May 2000 Macs Believe It Or Not

One of the blessings of being in the business of trying to keep up with all the known listings of insulators is the number of contacts that are generated through the magazine, the mail and now the electronic media from collectors who have made a "new find." When a question about a new find is directed to me, it is usually designated as a new find because it isn't in the latest Price Guide for Insulators published in 1999. Questions of this nature generally fall into two major categories.

New Finds - The first is what I will call embossing variations. Often the question will be similar to the following: "In the price guide, your listing [040] has a period between the 'T' and the 'D', but I have one with exactly the same embossing but there isn't any period." I reply and explain that punctuation was a problem from the beginning of trying to record all of the embossings, and that if a number of different punctuation variations exist, and that is the only difference, that I usually let one listing represent all of the possibilities. I appreciate receiving this information, and I do keep a record of it, but these calls usually don't result in a new listing. Most of the time collectors understand, but occasionally a collector will be disappointed that their "new find" isn't a rare jewel.

The second type of question falls into the "new find" and "new listing" category. This occurs when a listing is sufficiently different from any prior reported embossing, and I feel it deserves its own place in the price guide. Two of these types have come to my attention in the past month, and I thought I would share them with you. I received an E-mail from Daryl Stahler last month describing a CD 145 Brookfield that I thought was intriguing. He described a crown embossed piece, embossing [070], the FAB date error, but he said that Brookfield was spelled "BROOKFIELI", with no sign of the rest of the 'D' on the end. I'm generally not a big fan of new listings for partial letters, but he convinced me that I ought to look at it, and so I asked him to send me the piece.

It arrived a week later, and you can be the judge. I find absolutely no trace of the rest of the final 'D', so it will be recorded for inclusion in future reference books. Two possible explanations for the error: (1) the engraver made the vertical cut for the 'D', took his lunch break and just started on the next line when he came back, or (2) this was a special order piece for the Italian branch of the Brookfield family, (pronounced Brook-feel-ie).

The second new listing brought back some frightening memories of one of the worst pricing mistakes I made in the 1991 version of the price guide. Back in 1991, I was looking over listings for CD 162 Hemingrays, and I came across embossing [260], (F-Skirt) HEMINGRAY/PATENTED (R-Skirt) PETTICOAT. Now I had seen a lot of these in various shades of light blue, but I hadn't recalled ever seeing one in aqua. I was only able to confirm one Hemingray signal collector who had an aqua one in his collection. I had never owned one, and so I concluded that they must be rather uncommon. I priced the piece at $50. Well, wherever those pieces had been hiding, they decided to make an appearance within about two months after the price guide came out. Every ad that came into Crown Jewels of the Wire and virtually every sales table at every show I attended had one or more of these listed/available, and guess what the price was - $50. Even now, when I've trimmed the price to $15-$20 in the current price guide (probably still too high based on availability and demand), I cringe every time I find one in a junk box for $1 or less. Everybody's entitled to at least one mistake, right???

Anyway, back to the new listing. Mrs. Mac and I had a chance to buy a nice collection this spring while vacationing out west. Since time was short, and the collection was large, we had to separate insulators into three categories: (1) the ones to be mailed home, (2) the ones to be hauled to Arizona and stored until our next trip west, and (3) the ones to be donated to a local collector. This required careful inspection of each piece for unusual features. I picked up the CD 162 pictured below. It was in a nice bright blue-aqua, not quite Hemingray blue, but clearly a "Hemingray color". I was immediately interested because I didn't remember ever seeing a CD 162 Hemingray insulator with no embossing on one side. I anxiously turned it around, and below is what I saw on the other side - HEMINGRAY-19.

My memory was correct (for a change). I had no record of a CD 162 Hemingray with no embossing on one side. With several dedicated Hemingray specialists providing me with regular embossing updates, it continues to amaze me that a listing like this one hadn't been reported. It's reassuring to know that there are still little gems out there to be found. But this time, I'm being careful - I'm announcing the embossing to the hobby so that I can get some feedback before I assign a price and embarrass myself again.

Old Stories - For some time, I have been considering starting a series of short articles dedicated to individual threaded glass CD styles. My concept is not to make these articles definitive research articles, but rather to capture some anecdotal information about particular CD's and why they have been important to individual collectors. I have been thinking back over the past 30 years about all of the collectors I have visited, all the shows I have been to, and all of the insulators that I have bought and sold. Almost without exception, if a specific CD style is mentioned in conversation, I can think of at least one story, and often many, regarding individual collectors and collections related to that CD. I'm sure many of you have similar memories. Collectors have long talked about the fact that as the 'old guard' becomes less active in the hobby, many of the early history of collecting insulators will be lost or forgotten. I would like to view this as a vehicle for capturing at least a part of that history. So I encourage you to become a contributor to this series. Don't feel as though you have to "write an article." Just drop me a note, call or send an E-mail with any information of this nature that you would like to share with the rest of the hobby. I'll work it in with the other material I receive, along with my own stories.

As an example, I thought I would mention two specific memories about CD 100, the Surge electric fence insulator. (I do not plan to run the CD's in consecutive order, so don't worry if you have a story about CD 331, you won't have to wait until 2009 to see it in print.) The first memory has to do with embossing errors. These insulators were manufactured by Hemingray in the 1940's and 1950's when embossing errors should have been a thing of the past. And yet in this one style, two of the three known embossings are mistakes. The correct front and rear embossings are shown in the first set of pictures, and the errors are shown in the second set of pictures.

Embossing [010] is correct, [020] has the error on both the front and rear, and [030] has only the rear error. I was very early in my collecting days

when a dealer pointed out the spelling error on a CD 100 Surge and "how rare" it was. My only reference point was to stamps with engraving errors, and I was sure this would be a good investment. Now the only thing I am sure of is that I paid way too much for the first embossing error for my collection.

Front skirt: Embossing [010]	Rear skirt: Embossing [010]
Front skirt: Embossing [020]	Rear skirt: Embossing [020] Rear skirt: Embossing [030]

Believe it or not, I have owned many of the oak sidepins used on Surge installations, but never one of the long post pins. A small quantity showed up in an Illinois antique store during the past year and Russ Frank of the GCIC purchased one for his collection. He then told fellow club member, Rick Soller, about his find, and Rick went to the store and purchased all that they had. When they were placed on Rick's sales table, I was fortunate enough to have a chance to purchase one.

My second memory has to do with one of the real founders of the hobby. Along with Woody Woodward and Dora Harned, Marion Milholland did as much as anyone to advance the insulator hobby in its early years. I only had the pleasure of meeting him twice: first at one of Larry Veneziano's Chicago Jumbo shows and again at one of the early London, Ohio shows hosted by Steve and Lois Blair. I don't remember Marion carrying much to sell or trade because he was usually too busy meeting collectors and recording information in his notebook for inclusion in a future publication. But if you check back through the Crown Jewels of the Wire from the early 70's, you will find an occasional listing in the advertising section by Marion Milholland, selling CD 100 Surges, not individually, but 36 at a time "in thy original packing box." They were neat boxes, one layer, and 36 Surge insulators were laid out in six rows of six each. Mrs. Mac and I bought one box ($20 including shipping) when $20 was about a half-a-day's pay. We weren't sure we had made a wise investment at the time, but when you could buy any insulator for $.50 and sell it for $1.00 we figured we could get our money back eventually. I know Marion sold dozens, maybe hundreds, of boxes of Surges in the early 70's. I wonder how many collectors still have those boxes? I wish I did, but I think it went out with the trash in the early 80's. It would have been a nice go-with for the Surge pin and post, pictured on the previous page -- Believe It or Not!