My Own Money Manager Manifested!

I mentioned in a recent post that my family likes to joke that if we talk about or think about a certain model enough, we can manifest it. So that said, I spent the last several months working on and researching my early history of Breyer post, and I most definitely had Breyer's My Own Money Manager bank on the brain because of it. I've wanted one for years, but they're very hard to find, and they're usually expensive despite often being in rough shape when they do turn up.

So, not surprisingly, I was very excited to see a Money Manager pop up on eBay mere days after my Breyer history post went live a couple of weeks ago. Manifested? Maybe! I stalked the auction impatiently for a week, won it for a song, and then refreshed the tracking number for the box frequently once it was shipped. As soon as I got the text notification that it had arrived, I flew out of my office, slapped a sign on the door that I was "at lunch," and ran over to the campus mail room to retrieve the box.

The auction did give the dimensions of the Money Manager, not much more than 4 inches tall, but it's smaller than I've always imagined it. It's so tiny and cute!

Yay! Silly grail achieved!

According to the "New Toys On Parade" feature in the February 1950 issue of Toys and Novelties, a Chicago toy industry magazine, the My Own Money Managers were sold exclusively by Gimbels in New York for the holidays beginning in 1949 with more general distribution of the item planned for 1950.  The Money Managers were described as "authentic, miniature office file[s]," and they were advertised as having "sales potential to adults, teen-agers, careerists, for office petty cash, and unlimited other purposes," although they were primarily marketed for kids. Each one came with printed labels for the drawers, "12 popular headings for children, 8 for adults, and 4 blanks for personal projects." The Money Managers  also came with a booklet entitled "Grow A Self-Reliant Child."

February 1950 Toys and Novelties

The Money Managers came in "flag red" or "forest green," according to Breyer's advertising, and they were molded in Tenite plastic, just like the horses that would follow soon after. They were highly touted by Parents magazine and seem to have been popular sellers initially. Peter Stone, son of company founder Sam Stone, recalled that the Money Managers were sold in Walgreens drug stores (and likely other drug stores and five-and-dimes of the time). He also remembered seeing commercials for them on TV featuring a local Chicago celebrity. [1] The ad on the left below shows a child watching just such a commercial on TV.

March 1950 Toys and Novelties ads

In June 1950, an ad for a 6-drawer Money Manager was featured in Toys and Novelties. It was priced at $2.98, the original price for the 4-drawer model (which was reduced to only $1.98). Interestingly, the ad also includes model numbers for the Money Managers, 0044 for the 4-drawer and 0046 for the 6-drawer. There aren't many Money Managers in the hands of collectors, and the majority of them are 4-drawer examples. I think I recall seeing a 6-drawer example owned by another collector in a photo on Facebook several years ago, but I can't find it again, so I'm not sure I'm remembering correctly. Whatever the case, the 6-drawer Money Manager was only advertised once in Toys and Novelties as best I can tell (my local archive was missing some issues from the early 1950s), and they are even harder to find than the 4-drawer version.

For the holidays in 1950, Sears offered the usual red and green Money Managers as well as a tortoise shell version marketed as a Cigarette Host for adults. Collector Andrea Gurdon found one in the original box some years ago---you can read about it on her blog here. Peter Stone said that his father and his business partner came up with the idea for the cigarette host first, but it didn't sell well, so they rebranded it as a children's bank. [2]

1950 Sears ad

As of this writing, it's known that some Money Managers are just marked "Pat. Pending" while others say "Breyer Molding Co., Chicago, Ill., Pat. Pending, Made In U.S.A." Presumably, the earliest pieces had only the short patent pending text while the later versions included the Breyer name. Andrea's Cigarette Host has the full text, so it seems likely that Breyer continued to sell those along with the Money Managers at least as late as December 1950. I haven't found any other ads for the Cigarette Host, so that may suggest that it was only sold for about a year which is in keeping with Peter's recollection that it sold poorly. That would also suggest the text on the Cigarette Hosts and Money Managers was expanded from "Pat. Pending" to the full wording by late 1950. If that's the case, I would assume that Money Managers like mine that are only marked "Pat. Pending" are presumably from the first few months of production.

Some of the earliest ads for Money Managers in magazines like Toys and Novelties and Playthings featured palomino and alabaster Western Horses on one side of a page with the Money Managers on the back. I didn't have either of those color horses handy today for photos, so this well-loved old pinto WH who hangs out in my office got to be the scale model.

The last ads for Money Managers appeared in 1953 magazines, and after that, there were no further mentions of them from Breyer. By that time of course, Breyer had discovered that plastic horses sold really well, and their toy line had taken off in a more fun direction. More on that soon when I post part two of Breyer's early history in the 1950s.

Money Managers initially sold for $2.98 in 1950 which is the equivalent of $38.92 in 2024 (according the the US Inflation Calculator website), so they were not inexpensive items. Even when they were marked down to $1.98 in mid-1950 and then $1.69 in the Sears 1950 holiday catalog, that was still $25.86 and $22.07. A more reasonable price to be sure, but perhaps not low enough to keep them a viable product.

When Nancy Young published the last edition of her Breyer Molds and Models book in 1999, she was not aware of any Money Managers in the hands of collectors. [3] In the intervening years, a few of them have come to light, but they remain pretty elusive despite having been available for about 4 years from late 1949-1953. This is likely due in part to the fact that some of them are not marked Breyer, and they probably fly under the radar unidentified on sites like eBay. Also, though Money Managers are fairly solidly constructed---mine is heavier than I expected---they are a bit fragile. The doors on the drawers fit snugly and can be hard to open and unlock for coin retrieval. If handled roughly, they can chip, crack, and break. The cases are also prone to warping, making the drawers inaccessible and the product useless. I would guess a lot of these ended up in land fills long ago.

The handful of other Money Managers owned by collectors that I've seen seem to be evenly split between green and red, and all of the ones I could find pictures of have 4-drawers. If someone reading this had a 6-drawer example, I'd love to see a photo! As for the Cigarette Host, I have not seen anyone mention finding one besides Andrea. This isn't entirely surprising. Since the Money Managers are not horses or animals, they have a pretty limited audience among Breyer collectors. But I would hope there are more lurking out there, waiting to be found in the collection of early toy enthusiasts or tobacciana collectors. I will certainly be on the hunt for Money Manager variations now!

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1) Young, Nancy Atkinson. Breyer Molds and Models: Horses, Riders, and Animals 1950-1997. (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 1999), pg. 332.

2) Ibid.

3) Ibid.

The Early History of Breyer: 1943-1952

  "There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?"

These lines from the 1967 movie The Graduate---advice offered to Dustin Hoffman's character at his college graduation party---have always stuck with me (even when little else from the film did). I watched the movie for the first time some 30 years after it was released, and I thought the lines were kind of funny at the time. I mean, duh, plastic is ubiquitous in modern life, right? But while plastic is a part of everyday life that we often take for granted, it absolutely revolutionized life as we know it after World War II. In the 1960s when The Graduate was made, the plastic industry was still booming and growing.

The history of plastic dates back to the 1830s, but it took decades for the process to be refined and perfected. Some of the earliest uses included billiard balls (ivory had become expensive and rare) and then film and phonograph records.[1] The dawn of the 20th century saw greater leaps in manufacturing technology, and plastic became more accessible, appearing as nylon in tooth brush bristles, as the ever-popular Bakelite jewelry, and in celluloid vanity sets (hairbrushes, hand mirrors, etc) and other decorative wares. Simple celluloid toys became available by the 1930s, most of which were manufactured in Germany, the largest importer of toys to the United States before World War II.[2]

As tensions in Europe rose in the late 1930s however, imports from Germany slowed to a trickle, and wood, composition, and metal toys produced in the United States began to grow in popularity and numbers. Plastic technology continued to improve, but with the advent of World War II, most American plastic manufacturing was diverted to the war effort. Manufacturers learned a great deal during those years, and when the war finally ended, the plastic industry truly took off. Toy magazines and catalogs from the late 1940s clearly show the swift transition from wood, composition, and metal toys to plastic---by 1950, the switch was pretty much complete. Injection molding technology had also arrived which revolutionized the process of making goods in terms of speed, cost, and safety. [3]

The post-war baby boom and the advent of television and all the advertising tie-ins that came with it produced a huge audience for new plastic toys. And this is where the Breyer Molding Company comes into the picture. New plastic manufacturers were sprouting up all over the country in the late 1930s and 1940s, especially once the US joined the war. Plastic production increased by 300% during those years to meet the huge demand [4], and Breyer was one of the companies that rose to the challenge.

The Breyer Molding Company as model horse collectors know it began in 1943 at 2536 W. Lake Street just west of downtown Chicago in the heart of the city's manufacturing district. Peter Stone (yes, that Peter Stone) related to Breyer historian Nancy Young that his father Sam Stone and business partner Barney Smith bought the company for $15,000 knowing nothing at all about the plastic molding business.[5] Smith died unexpectedly in November 1947, and Charles Schiff joined the company in his place.

Many collectors have wondered where the Breyer name came from, and despite the company being in business for more than 80 years, it's been an enduring mystery. To the best of anyone's knowledge, there was never an "old man Breyer" who started the company. Stone and Smith purchased the company with the Breyer name from a family called Shoecraft, and Peter's best recollection was that the name honored "a 19th century German chemist who invented a type of cellulose plastic."[6] I have spent months digging through archives, contacting museums and historical organizations devoted to preserving the history of chemistry and plastic, and reaching out to various academic institutions around the world in hopes of finding some clue as to who this chemist was, but all of my searching has come to naught. No one has any record of a chemist named Breyer, not even one without a connection to early plastic experimentation.

I did however find a Nobel prize winning 19th century German chemist by the name of Adolf von Baeyer who was primarily known for his work synthesizing indigo dye, but who is also famous for inventing a precursor to what later became Bakelite. The name is off by one letter, but it's easy to confuse a capitalized A with a capitalized R (and Breyer's logo is capitalized), so Baeyer might have accidentally been misspoken, misread, misspelled, mistranscribed, or misremembered as Breyer. I can't prove that von Baeyer is the inspiration behind the Breyer name, but he is the only 19th century German chemist whose name and work comes at all close to matching Peter's recollection, so I think this is a plausible source for the name.

That said, it is also possible that the story about the German chemist was apocryphal. For all we know, the Shoecraft family had a relative, friend, mentor, or financial backer named Breyer. We'll probably never know. But if Peter's memory was correct, Adolf von Baeyer might just be the namesake we've been looking for all these years.

With World War II in full swing in 1943, there was a tremendous need for plastic parts for the war effort for airplanes, various military vehicles, and other equipment, and Breyer was commissioned to make everything from radio housings to steering wheels.[7] After the war ended and the demand for parts from the government waned, Breyer continued to design and mold items for other companies like RCA and Zenith [8], and they began to develop their own products as well, such as checkers, poker chips, and other simple toys. As you can see from the 1946 ad below, the Breyer factory was a one-stop-shop for plastic production from concept to creation---they designed items, made molds for said items, and produced plastic items from their molds.

A Breyer ad from the 1946 edition of The Buyers' Guide
and Industrial Directory of Chicago

Breyer's earliest forays into the toy market were vaguely educational. Peter Stone related to Nancy Young how as a boy helping out at the factory, he would load the warmed plastic pills for molding poker chips and checkers into the compression molding machines [9]. Breyer also briefly sold a Money Manager bank from 1949 to about 1953. They were molded in "superior quality acetate Tenite" [10] as per the ad below and came in "flag red or forest green" with 4 or 6 drawers. They included labels so children could save their money for different things like presents, charity, and savings.

March 1950 Toys and Novelties ads

The 1950 Sears Christmas catalog also advertised a Breyer-made Cigarette Host molded in "tortoise shell color plastic" right alongside the Money Manager. (Perhaps not the best product arrangement for the page.) All of these early non-animal Breyer products are hard to find.

 

 

As I wrote in my posts about the history of the Western Horse, the Breyer factory was located only a few miles from the Mastercrafters Clock and Radio Company. In 1950, Breyer was commissioned by Mastercrafters to take over some molding work that had formerly been done by Hartland Plastics of Wisconsin. This work resulted in the iconic Western Horse, the very first Breyer model. As I discussed in the Western Horse blog series, the Breyer Western Horse was a very close copy of the Hartland Victor, and it was also Chris Hess' first horse sculpture for Breyer. Though no one knew it at the time, this sideline of plastic horses would eventually eclipse all of the other practical plastic goods Breyer made and become the company's primary product and main claim to fame.

The very first Breyer models, the Western Horses Over Clocks

Breyer provided horses for Mastercrafters for a few years, first to stand over the clocks (probably 1950 only) and later to stand beside the clocks (circa 1951-1952). By 1951, Breyer also had begun to sell the Western Horses as freestanding models in palomino and alabaster. Early records and company lore suggest that Woolworths department store placed an order for 2,000 of the freestanding Western Horse models to sell in their stores. [11]

In June 1952, Breyer's business was booming, so much so that they built an 11,000 sq foot addition to their factory. [12]

Me (with a Breyer PAM and her Chicago-era box) posing like
the giant nerd I am in front of the old Chicago Breyer factory

By late 1952, Breyer had begun producing their second and third molds, a Boxer dog and the Western Pony. Which came first is debatable, but the Boxer was at least promoted in the Chicago toy publication Toys and Novelties. (I have yet to find a similar ad announcing the Western Pony, but hope springs eternal.) The Western Pony is a smaller version of the Western Horse, so in that regard, it too is technically a derivative of the Hartland Victor from which the Western Horse was copied. The Western Pony came in both palomino and white like his big brother, and the striking black colorway with gold feet was introduced for both models at this time as well.

The Breyer Boxer model was yet another copy, although this time unauthorized. It was molded directly from the fine porcelain Boxer sculpted by Edward Boehm and sold by his studio in New Jersey. Chris Hess, who was a sculptor, carver, and mold maker, most likely tooled this mold for the company. Copying the works of other contemporary companies, especially those producing ceramic or porcelain wares, became a common theme for Breyer in the 1950s and into the early 1960s. The glossy and occasionally chalky finishes on some of their early models were in fact meant to imitate fine porcelain!

March 1953 Toys and Novelties ad

Boehm Boxer (left) and Breyer Boxer (right)

I had intended to try to cover all of the 1950s in this post, but Breyer production really began to take off in 1953-1954, and this post is already pretty long, so I will cover the rest of that decade in a subsequent post. In the mid 1950s, Breyer continued to copy other manufacturers, but they also began to create their own sculptures as well. The next post will cover the rise of TV show tie-ins, holiday catalog special runs, a lawsuit for copyright infringement, and much more!

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1) Science History Institute Museum and Library: https://sciencehistory.org/education/classroom-activities/role-playing-games/case-of-plastics/history-and-future-of-plastics/

2) Lone Star Chemical (plastic manufacturer): https://lonestarchemical.com/50-years-of-favorite-plastic-toys/

3) Syracuse University Library, The Plastics Collection: https://plastics.syr.edu/page.php?id=/essays/plastic-toys

4) Science History Institute Museum and Library: https://sciencehistory.org/education/classroom-activities/role-playing-games/case-of-plastics/history-and-future-of-plastics/

5) Young, Nancy Atkinson. Breyer Molds and Models: Horses, Riders, and Animals 1950-1997. (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 1999), pg. 332.

6) Ibid

7) Ibid.

8) Walerius, Marney J. Breyer Models: Reference and Insurance Guide. (Barrington, IL: Self published, 1991), pg. 1.

9) Young, 332.

10) Tenite is a kind of cellulosic plastic (cellulose acetate) made by Eastman (Kodak) starting in 1929
https://www.eastman.com/Brands/Tenite/Pages/Overview.aspx

11) Past iteration of the breyerhorses.com website

12) "10 Million Will Be Spent by Chicago Plants," Suburbanite Economist, (Chicago, IL), June 22, 1952, pg 48.

BreyerFest 2024, Part 4: Colorful horses, the raffle, and Equilocity

Saturday at BreyerFest is usually a nice chill day for my sister Sarah and I. We get to sleep in a bit, linger over coffee with our parents and chatter about Breyerfest, and then make our way out to the Kentucky Horse Park to pick up our celebration models and special runs.

This year, we both mostly just wanted the stripey special runs, and happily, we each were able to buy them. We have an affinity for zebras, quaggas, zorses, and even the Lisa Frank fever dream that is the delightful day-glo Astrid below. Another one for the conga!

After picking up our models, we had some time to kill before the raffle later that afternoon, so we ambled through the barns visiting real horses. I snapped a bunch of pictures for art references. Nothing like being able to see fine details up close!

Pretty fleabit grey

A close up

I love the way the spots on this guy look like they were
splashes of wet paint that ran!

Lacey socks and flank spots

One of my chief passions when it comes to horse color is colorful Thoroughbreds. I was delighted to find Full Moon Rising, a great-grandson of Not Quite White. NQW was the well-spring of the W22 white spotting mutation (most famously passed along through her son Airdrie Apache).

Speaking of colorful Thoroughbreds, I was unprepared for the blind bag surprise special runs this year---the Winx mold in 6 lovely colors, 4 of which are definitely found in the Thoroughbred gene pool. I'm not a fan of gambler's choice offerings, so I never opt for a ticket for the surprise SR. Doh! I'm going to have to track down the glossy versions of all of these eventually. Might need to take a on a third job first though!

We managed to find seats in the stands at the end of the covered arena where the raffle is held, so we sat for a while and watched Athenian Lady (the celebration horse) and Amanda Delgado perform.

Not long after, we found our friends Sue Rowe and her husband Todd. They are fellow Minnesotans, and we met them at the 2nd or 3rd BreyerFest way back in the early 1990s. We see them just about every year, and they and their kids have become extended family. It's not BreyerFest until we see them!

Todd, Sue, Sarah, and me

Sarah and I traditionally only buy $10 worth of raffle tickets each---we're just too frugal to spend much on games of chance (hence also my dislike of gambler's choice offerings). Needless to say, we didn't win, making us 1 for 35 in BF raffle attempts. C'est la vie!

The raffle crowd gathers

After the raffle, we booked it back to the CHIN and miraculously found a parking spot. Sarah and I decided to walk across the parking lot to the Marriott to see if anything was still going on at Equilocity.

Not surprisingly, very few sales models were still available. Stone collectors don't mess around!

A number of best offer models that are auctioned online on a weekly basis were on display. They were absolutely superb! We loved this trio of zebras best. (I'm sensing a theme here.)

We could only afford to window shop, so we headed back to the CHIN for more of same.

A nice array of vintage Breyers

We ended the evening in the BHR suite helping our mom bid on a really cool black roan test run Proud Arabian Mare that she hoped to buy from the collection of Simone Smiljanic. Simone was a close friend of Marney Walerius, and the test run likely came into Simone's collection via Marney. I plan to write posts about both women soon, but for those who did not know them, they were two of the best known founders of the model horse hobby in the late 1960s. Marney did a lot of consulting work for Breyer at their Chicago factory and had access to many tests runs, variations, and cull models, a number of which she sold on to other collectors.

The color on this PAM is a neat take off of the splattery red roan color Breyer produced in the 1960s and 1970s. There is a supposed black roan Running Mare like this pictured on Identify Your Breyer, and for years, I thought it was just a photoshopped image that someone submitted to the site. Now I have to wonder if it's actually real and if there are other tests in this unique color kicking around.

We bid what we were able to on the PAM, but we were quite thoroughly surpassed by other bidders, and the PAM did not join our herd. She was very fun to see in person though, and she has a wonderful new home with a fellow vintage fan.

The theme for BreyerFest next year is Cheers to 75 Years of Breyer models. I hope there will be some fun vintage homages amongst the special runs! (Fingers crossed for Western Horses, Proud Arab Mares, or In Between Mares in the original decorator colors---let's manifest this, hahaha!) 

BreyerFest 2024, Part 3: BF Open Show

A bunch of BreyerFesters this year made and exchanged friendship bracelets, and I was 100% on board with this fun new trend.

 
My sister Sarah (who is 7 years younger than I and thus more in-the-know) informed me that the bracelet swapping trend was a thing at Taylor Swift concerts, so I had to include my own bad GenX musical puns with the ones I made.

Friday morning for the BreyerFest Open Show saw us both bedecked with an armload of bracelets and fortified with industrial strength coffee since we started the day at 4:00 am. The show always begins with collectors classes---Sarah entered the variety division and I entered theme.

Yay, Sarah!

My test runs only managed 5th. C'est la vie!

Here are some other fun entries from the variety, theme, and Stablemates collectors class divisions.

Most of what we show is, unsurprisingly, vintage weirdness. This Western Pony in the fragile, hard to find showcase box is one of my favorite additions to our collection this year.

We do a lot of running back and forth to the show tables over the course of the day, often with fiddly bits of ephemera, accessories, and other doo-dads. Pockets come in very handy when you want to be sure not to lose anything!

No Mounties nor their hats were lost!

The overall prize models this year were pretty paint jobs on the Moody Friesian and Conquistador molds.

The only prize model I desperately wanted to win this year was the glossy version of Sweetwater's Zorah Belle, Maggie Jenner-Bennett's scrumptious Fjord pony sculpture. I have a conga of 8 of them (7 OFs and 1 CM), so you could say I'm a tad obsessed. I blame my Norwegian forebears.

I had good luck again in this show with a powerhouse mini, and happily my conga remains complete for now!

I will probably cry when the mold is released as a raffle model. I am 0 for 35 with BF raffles alas. A bit of foreshadowing for my next BF post, ha ha. Anyway, next time, Saturday at the park with all of the colorful horses, the raffle, and a brief peek into Equilocity!