Dan Patch

I went back to Raven's Roost Antiques today specifically to get this Pacer. He was with the TWH I got Saturday, and I suspected this piece might also be a good find, too. I was right.

 #819, Dan Patch, 1990 only, $11, Raven's Roost Antiques, Lafayette, Indiana, 10/2014.

His hooves are a lot lighter than my other Dan Patch, but there is no doubt, this one is the Breyer Dan Patch that was only made for one year. It was on sale for 20% off!

His outstretched foreleg is warped, but I can fix that with a hair dryer.

I wonder who the collector is that is selling such nice models at Raven's Roost? Or did someone buy a collector's collection and is now putting it out piecemeal?

Five Gaiter - Commander

I looked at this piece twice at Sell It Here in Lafayette before picking him up. Just love the mold, and he is in such nice condition!

 Commander, #52, 1961 - 1986, $14, Sell It Here, Lafayette, IN, 10/2014

The flange is nipped (indicating a newer model as does the USA stamp by the Breyer stamp) but it is painted - unlike my other nipped tassle 5 Gaiters.

He is remarkable shape - someone must have had him in a collection and valued him. Now, he's been "rescued" and is in mine!

Sande Schneider - Uber Collector

Sande Schneider is the world's leading authority on Breyer horses. Her collection numbers almost 4,000 pieces! She's also a friend of mine who I met through the hobby. I know a pretty fair amount about Breyer collecting, but if there's a puzzle about a piece, it's Sande who I (and everyone else) turn to! Even Breyer - they have contacted her several times asking to use pieces from her archives.

Sande recently helped me identify the Boxer clock I found last week at Sell It Here.

 My clock.

 Jo Kulwicki's clock - picture from Sande's files.

I did my own research online when trying to figure out of my clock were real or not (I think it is.)

 An image I pulled from the internet as I tried to document my clock, the Davy Crockett Prancer clock, turned out to be Sande's!

 A Western Horse clock - unknown whose it is.

 A Boxer night light - image from internet/unknown.

Sande sent me some pictures of her own files:

 She has eight file cabinets chock full of documentation!

And binders galore.

Yes, she's the real Breyer guru and an uber collector!

TWH - World Champion Horse Equipment TWH III

Another great find this week!

World Champpion Horse Equipment TWH III, #790698, SR for World Champion Horse Equipment, $22.50 Raven's Roost Antiques, Lafayette, Indiana, 10/2014.

This piece is beautiful and in near mint condition, too. 

The belly stamp.

Breyer Solid Black Stretch Morgan

Another valuable find besides the Boxer clock this week - a solid black Stretch Morgan!

Stretch Morgan in solid black, #48, 1964 - 1987, $15.00, Sell It Here, 10/2014

A valuable piece and hard to find.

No white on this piece at all.

Hooves show the grey plastic the model is made from. This verifies it was produced in the 1970s during the oil crisis.

A comparison of the Morgan's hooves (left) to Breezing Dixie's hooves (right.) Notice how Breezing Dixie's are much whiter - that's the normal color of plastic that Breyer uses.

Breyer History Diva recently wrote about the black Stretch Morgan variations. It's a good thing she did; that's why I was aware that this was an unusual find!)


From Breyer History Diva, October, 2014

Solid Black Stretch Morgan

Solid Black! Well, almost solid black - he does have a chipped ear, revealing pinkish-purple plastic underneath. Solid Black Morgans mostly - though not exclusively - date to the Chalky Era of the early 1970s. Why bother basecoating a model, when you can just paint it solid black, instead? 

Allegedly some Solid Blacks were made as trophy models for the American Morgan Horse Association, around the same time. As far as I know, they’d be indistinguishable from the Regular Run Variations - unless they came with the documentation to prove otherwise.

In either case, the Solid Black Morgan is quite the rarity: I haven’t found another Solid Black Morgan since then. The prices I see them bringing on the secondary market make it unlikely that I’d ever be able to upgrade my boy if I wanted to.



Chalky Black Stretch Morgan
Back to the Black Morgan Parade. Here’s my Chalky one:

According to my records, he was another early flea market find - a few years after the Solid Black, and not long after I had started going to the flea markets on my own. (I had a car! And a job that paid me cash money!)
Other than his condition - exceptional, for a Chalky - he didn’t stand out enough to imprint a special memory. But just because he didn’t bowl me over when I found him doesn’t mean I didn’t love or appreciate him any less: the fact that I’ve owned him for over two decades now should be testament to my affection. 

Chalkies used to be considered sort of an odd thing to collect. Prices reflected that: more often than not, they weren’t any more expensive than non-Chalkies. In fact, their delicate nature and associated paint flaws - runs, drips, hoof puddling, softened/filled in details - were seen as detriments, in some hobbyists’ eyes.

The Morgan is sort of in the middle of the scale in terms of rarity  - not as common as the Appaloosa Performance Horse or Yellow Mount, but considerably more common than the Misty or Bucking Bronco. He also comes in an "unpainted" version where the gray of his plastic is allowed to show through the unpainted areas of his star and stockings, giving him an unusual (and not unappealing) two-tone effect.


Almost Solid Black Stretch Morgan
This particularly handsome Black Morgan Variation - Solid Black with gray hooves, a star, and no socks - actually predates the previous two in my collection, by at least a year:

I found him at a local live show. This show had set up a "sales area" for showers who didn’t want to deal with the hassle of simultaneously showing and selling, or worry about grabby hands reaching for the wrong models. They’d drop off their sales items in the morning, and pick up whatever cash they made at the end of the day.

I hustled over to that area quickly because we had a local dealer in attendance that day with a reputation as a flipper - buying up quality pieces very low, and pricing/selling them fairly high. While I had a cordial relationship with this person, I was still in college at the time and on a super-tight budget. This dealer frequented the same flea markets I did, and I had lost out on enough goodies: it wasn't planning on letting anything good slip away that day.

This model has always been one of my favorites, but what amazes me is the reaction that others have had to him. Every time I’d take him to a show, or show off a picture of him, other hobbyists would gush over how beautiful he was.

I have to guess that the fact that I have a ton of Variations, Test Colors and Rarities has made me a little bit blasé about him. He is wonderful, but he’s only the third or fourth most-fabulous Stretched Morgan in my herd. (Not going anywhere. Don't ask.)

Odd thing was, he didn't show well. I never did figure out the disparity. If everyone loved him, why wasn’t he placing? The only thing I could come up with was that when I was actively live showing, the Stretched Morgan - especially Black ones - just happened to be on the unfashionable list. The Black Stretched Morgan, at that point, had been in production for 20 some years. Except for the Solid Black variation that everyone was looking for, he was the definition of common and uncool.

It’s certainly not the case anymore, especially since the advent of Collectibility showing. The length of the production run on the Black release is no longer a liability, but an asset: more history means more potential variations. Even without that as a consideration, opinion of the Stretched Morgan mold as a Morgan has shifted back from "not very good" to "more typey than most." If I were to start live showing again, he’d definitely get shortlisted for my showstring.

I used to think of this variation as a "small v" variation - a random, unplanned one - as opposed to a "big V" variation - a deliberate and sustained change in the production paint job. Over the years, though, I’ve seen - and heard of - a few others identical to him, and there was one on eBay recently that went for a rather impressive amount of money.

So it might have been something deliberate after all. As I’ve written before, I’m a little hesitant to classify things as "big V" variations, because that’s where madness begins. Sometimes a variation is just a variation, and doesn’t need to be anything more than that.


The First Black Stretch Morgan

If an average collector has any variations of the Black Morgan, it’s the first: bald-faced, four stockings, and black hooves. They made him for a while this way - most of the 1960s, near as I can figure; the earliest ones had handpainted eyewhites. The black hooves eventually became gray hooves, then in 1970 the bald face was replaced with a star.

You wouldn’t have known that to look at the catalog photos, though: they used stock photos of the Bald-Faced Variations in Dealer Catalogs and Collector’s Manuals through 1975. They did use a correct Star-Faced photo on the white photo/picture boxes that debuted in 1973.

That disparity I attribute to a case of being cheap rather than inattentive, lazy, or incompetent.

There are no special stories or memories associated with the Stretched Morgan featured above. I’ve gone through a number of models in this Variation, never quite finding the "right" one; I had to purchase this better-than-average example at a local antique market - at an antique market price. (More than I usually pay, but still less than what most hobbyists pay retail). That’s it.

As for variations I don’t have in the collection yet, I wouldn’t mind locating a Short Sock Variation - a later variant with socks that barely clear the pasterns - but I’m in no rush.

Hartland Tinymite Arabian

Hartland Tinymite Arabian

Hartland Tinymite Arabian, #60, 1966-1969, $2.50, Countryside Antiques, Lebanon, IN.

New mold with changed ears and tail, styrene,.

Breyer Boxer Clock

My lucky find!

 Breyer Boxer Clock, # unknown, $38, Sell It Here, Lafayette, Indiana, October 22, 2014.

I have been corresponding with Sande Schneider, and she found a picture of a Boxer clock in Nancy Atkinson Young's files. It is owned by Jo Kulwicki.

The clockworks are different, but other than that, they look the same.

The clock workings are labeled "Lanshire, Chicago" and I have found several of the metal horse clocks with Lanshire workings on eBay as I research this find.

These are the only two Breyer Boxer clocks known in the hobby. Needless to say, I am thrilled to have made such a find! And very, very grateful.

The Find of a Lifetime

Since I have been collecting so long, I have had the opportunity to buy pieces new that are now quite collectible or to find others on the secondary market (antique shops, bartering with another hobbyist, etc.) It is a medium sized collection, but it is high quality. I love my collection and sure hope there is collecting in the next life!!

My biggest hope over the years has been to score a decorator. Decorators were produced in the 1950s/early 1960s and did not sell well. Who wanted a blue or gold horse? Now they're VERY valuable.

I did find a decorator once. Kathy Bateman, a lady living in the low-income apartments where I delivered newspapers in the 1990s, had one that I spied one day while delivering her newspaper. I knew she could get more than the $75 I had to spend, so I put her in touch with a collector with deeper pockets than mine. She got $1500 for that piece! (I may have lost the model, but I made a life long friend - Kathy and I are still in touch.)

I've kept my eyes peeled for a decorator for decades and never found one. I always thought a decorator would be the most exciting thing I could find and add to my collection. 

Until Tuesday when I made the biggest collecting find of my life.

Tuesday I popped into Sell It Here, a place I have found some nice pieces at good prices in the past. As I poked around, across an aisle and past two booths I spied a Breyer Boxer - a dog that the company has produced since its earliest days and is fairly easy to find. (I have two.)

It had the original studded vinyl collar, marking it as from the earliest days of production. Mine don't have the collars, so I walked over to take a look. But there was more to this dog than first appeared.

 It was attached to a wooden plinth and had a clock.

I paused. Breyer made clocks in their earliest days in conjunction with Mastercraft. They, too, are highly collectible. This looked a lot like the clocks I had seen in pictures.

A Breyer Davy Crocket clock. (Picture by Sande Schneider.)

But never, ever had I heard of a Boxer clock. I'd not seen any at shows where Breyer clocks were featured or in any of the reference books I have. And at $45, I hesitated to take something home I strongly suspected might be a fake.

I left it at the shop. 

I went home and emailed my friend, Sande Schneider, about it. Sande is also a long time collector, and she has file cabinet upon file cabinet of Breyer history documentation. If anyone could tell me if the Boxer clock was real or a fake, it was Sande. (Breyer has even come to her to get documentation as they did not keep good records in the early days of the company.)

Sande said that she did not know of any Breyer Boxer clocks, but would do some research. In her archives is the material Nancy Atkinson Young collected when she wrote the definitive collectors book on the company.

And in going through Nancy's archives, Sande found this:

A picture of a Breyer Boxer clock. Same studded vinyl collar, same wooden plinth, same clock housing, but a different clock face.

The only other Breyer Boxer clock known. (No wonder I'd never seen any at shows!)

Wow. I had just come across quite a valuable piece - and I'd left it behind! 

The next day I left Hershey as soon as school was over, hoping against hope that the clock would still be at Sell It Here.

It was. And it was on sake for $38, a nice plus!

Now there are TWO Breyer Boxer clocks in the hands of hobbyists.

(Sande put me in touch with the owner of that clock, Jo Kulwicki. I am looking forward to hearing about her clock, where she found it, and any history she can shed on it.)