Another Breyer Boxer!

My Breyer Boxer collection has grown to five (including the clock I found last fall.) The last three have been real oldies from the earliest days of production.

Yesterday I went to the Rensselaer Antique Mall at exit 215 from I-65 and this was the first thing I saw when I entered the building:

 Breyer Boxer #66, 1954 - 1973, $15, Rennselaer Antique Mall, 6/13/2015.

 He's only got a few rubs and a couple of marks, but is in great shape for his age. Plus, the price certainly was good!

He still sports his original snap-on vinyl collar, too.

For all that I do NOT collect dogs, I am thinking I need to rename this blog to something like "Lynn's Animal Rescue"!!

Boxer

Also at Sell It Here last Tuesday, a beautiful boxer with chain collar. I was not sure if the collar was authentic, but according to Nancy Young's book, it is.

 Boxer, #66, 1954 - 1973, $6.50, Sell It Here, Lafayette, Indiana, 2/2015.

 I love his gorgeous carmel color!

His right eye is lighter than the other for some reason, but that's the only flaw I see.

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!

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.)

Boxer

This Boxer is a beautiful piece - I count myself lucky to have found him yesterday. I love his chestnut color!

Breyer Boxer, #66, 1954-1973, glossy chestnut, no mold markings, $10, Sell It Here, Lafayette, Indiana, 2/2014.

He, too, appears to be a very early piece. He was from a different vendor than the other three that I found yesterday, and was MUCH cleaner. (I bathed him anyway, though.)

Antique Store Finds

Yesterday I did a quick perusal of Sell It Here 1 and 2 before heading out to work at Hershey. At Sell It Here 1, I hit the bonanza.

 Two Western Horses, an early Family Arab Mare, and an early Boxer. Bingo!!

The horses were all from the same seller and were quite dirty, so I bathed them all before photographing them for documentation. The FAM has some dark spots on her, too.

The Boxer was the only piece I was going to buy as I have two Western Horses and the FAM, but there was something unusual about the saddle-less Western Horse (I think it is a chalky, plus it has a mold mark I have never seen). The FAM just looked bereft there on the shelf, and since she is such an old piece, I "rescued" her and will sell or give her away. The second Western Horse is a very early piece, and mine like it is an oozie and falling apart. How much longer I will be able to keep it is in question as it is deteriorating rapidly.

So, home they all came to Windsong Stables, home of rescue model horses!!

Boehm's Bull - the Hereford

(from Breyer History Diva, 2009)

A Boehm biography found at a flea market:

The author and editor was a close personal friend of Boehm and an employee, and it shows: it’s more of a hagiography than a biography. The word fawning came to mind in my several attempts to get through the text. Here’s a brief excerpt:

"The next six years were to provide moments of excitement and depression for the Boehms. In retrospect, the hand of God surely over them for there were too many critical times in this period when it appeared the porcelain venture would fail. The great determination and endurance of Edward Marshall Boehm, working seventy to eighty hours a week, coupled with the courage, faith and enthusiasm of Helen Boehm, somehow carried them through each crisis."

He was also loved children, was beloved by Kings, Queens, Presidents and Pontiffs, and could peer into the very souls of animals. (Why, he knew animals so well that he was better at diagnosing the ailments of animals than the vet he worked for!) He was also handsome, talented, selfless, athletic, entirely self-taught...

Yeah, it reads does read like bad teenaged fanfic.

It was published a short time after Mr. Boehm death, and Mrs. Boehm undoubtedly had a hand in shaping the final manuscript as a final tribute. It’s not entirely unusable as a resource - there are a lot of lovely sketches, rare personal photographs, and descriptions of his working processes. Here’s a photograph that might look a little familiar:


It’s the presentation piece of the Hereford Bull, given by Mrs. Boehm to President and Mrs. Eisenhower in the spring of 1954. That date is … interesting.

Boehm’s Hereford was introduced in 1950. He was among the first Boehm pieces to be produced for general sale, but he wasn’t the first Boehm Breyer decided to adapt: that would be the Boxer, who was also among Boehm’s earliest releases.

Breyer’s adaptation of the Boxer was available by early 1953: I have a short article from the January, 1953 issue of Playthings announcing his arrival. ("Tenite Boxer Newest Breyer Animal Creation." p.169.) Why Breyer decided to adapt the Boxer first is unknown: his sleek, simplified contours probably made him an safer and bet. Safer and easier than the Hereford and Brahma, anyway.

We’re not entirely sure of the initial release date for Breyer’s adaptation of the Hereford. It was possibly as early as 1955, though the earliest datable reference I have for him is an appearance in the 1956 Alden’s Christmas Catalog (the Boehm-inspired Brahma appears on another page in the same catalog.)

The biography points out repeatedly that Mrs. Boehm was the promotional whiz of the company, constantly seeking out new photo ops, arranging exhibitions, and pestering local media outlets. It makes me wonder what the level of publicity was surrounding the presentation of the Bull to the Eisenhowers, and if any of it made into the Chicago press.

There’s probably nothing to it, but I’ll make note of it on my research-to-do list.