The Nashville Tennessean Magazine — November 23, 1947

HOME BANKERS

Walter Hoover’s interest in old cast ironware
eventually led Mrs. Hoover to scrap her glass
collection in favor of her husband’s pursuit

By ED BELL
     Collecting old mechanical banks has turned the home of Mr. and Mrs. Walter King Hoover at Smyrna into a toyland where a Christmas-like excitement prevails the year round.
     With a handful of coins a whole world of little iron men, women, children, birds and beasts populating their shelves and sideboards may be set in motion.
     Teddy Roosevelt shoots a bear in a hollow tree. An Indian offers the pipe of peace to Christopher Columbus. A dog takes a coin into a house, deposits it and reappears. William Tell shoots the apple from his son’s head. Boss Tweed of old Tammany Hall smugly pockets a coin. A battery of darkdown baseballers do a perfectly-timed act, the pitcher hurling a penny, the batter swinging and missing, the penny going into a slot beneath the catcher. A magician places his hat over a penny on a table, lifts the hat and the penny is gone. A woman in a rowboat starts to feed Jonah to the whale, but snatches him back to safety after Mr. J. tosses a penny down the whale’s throat. A clown stands on his head atop a spinning globe. A mother eagle feeds her peeping brood.
     These and many other diminutive performers are relics of a period in American history, half a century gone, when Yankee ingenuity exerted itself to implant the habit of thrift in children by offering them some fun as bait for saving their pennies.
     Hoover is a Smyrna funeral director who some time ago became interested in collecting old cast ironware — candlesticks, bootjacks, doorstops, cooking utensils, toy stoves and the like — while repairing an ancient kettle his wife’s great-great-great grandparents brought to this country from Switzerland.
     One day he bought an assorted batch of such items from a neighborhood antique dealer and found among them the eagle perched on the edge of her nest. When a penny was placed in her beak and a lever pressed, she would dip and feed the young. The bank contained a small bellows which enabled the eaglets to give out appreciative “peeps.” That find led to his centering on collecting both mechanical and still banks, a hobby which was to capture the enthusiasm of his wife, Margaret, and their two children, Denny and Jean.
     The new pursuit was so absorbing, in fact, that Mrs. Hoover eventually abandoned her own collection of glassware.
     Although the banks were mainly in vogue in northern parts of this country from the close of the War Between the States up until 1900, their origin dates far back in world history. The oldest one known is a mechanical alms box of glazed green pottery mounted with a small bear who nods acceptance when a coin is dropped into a slot. Now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the box was a product of the Han Dynasty, perhaps as long ago as 206 B. C.
     In the United States the banks became a great popular art which now offers as rewarding a field to the student of history as to the collector. Their designers drew liberally from everyday life around them for subject matter. Broad humor which would appeal to children was the underlying characteristic of most of them, but some dealt in satire such as that of Boss Tweed and another, also in Hoover’s collection, of a gaily-painted Uncle Sam whose beard waggles as he drops a penny into a carpetbag. Others were of the commemorative type like Teddy Roosevelt and the bear, probably designed in anticipation of his campaign for the presidency, and Columbus and the Indian to memorialize the Columbian exposition. Carnival themes with dogs jumping through hoops and the antics of clowns were also great favorites.
     Considering the limitations of cast iron, designers showed remarkable skill and inventiveness in creating little mechanical wonders like darktown battery with its many small parts, balance, timing and all-around smooth performance. This one was turned out in the ’Eighties, about the time baseball began to attract national attention.
     Many designers worked on similar themes and subjects accounting for variants among some of the same types of banks. There are known to be at least six different “Jolly Niggers” and numerous “Uncle Toms.”  Hoover has No. 2 of the Jonahs, but there is another he hasn’t been able to obtain yet wherein Jonah is swallowed feet first by the whale. He has two models of the theme of “Spise the mule,” one with the mule throwing the jockey head first and another with the mule whirling and kicking a colored boy a somersault. The inscription on them reads “I always did despise a mule,” hence the general name for the type.
     The banks have not been made since the turn of the century, there are no reproductions and the patents for the originals have expired, presenting an ever-narrowing range of operations for the collector.
     The trail has led Hoover to semi-monthly rounds of all antique and junk shops in his immediate vicinity, to perusals of old hardware catalogues and trips to northern cities to see other collectors, many of whom are also traders.
     His own collection now numbers 55 mechanical banks, several semi-mechanical (elephants with movable trunks) and 12 still banks. All of the old banks have well-established prices, he says, their value varying with their scarcity and mechanical and paint condition.
     Now and then he runs across one that somebody has given a fresh coating of paint, thereby decreasing its value as much as 50 per cent.
     Among the rarest in the Hoover collection are a colored mammy feeding a coin to her child, the magician and the clown on the globe.
     Others of varying worth and interest include a lion and monkey, an artillery-man firing a penny into a fort, two boys playing leap frog, a monkey and organ grinder, an owl with rotating head, a hoop-jumping dog (very old), a rooster, frog on lattice, Liberty Bell, Independence Hall (made prior to the Philadelphia centennial), an Indian shooting a bear and two performing dogs and a monkey.
     Favorite of young Jean is the dog on a turntable taking a penny into the house. Both children have a great deal of fun with the collection and are always eager for new additions. Sometimes they act as demonstrators when visitors come to see the collection.
     The banks were never as popular in the impoverished post-war South as in the North, but nevertheless the Smyrna collector has made some of his best finds in Middle Tennessee.
     One was acquired almost by accident when a casket salesman came to his place of business one day and Hoover happened to show him the collection. The salesman remembered having seen one of the gadgets around his own home. It now belonged to his small daughter, who didn’t care much about it, but wanted an iron dog.
     Hoover gladly traded her a dog doorstop.
     That bank was “Paddy and His Pig,” a humorous number placed on the market at the height of the Irish immigration to these shores. A penny is deposited on the pig’s snout. When a lever is pressed, the pig kicks the penny with one foot toward Paddy’s face and the smiling son of the Ould Sod laps up the currency with a bright red tongue. The pig’s kicking leg was broken and the bank was sent to a northern collector for repairs.
     Paddy is back now occupying a prominent spot in the Hoover home, and the owners are proud of him even though there is one cloud on their title.
     At the time of the trade with the salesman’s child, it was agreed that if her grandmother, who previously owned the bank, ever heard about the departure of the family heirloom and raised a ruckus, it would be returned.