Zac Marecki's post earlier today on ICON about being about 30 years late on information he found in the October 1975 issue of Crown Jewels of the Wire regarding RD numbers prompted me to post the following related story from my first Springfield experience in November of 2009.

I had sat next to fellow collector Chip McElwee at the banquet on Saturday night. I know Chip from talking to him at his sales table at shows I have attended. The conversation over dinner somehow got on the subject of rare insulators we had owned with some damage on them. Chip had described a milky jade CD 126 RD149959 that he had found in the mid 1970s in a box of around 30 insulators. The box also contained a CD 1038 Cutter and a CD 110 Brookfield. When he began to describe some of the damage it had it immediately got my attention because the piece he was describing sounded like a piece I picked up in the summer of 2007. Chip doesn't remember when he sold it or who he sold it to. I asked Tommy Snead, the collector I got it from and he seemed to remember getting it in an accumulation he puchased in Bellevue, Ohio back in 1997. Chip hadn't seen the piece since he parted with it but when I sent him a picture in November, he confirmed it was the exact same piece. He sent me a picture of his collection from 1974 that shows the piece on the second shelf, the second from the right.

To learn more about RD embossings on insulators, see the following Crown Jewels of the Wire article from October 1975:

http://cjow.com/archive/article.php?month=10&a=10The%20England%20Brookfield%20RD%20Insulator.htm&year=1975

Also see the following thread:

http://www.insulators.info/icon/articles/rd.htm

If you come across this posting while looking for information related to an RD149959 or RD154745 insulator you've found, please feel free to contact me.

Thanks to Zac for bringing up the subject and providing the Crown Jewels of the Wire link above.