If you want a good visual for how far the hobby has come, then this is the blog post for you! But I also think that you may see some similarities, too.
While I introduced Bobbie Sue and Carol to mode horse collecting, they quickly became just as avid as I was for model horses and it wasn't long before we were holding shows at each other's homes.
Bobbie Sue and Carol
(I look at some of my carpet herd from those days and wonder how on earth they survived after having been dumped into paper bags and slung over bicycle handles!)
One of the similarities to today's hobby was the creativity that was involved - the making of props and doll riders while limited by what a couple of elementary kiddos with small allowances could afford. But we did what we could, and Bobbie Sue far outpaced Carol or me when it came to repurposing household items, cutting up shoes and felt for saddles, and more.
In our shows we actually galloped horses by hand over jumps and timed our barrel racers, so we had to make suitable props for those classes.
A set of jumps with dixie cup jump standards (note my stable brand on them!) and Lincoln Logs for rails.
The Dixie Cups worked much better than standards created from egg cartons but some pieces have survived after all this time.
Awards were made by drawing and coloring them on paper and then cutting them out.
Notice how there are no blue ribbons in this batch of ribbons I won 50 plus years ago? Well, why make blue ribbons when the ones that came attached to your Breyers were so pretty? (Oh, if I could have a do-over on that choice!)
Just as many hobbyists today use doll riders in performance classes, so did we. I loved the Marx Best of the West dolls for that - they were realistic, articulated so they could ride, and the scale of the younger dolls in the series worked well with our Breyers.
Josie West was the more popular of the two younger dolls, but my personal favorite was Janice West.
Janice even got some western show pants from me, one of my first sewing efforts, with fringe on the bottom and glitter trim. The other doll is Skipper. While articulated, she couldn't compare to the Marx dolls.
The doll riders we used came from all scales and were chosen for two reasons. One was if they were articulated like these Mattel Liddle Kiddles were.
The other was the props they came with, and Liddle Kiddles came with a huge variety that could be used in all sorts of imaginative ways.
They could be used in various classes at our shows as well as for our doll riders socializing in the bunkhouse when the show was over.
We even had show blankets that we made for our winning horses. I was the sewist of the three of us, a very beginning sewist, but I am still as proud of these blankets as I was in the 1960s when I made them. I had never sewn before and had no idea how to create and fit a pattern.
See those yellow blanket closures? That's another 1960s creative idea - Bobbie Sue and Carol's neighborhood was just being built, and when the phone lines were put in, the workers left behind many bits and pieces of the wire.
That wire happened to be highly flexible and could be cut easily with school scissors. We scavenged those bits and pieces and used them for almost all our tack buckles and bits.
These live shows that we put on together lasted until Carol moved to North Carolina and Bobbie Sue and I got Starbuck and Amy, our real horses, when we were 12. Bobbie Sue dived into the real horse world, while I split my time between the real and model horse worlds.
There were no more live shows and I did not know any other model horse collectors. And then one day, Bobbie Sue and I were at a 4-H horse camp. I'd brought along the most recent copy of Horse & Rider magazine to read.
This article on Ellen Hitchins' and Simmie Smiljanic's club, the International Model Horse Showers' Association, was in there and I remember being stunned to discover that there were other people like me who collected and showed. I joined Ellen and Simmie's club in October, 1970 and began photo showing soon after that. Bobbie Sue had no interest in that, and then, due to a move, I lost contact with her shortly after that.
This series is not about photo showing, so tomorrow we will talk more about the history of live showing here in Indiana.
Stay 'tooned!
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