The November Give Away Items

 Second Post of the Day

I did a quick run out to Oxford this morning and picked up a few items for the Give Away.

Like this hat. This one is mine - I bought two and the second one is part of the Give Away.

There were two styles of hat patches. Because there is a rodeo held in Oxford every year, the other hat had a cowboy riding a bucking bronco on it. Nice, but I figured you would all prefer the Standardbred (who, in true Dan Patch form, is PACING.)    

Also in the Give Away is this cool bandana.

I liked it so much that I bought one for me, too!

Last but not least, a drink koozie. It has the rodeo design on it. If there were ones with Standardbreds, then they were all sold.

So there you have it - the November Give Away items. All are new and all are unused. Enter to win by commenting on any/all blog posts posted here starting with Friday, November 14 and ending Monday, November 17, at 11:59 PM Eastern.

I'll announce the winner Tuesday or Wednesday.

Stay 'tooned!

       

November Give Away: The Story Behind the Question

Today I will announce the winners of the November Give Away, but first I'd like to share the story behind the question, What did the man who came into my Feast tent have a license to ride?

You may remember that I had mentioned a couple of times on the blog that I had a very unusual block print, one with elephants on it. (A motif that was popular during the 18th century due to blossoming trade with India.)

It's an unusual, hard to find block print, and I was excited to find it, quickly turning it into a shirt to take to the Feast.

The shirt was hanging on the rack when the man and his friend came into the tent. They walked around looking at my wares and then spied the elephant shirt and the laughter began. I wasn't sure what they found so humorous until the friend said, "Too bad you don't have a license to ride those, too."

Turns out the man was licensed to ride camels. And when I said I'd never heard of that before, he pulled out his wallet and opened it, handing it over to me to look at.

Whoa!! He really did have a license to ride camels!!

The man let me take a picture of it and gave me permission to share that photo here, even with the wording on it. "Who will be able to read the number?" he asked when I said I'd black that out.  And so you get to see a camel riding license in its entirety.

We could not talk longer as I had other customers come in, and another gentleman bought the elephant shirt later that day.

Fast forward to a few weeks after the Feast and Leslie invited me up to her farm to shop the new block prints that had just arrived.

And look what I found.

One with a camel border!

And not just camels, but smaller elephants above them! Oh, how I wish I had that man's contact information - I think I would make him a trade shirt from this block print for free!

So, that's the story behind this month's question And someone did guess correctly that the answer was "camel."

Now it's time to spin to win.

And the winner is...!

 And the winner of the second spin is...!

Congratulations to you both!

Clock Two: The Breyer Boxer Clock

Finding my Breyer Boxer clock was absolutely the most jaw dropping collecting experience I have ever had. An extremely rare piece, I wasn't even sure he was real when I discovered him in 2014 sitting on a table in a local antique shop.

Boxer clock on the highest shelf; individual boxers on the lowest.

Here's the story about how he made his way into my collection, taken from a 2018 blog post titled, The Boxer Clock - My Biggest Find.

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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 beautiful 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 there.

Luck was with me and it was! I grabbed it off the table 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.

. 

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!

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Since I wrote that blog post in 2018, one more Boxer clock has appeared. It was found within the same radius from Chicago that the other two clocks were found and is the one that is posted on Identify Your Breyer.

I learned a lesson with the Victor clock - don't forget to look UP when you are searching for models in shops and thrift stores! But it was a very different lesson that I learned from finding my Breyer Boxer clock - don't be afraid to take a chance, especially if your gut feeling is telling you that you have found something special.

Give Away Error! 

I checked the photo of the license the man had shown me at the Feast (and given me permission to use here on the blog) and I have made an error. It is NOT a license to drive, it's a license to RIDE.

So, the question becomes, What is he licensed to ride? 

To be fair, I'm going to extend the deadline to answer  until Monday night (tomorrow at 11:59 PM Eastern.) Want to change an answer already in the comments? Delete the comment and make a new one. If that doesn't work, make another comment and indicate that it is a corrected comment. I'll use that one when I spin to win.

Good luck!