I am shamefully late getting this post written up, but here at last is the story of the Kroll copy of the Breyer Western Pony...and his racehorse friend! (This feels like a They Might Be Giants hobby filk song? Iykyk.)
Anyway, dumb jokes aside, when I wrote my multi-post series on Western Horse and Pony shaped objects back in 2020, I included what little was known about the copies of Breyer's Western Ponies marked "KROLL." A few years later when I happened to be in Shipshewana for Stone Horses Country Fair, I received a fascinating email from the daughter of one of the men who founded the Kroll company. I had every intention of writing this up sooner (story of my life), but I have had so much on my plate that time got away from me, and other subjects pushed ahead of this one. But having received another email last week asking about Kroll ponies, I decided it was time to pull this post out of the draft folder and finish it up. So, without any further ado, here is the Kroll story.
Like so many other plastic manufacturing companies, the Kroll Trading Company was started in the 1950s. It was founded by brothers Jack and Walter Kroll, and their first injection molding factory was located on Greene Street in New York City. The email I received came from Jack's daughter, and she and her cousins believe that the Western Pony copies were made at that location at that time because the handful of Kroll boxes that have been found by collectors say "NYC" on them. This timeline is also corroborated by the presence of a two-digit postal zone number in the address on the boxes rather than a five-digit zip code. (Postal zone numbers were used in large cities beginning in 1943 and were replaced by zip codes in 1963. Breyer introduced their Western Pony in late 1952, so the Kroll ponies likely date to the mid- to late -1950s.)
In the 1960s, the factory moved to Long Island where the Kroll brothers began to make other toys and products with molds they bought in Hong Kong. They were no longer making ponies at this point, and instead were focused on beach toys like sand pails and shovels as well as practical products like record racks. Jack and Walter retired in the mid-1970s and sold the company.
My interest in Kroll ponies began in the early 1990s when my mom and I would go out to the Lakewood flea market
on the south side of Atlanta to look for model horses. I have a very
distinct memory of wandering down an aisle in one of the buildings and
spotting a gold horse about 20 feet ahead of me. One of my nerdy
superpowers is model horse shape recognition from a distance or from
weird angles, so I could see right away that this gold horse was Western
Pony shaped. I made a beeline for it, but as soon as I picked it up, I
could feel that the weight of the plastic was wrong. It was too light. I
also realized that the model had the mane sculpted on both sides of the
neck instead of just the left like a Breyer, and it was marked KROLL on
the belly. I wasn't buying knock offs at that point, and $15 was a lot
of stall cleaning money back then, so I left it behind, but it made an
impression on me. Thirty-odd years later, I paid a lot more to get my
hands on the gold pony pictured above. Hindsight, etc etc!
As I wrote on my Western Horse copies post, the Kroll ponies come in several colors, but they are not painted---they are instead molded in different colors of plastic. Most are just solid colors, but occasionally, some were made from swirly plastic. Black and dark brown seem to be the most common colors. Here's my little conga of black, brown, swirly ochre, and gold. (The black pony's bridle was painted silver by a previous owner.)
To the best of my knowledge, the ball chain reins are original, and the
ponies may have come with slip-on saddles that were copies of Breyer's
snap saddles for Western Ponies (but sans girth). I have only seen one
example owned by another collector that has such a
saddle, but it looks as though it could be original. I'm honestly not sure though, and I would love to hear from any collectors that have found ponies with saddles like this. I suspect some---maybe many?--- of these
ponies were sold without saddles. I haven't ever come across saddles in this style that match the gold or white ponies for example. (Or if they had saddles, maybe they were a different color than the pony?)
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| Owned and photographed by Sharon Peden |
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| Mold mark on my swirly pony |
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| Double mane |
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| Close up of my swirly pony |
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| A swirly white pony owned by Sharon Peden |
Some Kroll ponies seem to have a molding flaw along the side of their rump. It's not an open crack, but it looks a bit gnarly. It's most easily seen on the gold ponies. I can't help but wonder if the molding flaw led to their discontinuation.
Kroll ponies were also sold mounted on a display base as seen with this model pictured on the Model Horse Gallery website. Interestingly, the box illustration shows a pony with reins but no saddle. It came with a little slip of gold leaf to personalize the base. This pony and the base are molded in black plastic. (Incidentally, the gold leaf packet is the same brand that was sold with the Breyer Proud Arabian Mare grooming kit in the 1958 Sears holiday catalog.)
A good friend clued me in to one of these ponies on the base on eBay, and I was delighted to finally get one in hand to examine closely. My pony is brown plastic on a black base. It has a gold souvenir sticker affixed to the front that is unrelated to the gold leaf slip that is shown with the boxed set above.
The pony is marked Kroll as usual, but the base is just marked "Enterprises" and "USA" on the underside. Above the word Enterprises is a scratched out space that appears to have been another word. It's possible that the base was one of the molds the Kroll brothers bought, and they simply removed the name of the previous maker. Kroll Western Ponies are somewhat hard to find, and I'm only aware of two of them on a base like this at the moment. If you have one, too, especially in a different color, I'd love to know about it!
As far as I know, Kroll only made one other horse, and as best I can tell, they seem to be hard to find. They are however entirely unmarked, so it may just be that they're flying under the radar. The model is a race horse, and both of the examples I've seen are molded in brown plastic. They came in this spiffy illustrated box, and like the mailer box above, it also has a two-digit postal zone number printed on it, so it presumably dates to the 1950s as well.
The racetrack illustration on the front of the box appears to be Aqueduct...
...and the grandstand in the background of the inner box panel appears to
be Belmont. What could be more apropos for a company originally based in
New York City?
The Kroll Western Pony copies must have been made no earlier than about 1954 and likely no later than about 1963. The Race Horse model presumably falls into that same date range. I hope to someday come across an ad for these models or maybe even an old Kroll price list or catalog. In the meantime, I'd love to hear from anyone who has an interesting Kroll model to share (or sell!). I hope you enjoyed this post!
And many, many thanks to Susan and her family for sharing their memories of the Kroll Trading Company with me!
