piggy bank

Buster Brown Bank

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: I realize that there has been no reason to visit the history of Buster Brown in this blog. Today I will try to do him justice via this bank I purchased recently from my Texan friends, @curiositiesantique via Instagram.

For those of you too young to have owned these shoes (I barely slip into that category with a dim memory of the advertising at the shoe store when I was a tiny tot) the brief history goes pretty much as follows. Back in 1904 in an early advertising coup the nascent Buster Brown shoe company purchased the rights to an existing comic strip character created by Richard Outcault of Yellow Kid fame. Outcault was on the market selling the character and pressed them to additionally purchase the rights to the Buster’s girlfriend which they did – more about her in a minute.

From a Heritage Auction. Not in Pictorama collection.

Interesting to me that Outcault sold the rights to 200 companies at the Louisiana Exposition which is where the shoe company picked it up. Therefore, presumably, there are Buster Brown items or more likely advertising that does not belong to the shoe company. Clearly however the shoe company made the most of their acquisition and a long history of Buster Brown shelling for shoes begins and runs well into the middle of the 20th century and Buster Brown is virtually synonymous with shoes now.

Meanwhile, it should be noted that the cartoonist Outcault was quite the business man when it came to licensing and in 1904 was making $75,000 a year on licenses and employed a small staff to manage them. (If Google is telling me the truth this means he was a millionaire in his day.)

Speciman 1908 hand colored Outcault Buster Brown strip.

However, let’s get back to the shoes. The shoes were so popular that generically a kids shoes might be referred to as their Buster Browns. In addition to items like this bank there was reams of print advertising and purchase point items for stores. Midgets were employed to play Buster, in his unfortunate garb, with cheerful pit bulls enrolled to play his dog Tige. The merchandising for toys was glorious and I spied at least one stuffed Tige online that I covet already. By the time I wandered onto the shoe wearing scene in the 1960’s the merchandising boiled down to some balloons. (There is a vague memory that maybe there was something else, maybe a comic long reprinted but I don’t really remember.)

Buster Brown and Tige in front of a shoe store. The copy of this photo is credited to Mel Birnkrant’s collection although a few exist online.

The shoes had Buster and Tige inside, under your heel and I remember the jingle from early tv in a high pitched voice, I’m Buster Brown and I live in a shoe, that’s my dog Tige and he lives there too.

Buster Brown Shoes sign located in Thomasville, Georgia. It can be found on North Broad Street.

So to my surprise, I learned today that as above Buster Brown had a girlfriend (huh), and her name was Mary Jane – and that is how women’s shoes with the single strap were named Mary Janes and are still known by that term today.

Real Buster Brown Mary Janes. Can be yours on Etsy at the time of publication.

As for this bank, it stands at five or six inches. A trace of paint remains on the face and hands while the red tie remains fairly vivid. This seems to be the most common form of this bank although online I found versions in an overall green and one in red which I can’t decide if it is original or not. The face was the first to go and I can’t say I found it pristine on any of this design. Buster’s hair was painted a light brown and Tige’s mouth was also the vivid red and there were red circles around his eyes.

Back of the bank.

It is a simple bank with a screw in the bottom you would use to retrieve your saved coins. It is small so not like you were keeping a fortune in there. Kim starts to ruminate on restoring it as soon as he looks at it. Evidently it makes him itch to paint it although we know that he won’t – nor should he devote time to such projects when more creative work awaits him. (Although Kim’s next book is scheduled for release early next year he’s already deep into the one after it.)

So now that we have a first Buster Brown item we’ll see how long it is before the next wanders in the door. I am going to be looking sharp for that stuffed Tige.

Here Piggy Piggy!

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: This little piggy showed up at our local haunt which has supplied us with a few other items over the past year or so. Most recently a rather splendid elephant bank I wrote about here. (A glorious reveal of another one pending for a near term future post!)

The other day without really meaning to, Kim and I wandered in on one of our trips to or from on that particular block. This block is on the path of our trips to a Vietnamese take-out place we favor, our pet food store and is the block we stroll up and down while waiting for our Mexican food to be prepared for pick up. I like to stop and look in the window and occasionally I breakdown and purchase something. The fact that they keep odd hours makes it easier not to resist actual purchases as our strolls seem to rarely matchup with their being open.

A fairly recent view of the store window.

However, a week or so ago we were out on a Saturday afternoon and they were open and we wandered from front window to being in the store. We had noticed this little fellow through the window a week or so before. He seemed rather singular and so he has joined the ranks here at Deitch Studio.

This piggy turns out to be very popular and widely available (currently examples are available on Etsy and other sites) and seems to have been produced over a long period of time starting in the teens, by the maker Hubley. (Another item from this shop is a great dog bank that was made by Hubley. You can find that post here. Seems like I am starting a de facto bank collection via these folks!)

On my version the sign he sports is easily read, The wise pig/ Save a penny yesterday another save today tomorrow save another to keep the wolf away. Below that, on his little stand, it proclaims Thrifty. I feel he is both smiling and yet has a concerned expression. Encouraging you to save and concerned for your future well-being. Other versions of the bank feature the pig with a big pink mouth – making me think of the phrase, lipstick on a pig.

The lipstick on a pig version of the bank. Not in Pictorama collection.

He is pleasantly chipped and handled. I alway wonder about these banks how many pennies, nickels and dimes you could realistically have fit in. The effort to loosen and remove the bolt at the back seems beyond a child – perhaps the whole point? Or maybe kids just jiggled the money out of the slot again. I would say none of my banks, for all their decades in existence, show any evidence that they were ever unscrewed and opened. Teaching children thrift indeed.

I wrote a bit about banks I had as a child in a post here. The one below is a reasonably close clone of my memory of the very traditional one that was beloved to me as a child. Mine may have been a model that was slightly older or newer. I don’t remember the one ear down, but it was a long time ago. This piggy had a cork holder in the bottom I believe. I may have kept coins in him (her?), but I think mostly I just liked it.

Perhaps the model of piggy bank I had as a child, for sale on Etsy. Not in Pams-Pictorama.com collection.

My “real” bank was a small safe someone gave me. Loren and I were each given one and I used mine for many years, tucking away both bills and coins. Later in life I adopted the habit of keeping bills in my dresser drawer – Loren was fond of the sticking it in old purses method of storage. We had proper savings accounts as kids too.

The exact toy safe I had as a kid – down to the red knob. Loren’s had a blue one.

I also remember Christmas Clubs – does anyone else? A small amount would be deducted throughout the calendar year and put into an interest bearing savings account. Those must have been an administrative nightmare for banks, but it got people into the bank and to create savings accounts I guess. A quick search tells me that there are still a few that do it, although of course now it is an automatic deduct from your account, not the charming little passbooks of years ago.

Vintage passbook for a Christmas Club account.

Smooth as Glass Savings

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today isn’t quite a toy post, but I guess we could label it a premium post, which is a genre I explore not infrequently, usually in my quest for interesting cat related items. (A favorite post about Corbin pin trays depicting cat heads can be found here, and the more recent acquisition of my Feed the Kitty bank here.)

This little bank was acquired last weekend on what may be our final trip to the store Obscura Antiques and Oddities in the East Village. I was sad to learn recently that they will be closing at the end of the year, a fact I discovered via Instagram where a parade of visitors are paying their final respects and posting them. Evidently it is more a decision about wanting to do something different than about raising rents, but I was very sorry to see this as I have made it my premium choice for expeditions celebrating my birthday or our anniversary annually. A truly great day is pairing a visit there up with a trip to the The Antique Toy Shop in Chelsea. (Some of my other adventures and acquisitions at these establishments can be found in prior post here , here and here.)

It is a bit boring to bemoan how all the interesting places for poking around in old stuff are disappearing. It is just a reality of the way we live, especially in fast moving Manhattan where things seem to come in go with an alarming rapidity. But it saddens me, as poking through the detritus of lives past is one of my great joys. However, I try to be philosophical about the general entropy of retail in Manhattan.

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Obscura Antiques and Oddities in the East Village when we visited last week. I really wish I had room for Mr. Peanut.

 

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Paper Mache mask at Obscura recently.

 

On our recent visit Kim purchased this little bank and a lovely little cabinet for me (future post) as an anniversary gift. I am just charmed by it and I immediately imagined stuffing it full of change as a child – and then being faced with the quandary of retrieving the coins as there seems to be no obvious option for cashing in. There is a seam running down it, and in the case of mine there is a crack near it which makes me wonder if someone didn’t break it in an attempt to open it at the seam. I suppose the purpose of piggy banks was saving, but I have never approved of the idea that you should have to break your beloved piggy bank in order to eventually realize your savings. It seems cruel.

My own experience with piggy banks starts with a nice pig model decorated with painted pink roses. The one below is not the one I had, but puts me reasonably in mind of it.

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I also had a Snoopy one that, given the evidence and availability on the internet of the model I called mine, every child of my generation must have owned at one time. My memory was that it was actually a bit fragile and made of some paper mache material so I did not keep change in it. It was beloved though and I owned it for a very long time. I don’t think I kept money in the pig either – although both had rubber handy plugs in the bottom for releasing the change. No smashing my pig!

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As it happens I instead kept my savings in a small safe made for that purpose. It had a combination lock (with the combination written on a tag the bottom as I remember, defeating the purpose but preventing the obvious problem) and it held a lot of coins, and then it weighed a ton. My sister and I each had one, and although I kept mine for more than a decade I could not tell you what happened to it ultimately. Somehow it and the change in it were lost to the sands of time. The one below, available on Etsy, is pretty much spot on the one I owned. It is a kick to see it again.

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Meanwhile, Pittsburgh Paint was a small Pennsylvania paint company which was acquired by a glass corporation back in 1900. Therefore the slogan smooth as glass and the glass bank premium make total sense and a slogan still associated with them today. (On the reverse side of the bank it also states, Nature’s Colors in Lasting Beauty, a poetic thought.) The paint brand is still very available and the company has become one of the world’s largest corporations, PPG. I am not in a position to comment on quality of their paint except to say that my own kitchen was recently painted with Benjamin Moore and in all fairness, I had not considered Pittsburgh.

The prevalence of contemporary piggy banks found during my online search makes me assume that children are still given them with the intention of instilling a sense of thrift and savings. In a world where, according to Google, the average price of a Hershey bar is $1.60 and a comic book almost $3, kids either need larger piggy banks or to replenish them quickly. I know nothing of the economy of childhood today, but assume it involves as more folding money than coins. In a sense this is too bad as coins were nice objects to collect and own, although folding money seemed downright exotic when I was a kid.