Automotive Cookie Jars Part I

Nov/Dec 2020 edition
Issue #13, AutoMobilia Resource Magazine
Ken Gross

Appleman Ceramic Cookie Jars:
The Cars were the Stars...

Glenn Appleman’s whimsical, car-shaped ceramic cookie jars were produced by his company, Appleman Autoworks, in Union City, NJ, from 1977 to 1987. Appleman made a few animals in 1970 and then he crafted individual busts of Alfred Hitchcock, Mao-Tse-Tung and Teddy Roosevelt. His first cookie jar was produced in 1977. Pudgy and cute, bigger than your typical cookie jar, each one was hand-made. Painted in bright kiln-fired enamel colors, they average about 17.5" long and 8" high.  

Each Appleman cookie jar has a snug-fitting lid which serves as the “greenhouse” on closed cars and the passenger compartment with a windshield on open models. They were initially offered at $75, and sold in gift shops, and that price was soon raised to $100. I don’t remember the first time I saw one, but I think it must have been at Jacques Vaucher’s l’art et l’automobile gallery in New York City, in the late 1970s. From memory, it was priced at about $200, which is the equivalent of approximately $750 today, so they were relatively expensive.

Before the Cookie Jars, Appleman’s early work of a Car & Trailer, made around 1970.

Most of the Appleman cookie jars that I’ve ever seen, including four of the five examples I own, are signed and dated in Sharpie-type ink with the signature, “Appleman,” on the unpainted bottom. Examples of these artsy jars were owned by notables like Andy Warhol, Sofia Loren, Sylvester Stallone, Dustin Hoffman, Reggie Jackson, Dolly Parton and Bill Cosby. They were spotted in photographs when celebrity photographers performed shoots of their famous subjects’ homes for magazines.  
​

Appleman went upscale with his Corvette, Rolls-Royce and Mercedes-Benz cookie jars. These were signed and numbered, and only 1,000 copies were made of the Rolls-Royce, making it very expensive today… if you’re lucky enough to find one.

The most popular Appleman cookie jar was the “Humperbump,” also known as “Sid’s Radio Taxi,” which is bright yellow, and was offered with several different taxi company labels. I own an Appleman Packard convertible in brown, and I have seen the same jar in green and white. It was also offered as a coupe in police car colors. The black Appleman 1952 Buick coupe was also available in white, red, and robin’s-egg blue. Other Appleman jars came in the exaggerated shapes of a red or a white Corvette, a Rolls-Royce (in several colors), a Mercedes-Benz convertible (in red, blue or white), and – one of the rarest types – a red Buick convertible with ten small ceramic cats playing on its hood and interior. I own a pink and gray DeSoto convertible, as well. 

10 Cats on a Buick sold on eBay for $1,611 in 2011

Prices are all over the lot: as I write this, there’s a black and yellow Rolls-Royce on eBay for $1,800 and a black Mercedes-Benz convertible that’s “Buy it Now” for $1,000. Packards and Buicks run from $350 to $500 or more. Cited in a list of top-selling cookie jars, “10 Cats and a Buick” sold on eBay for $1,611 in 2011.

For years, I wanted to know more about these cute ceramic novelties, so after I read the AutoMobilia Resource article on Sadler OKT42 teapots in issue #12, I told Editor Marshall Buck I’d like to research the Appleman items for an article. I only knew what you’ve just read. But I wanted to know much more. 

Publisher Sharon Spurlin suggested we run an ad in their classifieds, along with a photo of “Sid’s Radio Taxi,” to see if a reader could help us with more information. We struck gold on the first day when I received a call from Stephen Ring, who’d ordered a limited-production Jaguar cookie jar from Glenn Appleman (more about this in part II, issue 14 of AutoMobilia Resource).

Stephen said he thought Glenn lived in Brooklyn, and he believed he hadn’t been making the cookie jars for decades. He didn’t have Glenn’s phone number, but through the magic of the Internet, I was soon speaking with the elusive Mr. Appleman.

​Friendly, enthusiastic and blessed with a great memory, Glenn Appleman was only too happy to tell me all about his short-lived career as a cookie jar magnate. 

Here are four of the most popular – the red Buick convertible (2 versions). The Buick with ten cats was made because the red glaze reportedly was difficult to apply without producing black spots. Appleman’s solution was to craft tiny cats to cover the spots, making for an even more impressive item. “10 Cats on a Buick” is one of the most expensive cookie jars today. “Sid’s Taxi” was the most popular cookie jar. “Phantazoon,” the DeSoto convertible, was also offered in black.

“I was born in the Bronx in 1949,” he said. “I studied fine art at City University of New York. I always wanted to be an electrical engineer like my uncle Harold. But I was never good at calculus, so I decided I wouldn’t be an engineer. I was in the ceramic room at City College and the student aide was a friend; so, I never left. Ceramics was a lot more fun than calculus.”

“I didn’t initially make these pieces as cookie jars.” Appleman explains. “I called them objets d’art. But people thought of them as cookie jars. Who was I to argue?”

​“Besides, cookie jars became a hot collectable after Andy Warhol died and his collection of 175 jars was auctioned off by Sotheby’s in 1987. They brought over $250,000. People thought if Andy Warhol was collecting cookie jars, they must be art.”

Sid’s Taxi was officially known as the “Humperbump,” These cabs were done with several different taxi decals, with blackwalls or whitewalls, and in white, with no lettering. An enduring, whimsical design, the tiny taxi is emblematic of the enduring appeal of Glenn Appleman’s collectable cookie jars.

“And when cookie jars became very collectable, my things became very collectable cookie jars. The cookie jar collectable market today remains fairly strong,” says Glenn, “and I am the hottest cookie jar in the cookie jar market.”

​We asked how it all began...
“I did a very nice car and trailer about 1970 – it was a solid piece. The first time I made a [hollow] jar was in 1977. It started with the body type that came to be known as Sid’s Taxi. It was initially just a car, and someone suggested that I make it a taxicab, so I slapped a decal on the side, and the next thing I knew, there was a TV show named after my car.” [Editor: The show “Taxi” was an outstanding comedy series.]  
  

“That first car, the Sid’s Taxi, was known and marketed as the “Humperbump.” The next car out was the Packard, in 1979. Then I thought it would be cool if I made a convertible out of it. So, the Packard had two different lids and it also became a police car. In 1980, I made the first Buick – a 1952 model with a big grille that looked like a Viking battering ram. In 1981, things were slow. I didn’t have enough money to make a new car, so I came out with a Buick convertible by designing a different top. And I offered them in different colors.”

The Tea Pot that never went into production. Glenn made very few of these, preferring to stick with cookie jars.

Rather than having to deal with licensing issues, Appleman called his DeSoto convertible, “the Phantazoom.” He liked the bright pastel colors that automakers used in the 1950s and 1960s, and used them on many of his appealing little cookie jars.

“In late 1981, I did the DeSoto convertible, which was actually called the Phantazoom. I thought it would be a great idea to use the crazy two-tone colors of the 1950s, so I could make pink cars and purple cars. I moved out to New Jersey in 1982, and the first car there was the limited-edition Rolls-Royce. I recently saw one on eBay with an intact hood ornament, which amazes me. They weren’t really designed for the long haul.”

​“And that was it. Two years later, we went out of business.” 

The classy Mercedes-Benz convertible was available in three colors, with the top down or the top up. Appleman’s Benz’s used the over and under European-style headlamps.

“I was fortunate enough to pick up the beginning of the wave of the crafts movement in America. There were craft galleries and books. Art collectors were starting to acknowledge American crafters as artists. And there were many craft shows. The Rhinebeck show was the most famous, and there was one in Baltimore. The American Craft Council (ACC) still exists. They managed the shows. Dealers would order, and you went home and made stuff. We had a few department store orders, from I. Magnin & Company, and Marshall Field.”

“The truck series didn’t sell very well,” Glenn Appleman says. In the lower corner of the brochure is the top of another rare item, the cookie jar with Harry Truman and the famous Chicago Tribune newspaper that declared Dewey the winner of the 1948 election. Not many were made.

“But toward the end of the 1980s, the craft thing was starting to die. Galleries were disappearing. Main Street had had its flirtation with it. And then it ended, as trends do end.” Looking back, Glenn believes he made about 20,000 cars, “give or take a few thousand.” And he made one last small run of taxis in the early 1990s. 

“I looked at the crystal ball and realized, we’re not growing, we’re shrinking, and I said, ‘I’ve been doing it for ten years, and I’m tired. I think I’ll do something else.’ I went back to college and I have been a computer programmer ever since.”

The detailing on Appleman’s cookie jars was very well done — this Mercedes-Benz has a bright red finish, highlighted headlamps and parking lights and lots of lavish chrome trim. The Benzes were available in three colors, with tops up or down.

The business initially seemed successful, so I asked Glenn if there were other reasons that contributed to its demise. 

We’ll learn about Glenn’s famous clientele and preview a future Appleman design next issue, in AutoMobilia Resource  #14. 

Ken Gross

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