"Bearly Surviving" No-Spill Mugs - Totally Calfornian, Totally Nautical

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I continue to try and figure the wizardry The Kid Sister used to locate the replacement to my beloved old warrior of a no-spill coffee mug (see missive the last). But, along the way, I found a thing that filled in the historical narrative a bit, and I found it in an unexpected place: a site in New Zealand.

On the site New Zealand Pottery, an enthusiast site for Kiwi lovers of all things pottery, a user named Jeremy Ashford on the 21st of February, 2016 (I'm guessing at the year; the post is merely dated Sunday, 21 Feb with no concession as to year and the most recent year I can find is 2016; crossing that datum with the 2011 sign-on of said user and the only Sun 2/21 I can find during the user's term of residency there would be n 2016 AND MOVING ON) posted a rather interesting article beginning with the sighting of a model by the stoneware maker Crown Lynn (which defuncted in 1988), a model 1448, which shares the same low-center-of-gravity profile as my mug and all the Bearly Surviving mugs I've seen.

His informal investigation of the lineage of the design lead him to the brand Bearly Surviving and to one of the creators and marketers of the original design, Tres Feltman. It was his partner, Dirk Langer, the both of them grad students in Design at UCLA, who created the first design on the potter's wheel, and it went on from there.

From the article, in Tres Feltman's own words of reply to the author:

Dirk and I met while attending graduate school at UCLA. While pursuing our graduate degrees in Design we  began experimenting with different mug shapes to bring to market. Dirk actually created the first No Spill No Slide mug on the potters wheel. The original mold was made off the mug he threw on the wheel. We put decal graphics of surfers and surfing on the mugs and sold them to surf shops up and down the California coast. We originally sold the mugs under the name "Bearly Surviving" and later we incorporated under the name Feltman Langer, Inc.

We soon realized that the Surf Industry, at that time, was very small and most surfers didn't have the disposable income they have now. I was crewing on a sailboat at the time and realized sailers had more money than surfers and the boating industry was immensely bigger than the surf industry. That's when we began putting nautical graphics on our mugs and our little company really took off.

I have also subsequently found out that their company's mugs were marketed both under the Barely Surviving and Feltman Langer brands.

The practicality of the design to anyone in both the worlds of surfing or yachting is self-evident. The savvy of divining the right market is admirable, and the success of the design is well-attested to by the fact that it's still being traded heavily on eBay, almost as a collectors item, and that a twenty-something finding himself in Seattle in the mid-80s who will come no closer to sailing in his life than watching Gilligan's Island found the design appealing enough to own for thirty-five years. 

It also explains why so many of these mugs have nautical attire. 

So. A bright idea by two UCLA grad students in the 70s goes round the world, copied by a NZ manufacturer and maintains ... and even makes its entry into science fiction television ... what? Yes. It's reputedly been seen on Star Trek ...

But they who are interested can read the whole of it at the author's article at https://www.newzealandpottery.net/t7237-no-spill-no-slide-californian-origins-of-the-1448-mug. There are links you can copy and paste but I won't testify to their effectiveness; consider it an adventure, thrillseeker!

Also, get a load of what I was able to get on a Google web search of bearly surviving mug under the 'Shopping' tab. Four pages worth. And here's one for feltman langer mug. About as many. There's still a constituency.

I'm one.

Meet The New Coffee Cup ... Not Quite The Same As The Old Coffee Cup.

It is by cuppa alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Coffea arabica that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains, stains become a warning. It is by cuppa alone I set my mind in motion.

-- What Piter de Vries actually meant in that movie

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I have in front of me two coffee cups. To people of my self-styled bent, consciously continually inventing themselves in the DIY mold of the self-made artist/street philosopher king having a single dependable, 'companion' coffee cup is a thing of psychology, speaking to the needs of talisman and ritual. I've written about it before, back in 2015. The time has come, my friends, to speak of it again.

Why? because of a deed wholly unexpected, a pleasant and unexpected surprise having come my way. 

I don't write often of my family, not because we're terribly estranged, but we live kind of in different worlds (or, to be more precise, they live on Planet Earth while I've always lived in a sort of dimension of my own, a thing which has been known ever since I was a weird little kid in the then-rather-banal-and-normal Silverton). Currently my Mom, my kid sister and her husband and their kids live in Jackson County - same side of Oregon, different corner. Siskiyou Country rather than Willamette Valley.

During this time of wildfires we had occasion to think of them; when the phone call came from my sister, I didn't hesitate to pick up. As it turned out, their house and little town are fine and fire didn't come close. But she did want me to clarify my postal address, so I did, and all she said was that she was going to send me a box. 

It's at this point I'm hoping you followed the link three paragraphs up. If you don't feel like scrolling back up, here's the link again. Follow it. I'll wait. 

Back? All orientated? Good. The box contained a brief and dear letter, a repayment in gratitude, and the object on the right in the picture below:

On the left, the original edition acquired in Seattle in 1985. On the right, its successor, provided by my sister, who had noticed in my earlier sharings that the original warrior was in distressed shape, and she remembered how fond I was of that cup. And I am still wowing over this, because, as far as I can tell, finding vintage Bearly Surviving mugs (which seem to have become collectors items) that were originally sold thirty-five years ago is no mean feat. I mean, I've cruised the 'Web trying to find this particular model ... it's larger, about 21 ounces, than most of the non-spill travel mugs they sold back then. Vanishingly rare, as in, I've not found a-one yet. 

Several years ago, I shattered that mug, and managed to keep all the fragments, and held on to them until I found a glue I could actually use and since about 2014 or thereabouts I was drinking out of this beloved mug again. And, somehow, my sister, who now has my awe and respect for this, found another one just like it. I seriously can't even here. And I had no idea. Totally out of the blue here.

My life is filled with people, from the Brown Eyed Girl on down, who do little things that indulge me to make it possible for me to try to invent myself as the creative artist I should have always been. I don't recognize that enough. This'll be one of those things now that'll stay with me in that way.

The cup, it will be noted, has been christened (as see the picture that follows). And, away we go - for another thirty-five years? Who knows. It's possible!

And so it brews.