Mom's Collectibles

Mom loved to collect all sorts of stuff.  Coins, stamps, blue Mother's day plates, Madame Alexander dolls, Snow babies, Kewpie dolls, Crystal Balls, Opal rings, memorable newspaper headlines.  She collected and saved just about everything imaginable.

The special things were either anchored to the wall or encased in her fancy gold cabinet.
She was crazy about statues that depicted a mother and her child.  They had to be W. Goebel, which were made in what was then West Germany.  There is always a little bee and a V on the bottom of Goebel statues, along with the year it was made.

When we were visiting Aunt Amy in 1971, Aunt Amy gave mom a statue for her birthday on Halloween.  It was not the one Mom wanted and I could tell she was disappointed with the gift. She had the same look on her face when I gave her cheap dime store vase for mother's day earlier in the year.  Aunt Amy did not realize that Mom didn't want a statue of just a child.  She wanted a mother and child statue.    Plus, Mom hated red-headed kids, so this statue really did not impress her at all.

When we got back to San Diego, Mom put the red headed boy in her cabinet because she loved her sister, but told me she didn't like it and took me to a gift shop to show me which one she really wanted, which was the one I remember seeing on Aunt Amy's bookshelf. Mom told me that those  (she called them Hummels) Mother and child statues were the only things she wanted for gifts.  So these were what I got her for future birthdays and Christmas presents.

For Christmas 1971, Mom saw to it that I had enough spending money to buy her the mother in the blue dress statue, like the one Aunt Amy had.  The other two in this photo were subsequent Christmas presents:

Madame Alexander dolls were highly collectible in the 60s.  There used to be a fancy New York City toy store called F.A.O. Schwartz.  We always got a Christmas catalog in the mail every year, and I used to spend hours studying it and marking all the toys I wished for.  They were expensive toys that you did not see at Sears or KMart, so there was no way we kids were going to get anything from that catalog.  Only rich kids were going to get Schwartz toys for Christmas.  The Madame Alexander dolls were in the catalog.  They were based on story book characters, such as Hansel and Gretel, Little Women, etc. They also made dolls that represented different countries.

 These three dolls are all that remain from her collection. The blonde is Dutch, the middle one is French. They are at least 50 years old and decrepit, falling apart, and one of them is missing its ID tag and a leg:

Snow babies were a strange collectible.  They were toddlers or babies dressed in a snowy suit.  Mom told me they were inspired by a couple of young people who eloping in the winter and were lost in the snow and froze to death.  I have researched this and haven't found any article that corroborates this story. For some odd reason, Mom always encased snow babies separately under a glass dome. It seemed to me that if the story was that two kids froze to death together, you ought to encase two snow babies together, but that's not how Mom presented them in her cabinet.

I took one of them out of its glass dome so you can see it a little better:

The open armed Good Fairy is another odd collectible.  Mom had a big bronze one that lived on top of her her cabinet.  She also had a tiny one, which I still have.  The story she told me about the fairy is that the artist was going to have a child and did not know if it was going to be a boy or a girl, so she made a fairy sculpture that looked like a short haired boy on the left side:

and looked like a long haired girl on the right side:

These Good Fairies were really a thing a hundred years ago.  They were supposed to inspire happy feelings to those who looked at them.  And they were always half boy/half girl.

Lots of collectibles came in and out of Eagle Street, bought, sold, and traded for Blue Chip, Top Value, or S & H Green Stamps.  Mom was not only a master collector, she was also was a master salesperson.

 In the end, her most precious collections disappeared, and the rest of it was thrown outside like garbage, where a rare summer rain soaked and ruined everything.  All of the things in these photos are essentially worthless.  They are merely, to me, a reminder of Life on Eagle Street.