This multinational army of 7″ tall wooden soldiers at our 3rd St. Beehive storefront came from the estate of a single collector. Every one was hand-carved and hand-painted by the same self-taught artist, “Pat” Patrick Holman Jacobs, who never licensed them for mass production. Over the course of almost 50 years, Jacobs made more than 26,000 of these little guys by hand!
From start to completion each figurine took him 2 months because of the long drying time needed between the base coat of vinyl sanding sealer and then three separate layers of paint. Actual hands-on labor was 3 & 1/2 hours of carving, sanding, polishing, painting and buffing. And that doesn’t include the many hours Jacobs spent in his local Tulsa, and Norman, Oklahoma libraries researching various uniforms. His meticulous, even obsessive approach is evident in the soldiers’ mirror-smooth finishes and their simplified but accurate uniforms. Not all of his process was that exacting though, when asked in interviews why all the soldiers are 7″ tall, Jacobs confessed that he’d made the first one in 1968 of scrap lumber riddled with nails and 7″ was the longest unblemished piece he could salvage. After that random coincidence, the rest of the thousands of soldiers, for the next 49 years, were made to the same scale as the very first.
Jacobs did a lot of different things in the beginning of his adult life; he enlisted in the Air Force and served stateside during the Korean War (1951 – 53). He graduated Tulsa University in 1959 with a Business degree. He wrote grants for Tulsa and Oklahoma City, and invested in various Oklahoma businesses. He was married twice and had three children. He loved telling tall tales of his minor adventurous exploits, and he was a life-long member of a Wednesday morning men’s Bible study group. But it wasn’t until 1968 that his real purpose started to take root.
From the 1800s up into the early 1900s when Pat Jacobs was a kid, tin or wooden toy soldiers were closely associated with Christmas as a popular gift for little boys – they might be the ONLY gift a male child would receive (girls got china baby dolls). The 1934 Christmas movie “Babes in Toyland”, starring comedy duo Laurel and Hardy was released when Jacobs was a toddler and a stop-motion animation/live-action skirmish of wooden soldiers vs. ‘boogeymen’ is the grand finale of the popular 1/2 hour musical comedy. The Jacobs family got a new wooden soldier every Christmas, and “Little Boy Blue” by Eugene Field, was young Pat’s favorite poem, back in the day when children actually had favorite poems: “The little toy dog is covered with dust, the little toy soldier stands red with rust. Time was when the little toy dog was new and the soldier was passing fair, that was the time Little Boy Blue kissed them and placed them there.”
All these memories came together when Jacobs was in his mid 30s with sons of his own, triggering a desire to recreate the wooden soldiers of his childhood. He started a toy soldier business, “HMS by Patrick”, and puttered away until 1976, when his American Revolutionary soldiers were chosen as one of Oklahoma’s art contributions to the national Bicentennial celebration in Washington, D.C.. Demand for his work skyrocketed and over the years his commissions expanded to include NASA astronauts, Triple Crown jockeys, Native American chiefs, rodeo cowboys, even entire symphony orchestras. But for each Christmas until his death at 85 in 2017, Jacobs still produced a special limited edition of 100 Christmas soldiers. President Reagan, Queen Elizabeth II and the Pope (Jacobs was Catholic) all received them as gifts. Today one of these steadfast little guys even stands proudly on-duty at the Smithsonian Museum.
Tuesday Treasures was started by our staff member, Jeanne Lusignan. Each week she will be featuring items that have been found at our estate sales. If you would like to submit a treasure for Jeanne to feature in a future installment of “Tuesday’s Treasures”, please follow the button below and send us an email! Please attach a few photos of your treasure in a beautiful setting as well as any details you have about your item such as manufacturer, use, age, region of origin. If you don’t know about the piece, that’s okay! We still might be able to research it for you! Don’t forget to tell us what makes this item such a treasure to you!