A Hobby Bestie - Kathy Bateman

I've written before that in our "lean years" (when we had six kids at home and I was a stay at home mama), I did paper routes to earn extra money for our family. Craig and I shared an early morning vending box route and then I had an afternoon neighborhood route that I did by bicycle. 

One of the places I delivered to was an apartment complex of townhomes, and the manager subscribed to the paper. I had stopped by her home one afternoon and as we were chatting on her porch, I spied a shelf FULL of model horses just inside her door. Of course, I asked her about them and she invited me in to see her collection.

My jaw dropped when I saw what she had. And as you might imagine, thus began a lifelong friendship with my hobby bestie, Kathy Bateman.

Kat wasn't aware of the formal hobby but I introduced her to it and soon she was doing some amazing things.

A talented tack maker, she created this piece for Kay Biberstein in the early 1990s. (Photo by Kay.)

We began attending live shows together  - she'd stop by my home at 5 in the morning, we'd put my tubs into her truck next to hers, and off we'd go for a day of fun, talking all the way to Indy and back. We had so much fun!

Kathy quickly began having a lot of success and we soon we were on our way together to the very first NAN.

The inaugural NAN was quite different from what it is now - it was smaller but the competition was still fierce.

Kat's live show success continued on at NAN. (Sorry for the picture quality - these pictures are in an album and getting fragile, so I photographed them without taking them out.)

We met up there with another long time hobby friend of mine, Beth Dickinson. (Beth and I met in the early 1970s when we were teenage pen pals), 

 

and we spent time together at NAN and then at BreyerFest.

Kat and I went to several BreyerFests together. (Stephanie Clift, Kat, and Beth.)

She and I even put on three live shows - Lincoln Land I, Lincoln Land II, and Lincoln Land III in Champaign and Urbana, Illinois. Those days were so much fun and Kat became one of my dearest friends. 

Fast forward to today - Kat is retired and she and her husband live in Tennessee and summer at the "wee house" in the North Carolina mountains. I moved back to Indiana and my days of hopping on my bike and heading to Kat's home are long gone. But we have stayed in touch through email and social media despite the passage of nearly thirty years.

Tomorrow we will take a look at what's currently in Kat's model horse collection. (You might want to have a napkin handy; it's drool worthy!)

Stay 'tooned!