The Boxer Clock - My Biggest Find

My dearest hope over the years has been to score a decorator. Decorators were produced in the early 1960s and did not sell well. Who wanted a blue or gold horse? (I didn't - back then.) Now they're very valuable and sought after.

My decorator Running Mares.

I've kept my eyes peeled for a decorator for decades and just this spring and summer added two Running Mares and their Foals in wedgewood and gold charm to my congas of those molds. 

I had always thought a decorator would be the most exciting thing I could find and add to my collection. But in 2014 I made the biggest collecting find of my life.

Taking a break from a stressful school day, I popped into an antique shop where I have found some nice pieces at good prices in the past. As I poked around, I spied a Breyer Boxer - a dog that the company had produced in its early days and is fairly easy to find. (I have four.)

It had the original studded vinyl collar, marking it as from the earliest days of production. 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 had made clocks in conjunction with Mastercrafters. 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, pulled from Google Images.)

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 the asking price was high enough that I hesitated to take a chance on it.

So, I left it behind 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 chock full of Breyer history documentation. If anyone could tell me if Breyer had made a Boxer clock, 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 responded 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 books on the company. Sande bought all of Nancy's research materials, photos, and notes when she decided to no longer update her books.

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

(Photo owned by Sande Schneider and used with permission.)

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

My clock for comparison.

The only other Breyer Boxer clock known. I had just come across quite a valuable piece, and I'd left it behind! 

The next day I was SOOOO distracted in the classroom - all I could think of was that Boxer clock sitting on display and for sale to anyone, collector or not, who wanted it. I left school as soon as the dismissal bell rang and raced into town, hoping against hope that the clock would still be at there.

Luck was with me and it was! I grabbed it off the chair it was sitting on and bought it without haggling over the price. (As it turned out, it was on sale for 10% off!)

Sande put me in touch with the owner of the clock pictured in Nancy's files. That collector and I have chatted about our clocks, and she says she bought hers at an early BreyerFest. It is in storage at the moment so I have not seen it, but she was excited to hear about mine and to see just how similar they are. I hope that the next time she pulls it out, she takes some photos or that she contacts me and we can get together with our clocks, examine and compare them, and chat.

So, what is the story behind these two Boxer clocks? The other collector and I both live a reasonable radius from the Chicago Breyer facility. There are reports from collectors who also live within this distance of interesting finds, of meeting former jobbers at flea markets selling one of a kind pieces, etc. My guess is that the two Boxer clocks may have been marketing experiments or tests that made it out of the factory and ended up being sold somewhere on the secondhand market.

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Which leads me to suspect there may be more of them out there, too. You can bet that, any time I see a Breyer Boxer at an antique shop or flea market, I now take a closer look!