Still More Breyer Lamps: The Colorful Glen-Tek Lamps

One of the first Breyer lamps my mom and I found in the early days of our haunting antique stores and flea markets in the 1990s was a Glen-Tek Silky Sullivan lamp. As the resident horse racing fan in the house, it ended up on my dresser all through my middle and high school years. (It's still there in fact. One of these days, I need to bring it back to Chicago with me.)

Over the years, we found several more Glen-Tek lamps---a couple more Silky Sullivans and a mahogany Proud Arabian Foal. These two seem to be the most common lamps produced by the company. 

(The shade was borrowed from a 
Dunning lamp. It's not original.)

As you can see, the Glen-Tek lamps have distinct bases---a light colored top, contrasting color around the beveled edge, and little round feet on the underside at the corners. Many of them have a small accessory decorating the base like a fence, water pump, or drum. 

Both the Silky Sullivan and mahogany Proud Arabian Foal lamps can be found for sale on sites like eBay pretty regularly. That said, there are at least six more Glen-Tek lamps I'm aware of, but they all seem to be quite a bit harder to find. I can only assume they weren't made as long as the aforementioned Silky Sullivan and mahogany Proud Arabian Foal lamps. 
 
The first of these is another Proud Arabian Foal lamp, but featuring a dapple grey foal instead of a mahogany foal. They too have the little fence panel on the base.

Photo by Christina Dils

Occasionally, some lamps have Swaps instead of Silky Sullivan. He faces in the opposite direction and also has a fence.

Photo ganked from Facebook

One of the cutest lamps Glen-Tek offered is this palomino Family Arabian Foal with a little red water pump and bucket. The edge of the base is painted white, and the lamp pole and cord are also white to match.

Photo by Christina Dils

But I think my favorite Glen-Tek creation is this classic Lipizzaner lamp with the little drum accessory. I was delighted to find one on eBay earlier this year, and while it was pricier than I would have liked, I justified it as a birthday present to myself. (I feel like that was quite solid logic.) Like the Family Arabian Foal lamp, this one also has a white trimmed base, lamp pole, and cord.

This lamp with a Classic Arabian Stallion and Foal is the only Glen-Tek lamp I have seen with two models on the base. 

This bay Rearing Stallion lamp looks fairly similar to a Dunning lamp, but like the other Glen-Tek lamps, it has round feet under the base helping to distinguish it.

Photo by Christina Dils

As you can see from the photos below, the feet on the bottom of the bases varied a bit. Some are quite round while others are sort of compressed. They all have a lamp cord that emerges from the underside.

Photo by Christina Dils

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out much of anything about the Glen-Tek Scientific company other than it was located in Scottsdale, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. Breyer historian and author Nancy Young related in her Breyer Molds and Models books that Peter Stone told her the company was co-owned by Rudy Schorsch who was later involved in the mail order company Horses International. (They offered a handful of Breyer special runs in the 1980s.) As you can see on the stickers on the lamp bases in the photos above, the only address given for Glen-Tek was a PO box, so I was unable to search for any company property records. Rudy himself is also an enigma. He apparently passed away in June 1989 at the age of 58, but I couldn't find an obituary for him. There are no references to the company in local newspapers either. I am hoping to look through my stash of Western Horseman magazines when I visit my family in December in case Glen-Tek advertised in the classifieds, but I'm not sure how many magazines I have from the later 1970s. (It should be noted that the Arizona Glen-Tek Scientific lamp company was not related to Glentek, the southern California servo motor and drive company.)

So that said, while we don't know the specifics of the Glen-Tek Scientific company, their products give us some good clues about when their Breyer lamps were made. Based on which models were used and how they are painted, it appears the Glen-Tek lamps were probably made from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s. Swaps and Silky Sullivan were not released until 1975, and the Lipizzaner debuted in 1976, so that gives us a pretty solid starting time frame. The Proud Arabian and Family Arabian Foals were available earlier, but the painting style of the foals on the lamps I've seen appears to be later 1970s in my opinion. I've only seen one example of the Rearing Stallion lamp, and it looks like a very late 1970s or early 1980s piece to me.

The Classic Arabian Stallion and Foal lamp likely dates from about 1979 to 1981 which probably gives us an approximate end date for the Glen-Tek lamps. The Classic Arabian Stallion was shown with no star and tan hooves only in those years in Breyer's catalogs, and the palomino Classic Arabian Foal was last available in 1982. Given that no lamps have turned up with models made outside of about 1975-1981/1982, I suspect that accounts for the years of production pretty accurately. 

If anyone reading this knows more about the Glen-Tek Scientific company or has a Glen-Tek lamp not shown here, please feel free to comment or send me a photo at mumtazmahal (at) gmail (dot) com

Thanks for reading!