Grasshopper sitting on a railroad track /
Singin’ polly wolly doodle all the day…
By a show of hands. how many of you remember that song? Careful. you
may date yourselves.
So here’s the story. As some of you may know. and others of you may
suspect. it occurs upon extremely rare occasions that a jeweler may
see a design he or she likes. and decides to copy it. making a few
changes here and there to avoid copyright infringements. These
dastardly deeds are surely quite uncommon. and yet they happen. Who
woulda thunk it?
Once upon a time in a distant land where they didn’t speak English a
man called Aesop wrote some fables… one of which was called “The
Ant and The Grasshopper”. In 1940 a company called Castlecliff made a
gold plated trembler of–yup. you guessed it–a grasshopper. Well…
not long after that a company by the name of Brier Manufacturing came
along and decided this was a neat thing to make. And so they did. And
they distributed it to Woolworth’s.
Now. believe it or not. vintage lawsuits abounded in the
costume-jewelry field in them that days. And perhaps they still do.
In any case. Castlecliff sued Brier, and Woolworth, as well as a
company called Crystal Novelty for design patent infringement. And
Castlecliff won.
As an aside. Castlecliff and Brier were–in their day–major players
in the costume jewelry field. I have no on Crystal
Novelty which I assume was some sort of distributing company.
As to our fiddling grasshopper trembler.coming to you straight out of
the pages of Aesop. he is about 2-1/2 inches tall. made out of
gold-plated pot metal with sapphire RS. Not too sure what RS means.
the closest I get is RuneScape. If anyone knows. I would not be
adverse to having is passed on. The price on this grasshopper is
$50.00. And the version you are about to look at is the Woolworth
version.
So there it is. everything you ever wanted to know about grasshoppers
and lawsuits.
You wanna see? You know where. Home page: tyler-adam.com. Left hand
menu. Click on Tidbits.
And there ya have it. That’s it for this week folks.
Catch you all next week.
Benjamin Mark
Teri