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Sam Butcher was a quiet artist. His “Precious Moments” porcelain figures with fawn eyes and pastel colors sparked a worldwide collecting frenzy and made him a wealthy man. He also built his own version of the Sistine Chapel in Carthage, Missouri, out of his Christian faith. He died on May 20 at his home in Carthage, Missouri. He was 85 years old.
His death was confirmed by his son, John.
Butcher was Missouri’s Michelangelo, and his lovable, long-nosed Precious Moments characters were, as The Wall Street Journal once described them, “porcelain Beanie Babies.” Hundreds of thousands of avid collectors made room for their Precious Moments figurines, flocked to area clubs, and made pilgrimages to Carthage, where they stayed in Precious Moments motels and RV parks, marveled at the Precious Moments angel fountain, dined at the Precious Moments food court, and strolled the 30-acre grounds. (Carthage has also hosted Precious Moments weddings.)
At one time, the Precious Moments Care-A-Van — an 18-wheeler truck outfitted like a museum and loaded with figurines and dioramas telling the story of Butcher’s life — traveled around the country. Hundreds of Precious Moments licensees manufactured hats, key chains, watches, greeting cards, books, and children’s Bibles. At the company’s height in 1996 and 1997, Precious Moments’ worldwide retail sales exceeded $500 million a year, an astonishing sum for a man who had once struggled to buy groceries for his seven children.
As fans sought him out to sign figurines and posters at the Precious Moments compound (he always carried two pens for that purpose), Butcher didn’t look like a millionaire: normally wrinkled, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, with a bushy coat of paint and a shy smile.
“Most people think I’m just a gardener,” he said.
Butcher was teaching and illustrating Bible stories for an international, nondenominational children’s ministry when he and colleague Bill Beal began creating inspirational greeting cards and posters featuring lovable characters in the early 1970s. “I came up with ‘Precious,’ and he came up with ‘Moments,'” Butcher told the Kansas City Star in 1995.
At a trade show they attended, Eugene Friedman, president of the Illinois-based gift-supply company Enesco Group, saw the scrawny kids they’d made and thought they might sell commercially as figurines, perhaps to rival those made by Hummel, a long-established collector’s giant. When Kohei Fujioka, a Japanese sculptor whom Friedman had commissioned to translate Butcher’s characters into porcelain, made his first figurine, a boy and girl huddled on a tree stump and titled “Let’s Love Each Other,” Butcher later said. He fell to his knees and cried.
In 1978, Enesco introduced 21 characters, and by 1995, Precious Moments had become the number one collectible in the world, according to the company.
In 1984, Butcher said he was living in Michigan and visiting factories in Asia when God instructed him to build a house of worship. He was driving home from a business trip to Arizona and made a detour to look for a site. Hungry, tired and in need of gas, he stayed overnight in Carthage. The next morning, Butcher said, God said, “You are here.”
He bought 17.5 acres and built on it over the years. A trip to Rome and a visit to the Sistine Chapel inspired him to build the 9,000-square-foot temple, which is covered with 84 murals, bronze panels and stained-glass windows. Construction took four years. Like Michelangelo, Butcher lay on his back on the scaffolding and painted stories from the Bible, from Creation to Resurrection. But unlike Michelangelo, known for his muscular figures, Butcher painted his signature spirits in the chapel. And he gave himself creative freedom.
In a painting depicting the first day of creation in Genesis, when God said, “Let there be light,” Butcher painted three angels holding flashlights. On the fourth day, when God created the heavens, Butcher painted an angel basketball team he called the “Shooting Stars.”
Other areas of the chapel are more modest. Hallelujah Square, a crowd favorite, features dozens of angels entering heaven. Some were inspired by terminally ill children who visited the chapel with their parents, whom Butcher painted after their deaths. Butcher built a room for his son Philip, who died in 1990, and a tower for his son Tim, who died in 2012. The chapel’s memorial book is crammed with names, prayers and notes from visitors’ loved ones. “My grandpa and aunt died,” wrote a young girl named Jenny, according to a 1998 Baltimore Sun article. “And my cat Midnight ran away.”
Samuel John Butcher was born on New Year’s Day, 1939, in Jackson, Michigan, one of five children to gas station owner Leon and Evelyn (Cooley) Butcher.
Sam grew up in Redding, California and began drawing at the age of 5. His family was tight on finances and he couldn’t afford art supplies, so he used rolls of paper he salvaged from the local dump and leftover car paint from his father’s business. Encouraged by his high school art teacher, he won a scholarship to California Institute of the Arts, then in Oakland.
He married his high school friend, Katie Cushman, in 1959. Her father sold a cow to pay for the wedding. After she gave birth to their first child, John, in 1962, Sam dropped out of college and worked a variety of jobs, including as a cleaner, making window displays for a wallpaper store, and as a cook in a pancake house.
The couple began attending a local Baptist church, but one Sunday Mr Butcher accidentally walked away with a hymnbook. The guilt awakened something in him, and by the next Sunday he was a convert.
They divorced in 1987 (though they remained close), and Butcher moved out of the mansion they’d built together at the Precious Moments complex and into his garage, but still allowed visitors to tour it. The couple admired the stone fountain, Italian marble floors, Czechoslovakian chandeliers, and five-foot-tall cloisonné vases that lined the hallways. Two six-foot-tall teak elephants and security guards stood guard at the front entrance.
“After my wife Katie left, I decided I didn’t want to live in the house,” Butcher told the Kansas City Star. “I’m just a dirty old artist, so I’m just going to live in the garage, paint, and sleep when I’m done.”
In addition to his son, John, Mr. Butcher is survived by another son, Don, three daughters, Tammy Bearinger, Deb Butcher and Heather Butcher, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Mr. Beal and Mr. Butcher separated when Mr. Butcher moved to Missouri in the early 1980s.
In his prime, Butcher could finish three Precious Moments paintings in a night; his son John estimates that he produced as many as 4,000 over his lifetime. “But the Chapel was something else entirely,” he says. “He was never satisfied. He was constantly tinkering” — adding characters, tweaking the pleats of an angel’s robe, changing the color of the clouds.
“My work is never done, and the chapel is never finished, because I’m always feeling like I want to do something else,” Butcher told the Carthage Press in 2015. “People say it’s well done, but my work is always pretty close to well done. It’s always pretty close to well done.”
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