I am writing this article on January 26. Unless a person loves winter weather, it is just a lousy, rotten day! We have more than six inches of fresh snow, and the temperature is about ten degrees above zero. Many of the streets here are snow packed, or worse yet, the proverbial "sheet of ice".

Because of these conditions, I was forced to travel an alternate route to work this morning. As I was waiting for the red light at the corner of 27th and Holmes, my mind began drifting back to the autumn of 1968, when I became involved in our hobby.

In Kansas City, Missouri, there is a nine block stretch of Holmes Street that holds many nostalgic memories for me and a few other collectors who were involved in our hobby during that year. This section of Holmes, from 31st to 22nd, was the location of the majority of the peacock blue Mickey Mouse insulators still in service on the high voltage electric lines in this city.

By now my day dreaming was in high gear. I could remember the many times I traveled through there and looked up at those power poles. On a sunny day it was an unforgettable sight! I always had trouble concentrating on the road ahead. Most of my attention was focused on those blue CD 257's. Fortunately, this stretch of road is one-way traffic, which eliminated the need to watch for oncoming cars. That gave me the opportunity to drive slower and gawk more. It was beautiful -- there's no other way to describe it! I've often wished that someone would have thought to take a color photograph, with the camera positioned about level with the crossarms and looking down the street, with all those peacock blues fading away into the distance. Some of the individual poles along the nine block stretch had been replaced, and the insulators on these were modern porcelains. But I can easily remember the many times I counted the mouse-ears that remained. There were 108 of them. And of that total, 76 were peacock blue! One particular pole in the 2600 block still contained eight peacocks.

It didn't take long before they began to disappear. Not because of line construction, but because the Power and Light employees began learning about insulators also. By Christmas of 1970 only 24 of the 108 remained. The pole with eight peacocks was long gone, and only a very few of the remaining 24 were blue ones. By the summer of 1971 they had all been replaced. Even the aqua and light green colored ones. Soon after that I quit driving this section of Holmes. I guess I had been subconsciously using this street so that I could look at the mouse-ears, instead of driving a wider and more convenient street.

During the past 14 years I have probably owned more than 50 of those "peacock Mickies". In 1970 there was one occasion when I had eleven of them. I had bought these from a lineman who had personally taken them down. They cost me three dollars apiece. Today some of the most prized insulators in my collection are there because of the trades I made with the peacocks. I honestly cannot remember selling more than three of them. I used them almost exclusively as traders.

The linemen I bought from could really tell some stories. One of them said he could personally remember breaking dozens of mouse-ears. He was working in the reclaim department, where old dismantled equipment was turned in at the close of the work day. Apparently this man and another employee enjoyed destroying these insulators by throwing them against a cinder-block dumping enclosure. Another employee told me he could remember breaking many of them with a hammer. When he was atop a power pole changing out the insulators, he said he was too lazy to unscrew the old ones. Instead, he would hold one hand up to shield his face, while he smashed the insulator with a hammer. Then, all he had to do was screw on the new replacement. (Groan!) 

The honking of a horn abruptly brought me back to reality. The traffic light had changed, I had not moved, and the driver behind me decided it was time to go. As I pulled away from the intersection, the thought struck me that it is a good thing the insulator hobby arrived here when it did. Had its arrival been delayed much longer, there is a good chance that Kansas City, Missouri, would not have had any "peacock Mickies" left to contribute to our hobby.