Sam Butcher, Who Gave the World Precious Moments, Dies at 85

Sam Butcher, the soft-spoken artist whose doe-eyed, pastel-hued porcelain Precious Moments figurines ignited a global collecting frenzy and made him a wealthy man, and whose Christian faith spurred him to build his own version of the Sistine Chapel in Carthage, Mo., died on May 20 at his home there. He was 85.

His death was confirmed by his son Jon.

Mr. Butcher was the Michelangelo of Missouri, and his adorable snub-nosed Precious Moments characters were “the Beanie Babies of porcelain,” as The Wall Street Journal once put it. Their zealous collectors, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, built rooms for their Precious Moments figurines, convened in regional clubs and made pilgrimages to Carthage, where they slept in the Precious Moments motel or the R.V. park, marveled at the Precious Moments Fountain of the Angels, dined in the Precious Moments food courts and wandered the 30-acre grounds. (Carthage also hosted Precious Moments weddings.)

For a time, the Precious Moments Care-a-Van — an 18-wheeler kitted out like a museum, filled with figurines and dioramas that told Mr. Butcher’s life story — toured the country. There were hundreds and hundreds of Precious Moments licensees, which made hats, keychains, watches, greeting cards, books and a children’s Bible. At the company’s peak, in 1996 and 1997, Precious Moments’ global retail sales reached over $500 million each year, a stunning amount for a man who was once so poor that he struggled to buy groceries for his seven children.

Mr. Butcher, whose fans sought him out at the Precious Moments compound to autograph their figurines and posters (he always carried two pens to do so), was an unlikely-looking millionaire: a rumpled figure typically clad in bluejeans and a T-shirt, with paint in his bushy hair and a shy smile.

“Most people just think I’m the gardener,” he said.

Mr. Butcher had been working with an international nondenominational ministry for children, teaching and illustrating Bible stories, when he and a colleague, Bill Biel, began making inspirational greeting cards and posters featuring his winsome characters in the early 1970s. “I came up with ‘Precious’ and he came up with ‘Moments,’” Mr. Butcher told The Kansas City Star in 1995.