Long Term Love Affair

Although members of the Hagen-Renaker (H-R) Collectors' Club are sworn to secrecy about a number of issues, there' a thread going on right now on the Hagen-Renaker Collectors Cub Group Facebook page that I think will be okay to talk about here.  I hope so anyway, because this blog post is my response to this particular thread.

The question being asked of H-R Collectors' Club members is: Which H-R has been with you the longest?

This is not just about horses of course -- the H-R that you've had forever could be anything from a hand-painted butter plate to a DW (Designer's Workshop) dog.  But most Collector Club members are model horse fanciers, so horses make up the majority of the responses.

It's also not necessarily about the first H-R you ever got -- if it's not still with you then it doesn't count.  It's not about the oldest piece in your collection either -- if you still have both an H-R mini you bought new in 1980 and a DW H-R you bought second-hand in 1985, the mini is the one that's been with you the longest, even if the DW has been in existence for a longer time.

So, given all these rules, I've determined that the H-R that's been with me the longest is the A-323 Western Pony.  I bought him in 1989, when I was just starting my collecting career.

A-323 Western Pony.  I show him as a Sec. A Welsh Pony "Cader Chippit" (he had a small eartip chip when I bought him).

This was the period when I was doing a lot of learning about model horses, and realizing all the near misses I'd had with opportunities to collect Breyers and Hartlands before I really knew what they were.  When I found out about  H-Rs I had that same sense of "oh dear, I once had a opportunity to buy some of those and I let it pass me by."

There was a card shop I used to visit occasionally that had a small display of H-R minis, right on the front desk.  They didn't have a great variety of horses, but one that they did have was the H-R miniature Circus Pony (sans plume) that ran from 1980-1983 in four harness colours: purple, green, dark red, and pink.  For at least two years I would regularly go and ogle those horses whenever I visited the store, but I never bought one, and the reason I did not is the same reason that has held me back from buying so many horses I've found attractive over the years -- I couldn't decide which colour to buy.

A friend of mine has a fantastic solution to this problem:  when she can't decide between two or more horses, she'll just buy them all.  When buying second-hand this often results in her getting a discount for bulk buying, and in any case buying both or all of the horses under consideration gives her more time to decide if she really only wants one of them, thereby enabling her to sell the rest.

The only catch with this method is that you have to have the money to buy more than one right up front, and that of course is not always the case -- not for me and not for my friend.

Anyway, after I realized that those Circus Ponies I wished I had bought were the kinds of H-Rs I should be looking for, I decided to take up the hunt again.  That original card shop has since closed, but it was part of a chain so I started to check out others in the chain to see if they, perhaps, had H-Rs too.  

Most of them did not, but at last I found one store with a few H-Rs (all discontinued, although I did not realize this at the time) and one single solitary horse -- the reissued Western Pony (1979-84).

I hadn't been counting on buying a horse with tack, but when you can find only one you take what you can get, and the pony itself was quite attractive under his trappings.

In the end, I'm so glad I did buy him.  He's been with me for over 30 years now, and I've always felt lucky to have been able to buy him new when he was already 5 years discontinued.  It took a long time for us to get together, but our story marks a great start to a long term love affair.