A month after Christmas and my seventh birthday, our house burnt down completely. My parents regretted the loss of household goods, and I mourned the loss of my money and my dolls.
My dad pulled money out of his pocket and gave it to me. An empathetic soul brought us her daughter’s unwanted cloth dolls with molded polymer faces and limbs, eyes that closed and with comb-able hair. They looked and felt like real babies. My mom assigned the brunette to me and the blonde to my next younger sister. Little sister had to wait for another donation or a trip to the store to get a doll.
Months later in a different house, we each received identical dolls for Christmas. Stiff, plastic dolls, with curls of hair imprinted into their scalp, each wore a T-shirt and diaper. They slept under the tree in the wooden fruit baskets my mother had painted white and lined with flannel cloth and a cushion of sponge.
Our name inscribed on the bottom of the foot of a doll helped us keep them straight. That meant nothing to my youngest sister who could not read. She borrowed my doll, played with it and scribbled all over it. I was enraged. My mom scrubbed most of it off, but a trace of crayon always remained.
But scarred for life, or hand-me-downs after a fire, the dolls served their purpose. They provided opportunities for me to:
• Learn to be gentle, “Be nice to the baby. Don’t swing her around like that.”
• Hold a baby correctly, “No, you don’t hold a baby by her feet. Hold her in your arms like this.”
• And how to dress a little one, “here are some baby clothes for your dolls.”
Baby clothes that had once clothed my grandmother’s burgeoning family of cousins. They primarily consisted of a collection of kimonos with ties that my grandmother had made from flannel and crocheted a tidy row of trim around the neck and sleeves.
Also, taking the squares of white flannel used in the barn for straining the milk into the cans to carry to the factory, she cleaned, scalded, bleached and sewed them together into plain white kimonos. Plain clothing compared to today’s brightly festooned children, but soft and comforting for babies and later easy for little girls to practice pulling on a doll.
Around this time, I also received a Betsy McCall doll with clothes – a six-inch tall, school girl with a properly trimmed dress, red shoes and raincoat and life-like hair. I asked my grandmother to make her some clothes. She made a poncho with a string belt. I lost that some time ago, but I still have the dress and tattered raincoat still.
The dolls moved with us to a home with a long, unfinished room under the eaves of the second story. Too narrow to be a bedroom, it had an unfinished ceiling and walls and exposed timbers, – a perfect little girl’s playroom. We lined one wall with our fruit basket doll beds and seriously considered how wonderful it would be if the dolls would become real babies.
We stacked up our odds and ends of plastic butter tubs, measuring cups and tea cups in our kitchen of crates and boxes and declared this our house.
That room held everything – all our dolls and teddy bears. Everything – except the perfect doll I drooled over every year in the fat Christmas catalog with its pages and pages of dolls. Small dolls, medium-sized dolls, extra large dolls. Classic baby dolls, dolls that moved their arms, legs and head. In the era before Barbie and Ken, I wanted a Madame Alexander doll. Any of them would have done. They all wore beautiful clothes and looked like little princesses … dolls too expensive for me to even think about asking to receive as a Christmas or birthday gift.
In time my sisters and I received Barbie dolls. Once we learned to sew in junior high home-ec, we bought a yard of fabric printed with pieces of several outfits to sew for our Barbie dolls. They looked nothing like the kimonos and proved much more difficult to place on the dolls. Then one day in junior high I sat down to supper and observed that I had not had a lot of time to play with my dolls lately. I had just been too busy.
My parents just looked at each other and silently acknowledged the teen years loomed. Later, when they announced plans to move us across the country, Mom asked us to sort through our toys and pick out what we wanted – but to remember we did not have room to take it all.
We astounded her and pitched the teddy bears – but we kept the dolls and their clothes.
Today, some 45 years later, I still have them. I also have dozens of miniature Madame Alexander dolls – toy give-aways at a fast food restaurant that I find at yard sales. I use them to decorate my Christmas tree.
I don’t play with them. I don’t put them on display. I just keep them tucked away in a drawer, up on a shelf or in the guest room with wishful thoughts for the grandchildren. They are my dolls. And that’s reason enough for keeping them.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at jhershberger@eldoradonews.com.)