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 still have none. 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.
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. She is the guru of Breyer collecting history - 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!
I could hardly believe my good fortune as I paid for the clock and headed home. It's sitting on my bedroom dresser right now, but I will soon take it upstairs to my office and display it there. I still find it hard to believe that I found something so rare.
Now there are TWO Breyer Boxer clocks in the hands of hobbyists. I wonder if any more will surface?
(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.)
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