The Metlox Mystery - I Believe

First Post of the Day

So, did Metlox make a ballerina circus rider or not? Sally and I have been talking about this since the last blog post on the topic.

I ended that post pretty convinced that there is no Metlox ballerina. But Sally is far more knowledgable about Metlox than me, and she believes that Melox did indeed make a ballerina. With her permission, I post her thoughts here. (They have been edited a bit - she and I enjoy chatting about other things, too!)

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Hi, Lynn,

 Now to the Metlox ballerina - yes, the Metlox book makes no reference to it, but as with other specialty books, sometimes the author either accidentally leaves things out or just doesn't know about an item. 

But despite your very thorough research, I still think a Metlox ballerina exists - but is very, very rare. I have seen one twice - I saw one on a web page from a Metlox collector. The other was from the eBay auction which was in 2009 and had 16 bids and sold for $920. It had both stickers, Metlox and Poppytrail. The picture for the auction makes no reference to a horse. Maybe it's a shelf sitter as it is sitting on a small box.

In terms of the ballerina's left hand not touching the horse, that could have been the way someone sat the girl on the horse as the auction picture shows her touching the box - no gap.

The auction noted the ballerina was 7" tall, 3 1/2 " deep, and 3" wide. The auction says the tutu was white with some pink near the left arm, but the picture that is floating on the internet makes it look like it is light turquoise.

You have a lot of good points in your research, but for me, having seen the auction and the web page, I tend to think that it is out there. Maybe only in collectors' hands, but very, very few of them exist.

TTYL,

Sally

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The possible Metlox ballerina on one of the Metlox Circus Horses. This picture is from Sally and may be the one that was in the auction.

The file photo I have had in my collection for years. Is this from the eBay auction? I do not know.

Sally mentioned that one of the ballerinas she saw had both Metlox stickers.

One of them, the round Metlox sticker, looks like this and is on my palomino Circus Pony.

The triangular sticker with "Poppytrail" is on this white Metlox Circus Pony. The round Metlox sticker is also present - you can barely see the round sticker under its belly. (Not my photo; one I'd downloaded for my files  before I bought this piece for my collection.)

Having two stickers is not unusual for Metlox pieces, and the ballerina Sally saw in the auction had both. While stickers can help document a piece, they are not always a reliable piece of documentation. They can be transferred from one item to another, something that is known to have happened in the past.

Still, the Metlox and Poppytrail stickers are pretty solid and substantial; my guess is that if the ballerina that Sally saw had them, then there's a good chance that they are original to the piece.

As I read what Sally had to say, I thought back to a similar situation in the model horse world. Ever heard of the original Breyer Christmas decorators? For decades rumors have swirled around saying that, in the 1960s or so, red and green decorator models were briefly produced by Breyer. 

Simone Smiljanic, Ellen Hitchins, and Marney Walerious were the original "hobby mothers." Back in the late 1960s/early 1970s, they helped give the model horse hobby its earliest underpinnings. Simone was a good friend of mine and she was the source of those rumors.

Ellen Hitchins and Simone Smiljanic, November, 1971. (Taken by Nancy Kelly, the photo is in the collection of Liz Cory. Used with permission.)

A few years ago, the topic came up on social media and Simone was drawn into the discussion. Someone there was quite insistent that there was no proof of those 1960s decorators and that they were just a hobby rumor.

Simone responded quickly and adamantly. She wrote that she had been in the Breyer factory together with Ellen Hitchins and they both had seen those models on a shelf in the warehouse. She insisted that they did exist despite the lack of any photographic proof. They were real and she had seen them. 

Throughout her life, Simone's account of her visit to the factory and having seen those decorators never changed. And to this day, I believe her.

No photos of the 1960s red and green decorators have ever come to light. But, as Andrea Gurdon wrote in a blog post dated October 3, 2009, "Yet absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: all it takes is one photograph, one document, or one model to move something from the realm of imaginary."

That's a really good point. And in the case of the Metlox ballerina, we have an auction with multiple photos as evidence. Plus, I have a second photo of the piece, although it may be the same piece from the auction.

Just as I believed Simone in her lifelong assertation that the red and green Breyer decorators existed, I believe Sally that the Metlox ballerina is real.

Sally, I hope you find one for your collection. (One that's not $920!) What a find that will be. Send pictures when you do and we will all celebrate with you!

Don't forget the August give away! Comment to enter. Entries close Tuesday at 11:59 PM Eastern Time. Two winners this month!

Vintage Club Kirk & His Insert

For weeks, the box containing Kirk, the most recent Vintage Club offering, has been sitting on my desk. I've wanted to open that box, but I needed time to take photos of him, to get him tagged, and then to find a space for him on my shelves. 

Finally, I got that time.

Aside from a small bent corner, the shipping box looked okay.

Kirk's inner box looked fine until I looked at the top of it.

Oh, no. The ears had come through it. 

Sure enough, despite being bubble wrapped,

Kirk's near ear had poked through the bubble wrap and then the box - twice. Fortunately though there were no rubs on that ear and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Kirk is absolutely gorgeous. He's a glossy splatter grey, a highly popular vintage color that is very well executed on this piece.

He has a striped mane and tail and my piece is flawless.

Kirk is also a throwback to the 1950s night lights and has a jack in his belly where he can be connected to a power source.

The removable power cord is quite long enabling him to be placed a good distance away from the plug.

Kirk is rapidly becoming one of my favorite Vintage Club pieces of all.

Anyone else catch this error on Kirk's certificate of authenticity? When I read that, I thought that that was a really odd way to describe his color. In fact, it made no sense. Something was wrong.

I compared the certificate to a screen shot I'd taken of his description when he was released.

Yep! ICONIC is the word Breyer meant, not chaotic. Makes MUCH more sense!

Informational inserts always come with Vintage Club pieces, and Andrea Gurdon used to write them. I've wondered who would do them after she passed away, or if perhaps we were lucky and she'd completed the 2024 inserts before she had. I'm not sure that she did, though.

This insert did not seem like her writing, but I can't put my finger on why - it just doesn't "feel" like Andrea. I've read her blog for years, I've read all of her Vintage Club inserts, and I read her Morning Glory Ranch Sampler every year it was published. I'm very familiar with her writing style and lean toward thinking that she may not have written Kirk's insert.

But, I may be wrong and she did write this one, too.

Please don't misunderstand - there is absolutely nothing wrong with this insert; it's fine. It's just that the writing style doesn't have the familiarity for me that Andrea's did. 

A part of me hopes that this insert is one last bit of Andrea's knowledge being shared with the rest of us. Wouldn't that would be lovely?

If you know who write Kirk's insert, please email me at horsiemama8@gmail.com or make a comment below. I'm curious and I suspect I am not alone in wondering.

Thanks.

Andrea Gurdon, Breyer History Diva

Andrea Gurdon, also known as the Breyer History Diva, passed away after a brief fight with cancer on Saturday, February 17, 2024. Her family posted a note on her blog that she went peacefully in her sleep and that she had family with her when she went.

A fellow blogger, Andrea's Breyer History Diva blog was popular with collectors and over time she published 1,820 blog posts that were not only chock full of hobby history, but were often sprinkled with her sense of humor and wit, too.

Andrea (far left), Shannon Call, Kelsey Kramer, and Steff Bodamer at dinner after Indy Blooms in April, 2022.

Last November she began mentioning that she was not feeling well. She was struggling with insomnia and back pain, and nothing seemed to help despite consulting with medical professionals. On December 16 she wrote that she was "sick of being sick" and added gastrointestinal issues  to her list of things that made her feel unwell.

In January she wrote of having debilitating pain and being unable to eat, and then inserted that dry wit that she had and noted that her jeans were fitting again.

Andrea shared in her next post that she had been admitted to the hospital for testing. She was able to go home briefly after that, but she soon returned to the hospital, writing one last blog post before she did.

It was in her second to the last blog post titled Back Again that Andrea mentioned that she would be celebrating her 50th anniversary of collecting this year and that she had been looking forward to celebrating "with yellow cake with gold frosting and maybe a Traditional Man O' War on top."

Andrea, Kelsey, Me, Steff, Jamie, and Liz Cory.

I am going to bake that yellow cake, figure out how to make gold frosting, and then top it with my carpet herd Man O' War sometime during BreyerFest week this July. As I eat a slice (or two) I'll remember her contributions to preserving our hobby history and read snippets from her blog entries.

Rest in peace, Andrea. And thank you for all you did for our hobby. You will be missed.