringement, and didn’t want to push his luck? I'd also disagree with the “low in price” part: I could have gotten at least six Traditional horses back then for the price of the cheapest finish option (Dupont gilt) on this weathervane!

The Sturbridge Yankee Workshop is still around, and still making the kind of home furnishings that your grandmother loves: sturdy, comfortable, and headed straight to the Salvation Army donation truck when she downsizes from a house to that furnished condo in a retirement community.

I wouldn’t mind owning that weathervane, but as far as I can tell, it’s been discontinued and replaced with a more suitably antique-looking ones.

Brick Pavers

Another quiet day at the flea market; it’s not that there wasn’t anything to buy, but that I’ve been in more of a selling mode than a buying mode, and I already have plenty to sell. I have a rather big expense coming up this week too, that helped stay my hand the few times.

I guess there was a big model horse auction down in Indiana on Saturday; I was momentarily tempted, only because a Raffle Model Fiero was involved. It’s a long story, about a debt I’m not obligated to pay, but weighs heavily on my mind nonetheless.

The interest it generated on Blab quashed that idea almost immediately. I think it ended up going in the neighborhood of $600 - "cheap" in a relative sense, though not sufficiently for me. Good for the seller/estate, though, which is all that matters.

I’ve spent most of the weekend so far taking care of other old business, some of it model horse related, but mostly not. (The garden looks…better. Not good, but not embarrassing.)

I did a quick survey of my Polled Hereford Bull situation, and I have six, not five: one I had thought I sold I apparently didn’t. He’s very similar to another variation that I have, as in both of them appear to be made of one of those bright white, almost-Chalky Tenites they were messing around with in the early 1970s. (I haven’t found a "true" Chalky of the PHB - yet.)

The one I’ll be keeping is a very bright cinnamon color with high airbrushed socks, and the one that I’ll be selling (eventually) has shorter socks and more of a brick-red tone. Even thought they’re easily distinguishable, and not one of those only-I-can-see-it variations, I’ve gotten to the point where more subtle variations aren’t that much of a big deal to me anymore.

And besides, the PHB mold is BIG. He’s like a brick paver with legs. He has an almost Othello-like quality for eating up shelf space. There's only so many I can keep around.

One of my Polled Herefords who is not going anywhere for quite some time is this oddball that I picked up from Bob Peterson a while back:

He wasn’t too expensive, actually, because there’s not a lot of competition for rare and/or weird Polled Hereford Bulls. I’m not too sure what he was supposed to be - a touched up cull, maybe? Someone goofing around with the airbrush on their lunch break? A straight up test color? Something associated with the Robbins Weathervane program?

I tend to think that last supposition is the most likely, because he has a "piggy bank" slot cut out of his back that was done prior to painting, not unlike the drill holes that were done on the Weathervane models. I find his slot incredibly appropriate: if any model had sufficient interior space to store spare change, it’s the Polled Hereford Bull.

Charolais Specials, Part II

Clearly, there was some sort of relationship between Robbins Metal Craft and Breyer, beyond that of buyer and supplier: Breyer was not only manufacturing models specifically for the company, they were providing them photographs for their sales brochure.

But here’s the funny thing: there’s no mention of the word Breyer in the brochure. There was no mention of Breyer in the packaging either, or at least in the one complete Weathervane I purchased off of eBay several years ago:


Yep, the Simmental Bull, Mint in Box. It cost me a pretty penny - way more than I usually spend - but it was shortly after I had sold one of those early AQHA Ideal Quarter Horses, also MIB, for an almost equally absurd sum, so it worked out for me. (Remember the astronomical sums people were paying for them, not that long ago? Ah, the mysterious economy of eBay!) Here's a better shot of the assembly instructions:


I think I got the better deal, of course - how many MIB Breyer Weathervanes are out there, anyway - and a special run, to boot? But, I digress.

So how do we classify these things? My first tendency is to classify all of them - even the "Regular Run" items - as Special Runs, but with the eternal caveat: only if you’ve got the evidence or provenance to prove it. Just like the fakesters out there glossing up run-of-the-mill regular run critters, anybody could - theoretically - drill a hole through any given model and claim it’s a Weathervane SR.

The kind of evidence you’d need would be something like the original box, the original weathervane it was mounted on, or the visible evidence that it was factory painted after - not before - being drilled. (A fully assembled and mounted weathervane in a showring? Now that’d be a sight to behold!)

Just how rare are these things, anyway? It’s hard to tell. If you do a little Internet snooping, you can even see that Robbins is still in business, and still has a few Breyer weathervanes in stock:

http://www.robbinslightning.com/full_bodied.php

http://www.xpressweb.com/linton/fwv/ (click on "full-bodied" link)

It’s hard to judge which models were made, in what quantity, and over what period of time. It’s conceivable that the SRs might have been better sellers than the "regular run" items, or that many of the items listed in the brochure were never made at all - or if so, only in limited quantities. It’s yet another topic that merits much further research. For what it’s worth, the contents of my Simmental’s box were wrapped in a local Missouri newspaper, ca. 1985 (the company is based in Missouri, so I’m assuming it was original) so the SR Bulls were made, or were available, at least that long.

Another complication is the fact that, while mighty durable, Breyers don’t make ideal weathervane ornaments. If a few years of continuous exposure to the elements didn’t do most of them in, the lightning strikes certainly would have.

So, what’s the relationship between the weathervane SRs and the plain old undrilled SRs? Did Robbins sell the undrilled SRs, or were they available to other retailers and mail-order companies?

Anecdotal evidence documented in Nancy Young’s Breyer Molds & Models mentions an order form with numbers identical to the ones seen in the brochure, seen by a hobbyist lucky enough to find the (undrilled) livestock SRs for sale at a flea market back in 1985. Whether that order list was from Robbins, or another supplier, is unknown. (I’d like to think so, but I’d prefer to know so.)

Another wrinkle in this story is something from the brochure I didn’t show you last time:


Does that mean Desk Trophies = Presentation Collection? The photo is in black and white, and too murky to make out the base in any detail. I don’t think anyone has ever established who was responsible for mounting the Presentation pieces - I had always assumed someone more local to the factory, like the Riegseckers.

It truly leaves me at a loss for words. Was Robbins involved in the manufacture of the original Presentation Collection? Was it a continuation of the old program, or something new? Does that mean that the Presentation Collection may have led to the creation of the Weathervane SRs? If these models were a continuation of the Presentation program somehow, how do we classify them?

Gah! It makes my head hurt more than it already does.

To end on a slightly more amusing note, here’s a vintage Robbins ad from a 1981 Kentucky newspaper:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1696&dat=19811106&id=2e8aAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MEcEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6619,1704732

Ouch! I was kinda wondering how they’d mount the Fighting Stallion on the rod. Poor, punctured King!

Charolais Specials, Part I

I won’t go into the gory details, but I was sick yesterday - the kind of sick that requires one to be within sprinting distance of a bathroom. I’m somewhat better today; I can swallow, stand upright, and talk in moderately coherent sentences. I did have to spackle on a couple pounds' worth of makeup to make myself look a little less cadaverous for my driver’s license photo today, though. (I was so pale, I was verging on transparent.)

Anyway, as promised, here’s a picture of my SR Shorthorn Bull:


The first thing you’ll notice is that his eyes aren’t painted - he’s a cull! A little unusual, especially for an SR as rare as he is, but that’s not his most interesting feature. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The early SR Charolais Bulls - both the Shorthorn, and the Simmental - are mostly a mystery. We don’t know the exact circumstances of how either one came to be, how many were made, or even exactly when they were made. They started showing up sometime in the early to mid-1980s, mostly on everyone’s want lists.

We know that at least 288 of the SR Simmental were sold through the National Simmental Association, ca. 1983. The Simmental does seem to be somewhat more common than the Shorthorn, but it’s hard to tell because, like a lot of early SRs, they weren’t sold directly to the hobbyist market. There could be hundreds more of them, sitting on the shelves or in the closets of nonhobbyist cattle fanciers, unaware of either the hobby or their rarity.

It’s unclear if the Simmental was specifically designed for the NSA in the first place. Why do I say that? Let’s turn to this little document I found on eBay a number of years ago:


Weathervanes? With Breyers on them? What does that have to do with the SR Bulls? Take a look at the inside spread and see:


Let's look a little closer at the little box of text in the corner:


The brochure is copyright 1976; the photograph looks very similar to the photos used in the 1976 Breyer Dealer’s Catalog and Collector’s Manual - so much so, that I believe they’re from the same photo shoot. Does that mean that the Bulls were originally designed as SRs for Robbins Metal Craft, as early as 1976?

Maybe. The dates for the brochure seems right: the colors and typography of this brochure are so very, very 1970s. But it’s possible that the brochure could have been reprinted for years, and the "additional ornaments" text in the corner could have been added in a later printing. Is there any actual evidence of the SR Bulls being used - or at least sold - as weathervane ornaments?

You’ve already seen it. Here’s an aerial shot of my Shorthorn:


Yep, he was drilled for mounting. You can see that there are traces of airbrushing inside the drill holes, which means that he was drilled prior to being painted.

He’s not just a cull, he’s a weathervane cull. Advertised in a brochure illustrated with photos straight from Breyer.

Intrigued? More on this story, later in the week.