Griffin Lamps

After planting trees in the morning, I had an uneventful birthday, working on craft projects and restoring my latest acquisition:

I don’t have much documentation about the manufacturer of this lamp, the Griffin Lamp Manufacturing Company, other than this ad I found in the November 1970 issue of Western Horseman:

The company made more than just the Western Prancing Horse lamp; you can occasionally find similar lamps with other toys attached, like stuffed animals and die-cast trucks. In fact, I might have had one on my night stand when I was little; I think it was a vinyl bear? It was basically a big squeaky toy, and not (thank goodness) one of those creepy stuffies with a human face.

(It’s long since gone.)

The Western Prancer ones turn up every once and a great while; the last one I saw previous to the Buckskin was a Smoke with its original lampshade, and it went for more money than I was comfortable paying. (While Smoke is not listed in the ad, its absence is obviously a typo.)

The Buckskin one had been sitting on eBay for at least a month prior; I didn’t notice it at the time because I was trying to behave myself for Lent and not actively buying anything. So when he happened to pop up on top of my searches early last week, I decided to make it my birthday present this year!

He was in much better shape than I expected him to be, other than the missing shade and saddle. I have been trying to upgrade my Buckskin Western Prancing Horse for quite a while too, and other than the yellowing, I think he’s aesthetically better than my current Buckskin. 

But since I consider the lamp its own separate thing, I’ll still be on the lookout.

The numbering of these lamps in the ad is interesting, since it obviously follows the numbering of the original Western Prancer releases, with a one added to the front: Buckskin is #1111, Palomino is #1112, Bay is #1114, and Appaloosa #1115. This is not dissimilar to the numbering system they used for the Showcase Collection, which used trailing zeroes. Or even the Presentation Collection, which had the number 50 prefixed to their original release numbers: for example, the Presentation Collection Man o’ War was numbered #5047. 

All of these oddball releases happened around the same time (the late 1960s and early 1970s) so it makes me wonder if Breyer had originally intended to market these as a part of their own product line, but pulled out at the last minute. (In case it is not obvious, the base is also plastic.) 

I have a feeling that the replacement saddle for the lamp will end up costing me more than what I paid for the lamp itself. Alas, I’m already consigned to paying a princely sum for the lampshade, so I may just bite the bullet and go for it anyway. 

Saving Hobby History

One shift turned into two back-to-back shifts, thus playing havoc on my schedule. Fooey. It'll be worse in January, when the part-time job temporarily turns full-time, with overtime, and insane. (It's not as awesome as it sounds. Trust me. Other income-making opportunities are welcome.) Not sure if I'm going to cope with it here – write shorter posts, pre-write a bunch, or some combination of the two. We'll cross that proverbial bridge when we come to it.

Back to the Hobby History project.

When I talk to “outsiders” about the model horse hobby, many of them get the impression that it's a relatively new phenomenon, like PEZ collecting. PEZ dispensers have been around for about the same amount of time as Breyer Horses – since the early 1950s – but there wasn't an active or huge PEZ collecting/hobby community until the early 1990s. (I should know: I was one of attendees of the first PEZ convention, the famed Dispens-O-Rama, in 1991! Yes, it was several different flavors of awesome, including Anise.)

So when I tell them that the hobby has been around in some form, in the U.S., since the late 1950s, I get the usual eye-rolls and incredulous looks. So I'll go to my archives and pull out a couple of pieces of documentation to straighten out the wiseacre, including this neat article from the September, 1961 issue of Western Horseman:

Yup, that's an Old Mold Mare they are holding. There's a App FAM and several H-R minis visible, and that's a pot metal Western Horse on the shelf. A favorite quote from the brief article beneath:

“The miniature saddle maker's artistic talents also include pencil sketching and refinishing horse statutes in such colors as real animals.”

Unlike Breyer History, we actually have quite a lot of Hobby History ephemera out there. Prior to the Internet, the hobby was a paper-intensive affair: letters, newsletters, photo shows, the occasional newspaper or magazine articles brought us together and bound us together. I can remember stalking the mailbox on a daily basis, anxiously waiting for the next precious communique from the Model Horse Universe. A big, fat envelope with my name on it = much happiness!

As a student of history, I'm also interested in saving the hobby's collective history, not just of Breyer Horses. Aside from the research opportunities it would provide (i.e. being able to track when certain terms were invented, when color and mold changes occurred, etc.) it'd also provide us some standing and credibility to the Outside World. Showing the Outside World that we've been around for about fifty years will go quite a ways towards taking us more seriously, and proving that we're not a fad, and we're not going away.

Besides, other avocations with papery origins, most notably Science-Fiction and Comic Book Fandom, have made vocal and visible efforts to preserve their history and ephemera, so why not us? Science-fiction fandom just celebrated its 80^th anniversary, in fact! (And some are celebrating by trying to find out what happened to First Fandom's first club president. Cool!)

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=58405

There's just one problem: most hobbyists shared my sentimental attachment to this paper, and are loathe to give it up.

I've been trying for some time now to save the physical remnants of our collective history and create at least the rudiments of a hobby archive. I've made a few excellent recoveries and discoveries, but most hobbyists don't want to surrender the tangible evidence of their fondest childhood memories. Then there's the contentious question of who becomes the repository: everyone who has a bigger than average pile of stuff wants to be home of THE archive (including me!)

I first became involved on Blab when my name came up in a potential hobby history project; our initial efforts didn't get very far, for a variety of reasons. The topic came up again, in connection with the epic “future of the hobby” thread, and it looks like we might get a little bit further along this time. For one thing, a Facebook page has already been created to help collect and coordinate our collective efforts, and begin the effort to collect oral histories. A link to that page has been provided in my Links of Interest, to the right.

Next post – back to plain ol' Breyer History. Promise!