A Doll Blogger in the Making

I just got the opportunity to scan these photos, and they make me smile to see how I might very well have been a doll blogger if there was internet back then. I was very careful in my layouts, and of course I had to frame the picture properly when I took it, as there wasn't easy access to photo cropping tools back then either. These pictures are from January 1986, when I was 17 years old, and a senior in high school.

Here my Cabbage Patch doll is ready for bed. I wrote on the back of the photo that she was "6 months," so I must have received her for my 17th birthday in 1985.

And here she is seated at a desk down in our basement. It was an old-fashioned desk, with two seats, although the front seat did not have a desk. It looked rather like American Girl Samantha's school desk, with the wrought iron and everything, but ours had the extra seat in front. I'm pretty sure that's a real apple on the desk.

Here's a picture of Samantha's desk, when American Girl was still making nice stuff (did I say that out loud?) I got this from the American Girl Wiki page, but this is obviously a AG sales photograph, and not a personal one.

My sisters and I loved to play "old-fashioned" school with our desk. We especially enjoyed playing Little House on the Prairie school. The Samantha Parkington doll was released for the first time in 1986. How I would have loved the desk set even more if I had owned a Samantha!!

Surprise Travel Doll!

Today I got a box in the mail from my sister. She's been helping my mom go through stuff in her house; my mom is healthy, but she is 83. Most of what was in the box was old school papers, but there was also a travel doll in her original box! Tam showed us several travel dolls on her blog, and now I get one out of the blue! Now that I'm looking at the doll again, I do remember having her when I was a little girl. Unfortunately, I can't remember where she came from. Let's take a look at her.

Here she is in her box. The box is beaten up, but mostly intact, and the cellophane or plastic on the cover is still there. Judging by my beautiful handwriting, I must have received her when I was maybe seven or eight at the most?

Her head, torso and arms are made of lightweight plastic; her legs and feet are made of rubber. Her shoulders and hips allow her to move her arms and legs forward and backwards, and her head can turn left and right. She does open her sleep eyes, but I'm not sure they open all the way. Something rattles a little inside her head when you shake her; maybe it is the sleep eye mechanism. I love the shape of her little hands.

She wears a white cap, a white rectangular neckpiece, a red and black garment that looks like a shawl, but is also the only thing covering her torso, an apron, a skirt, an underskirt, simple underpants, and rubber shoes. Her underskirt is held on by virtue of being attached to a string that ties around her waist. I think her hair is probably mohair.

The mark on her underskirt looks like it was possibly some sort of mark by the manufacturer? It feels like it is painted on. Is it possible it was paper that changed over her many decades? It also looks like her underskirt was either sewn oddly, or is inside out, as the raw edge of the hem is on the outside of the skirt as she wears it. I don't remember ever taking her clothes off, but her underskirt could have fallen off and been put back on at some point, I suppose.

She is about 5 5/8" tall, or 14 cm. That probably explains why the bottom of her shoes are marked 14M. Maybe there were larger and smaller dolls like this, making this doll the Medium size.

I only found one clue as to which country this doll is from, but it isn't completely helpful. On the underside of her apron, there is a tag which appears to read, Mele, Danmark.

So our little lady is probably Danish, but I'm not sure that I'm reading the first word correctly, as it doesn't seem to mean anything applicable in Danish. I also tried looking up the word as Mels, but I got no results with that either.

I hope you like my little surprise dolly! I also enjoyed going through my school papers. There were a couple of notes from teachers that shed a lot of insight on my personality, and a note from a kindergarten speech therapist concerned because I can't lift the tip of my tongue when I speak. Well, yes, because I'm tongue-tied. I wonder if my parents tried to do the exercises with me that the speech therapist recommended. To this day, I'm not always understandable with every word when I speak. Oh well!

Childhood Dolls

I know basements, or cellars, aren't common in many areas of the world, but here in Northeast Ohio, they are extremely common. They usually have the washing machine and dryer, and the utility tubs, large tubs for cleaning things that would be impractical in the other sinks in the house. Before showers were common, utility tubs were apparently even used for washing hair, which is what my mother taught my sisters and I to do when we were old enough to reach over to the faucet. It wasn't until we got a little older that we realized that we *did* have a shower, and we could use that to wash our hair, like our friends did!

Moving on from that bit of history and nostalgia, basements are also used to store things that are wanted, but aren't used often enough to have them take up space in the living areas of the house. Holiday decorations or camping supplies are a common example. However, my mom's basement needs some serious waterproofing, and it was largely for that reason that my sisters and I needed to clean out what was unnecessary in the basement, either throwing things away, donating things to charity, or taking what was precious up to the first floor now that my mom has the whole house to herself to store things.

We found some interesting things down there. A few newspapers headlining the end of WWII in Europe, or the first moon landing. My mother's high school diploma, tassel, and class picture. But my mother had also stashed lots of old toys belonging to my sisters and I down there, and I want to show two of my old dolls today.

The first one is probably my very first doll. I received her from my grandparents for my first Christmas when I was six months old. She's dirty, her rooted hair is matted and dried out, and her dress is dirty. Her hollow torso is of a cheaper plastic than the limbs. Her only marking is U11 on the back of her head at the hairline. Here she is after years of play, and a few extra decades spent in a basement.

Here I am as a baby, sitting on my grandmother's lap, with the doll on my lap. My mother's hands are also in the picture. Please excuse the poor quality photo; this is a screen shot from an old Super 8 home movie, converted to DVD.

The other doll I discovered who was worth taking away, was my Rub-a-Dub Dolly, made by Ideal. Her main characteristic was that she was supposedly waterproof, so she could be played with in the bathtub. Her initial release date was 1973, so if I got her that year, I would have been five. I don't think I have any old photos of her, but I found a website where a girl put up a picture of herself having just received her Rub-a-Dub Dolly. Click here to check that out.

As you can see, she came with a hooded towel, and underpants which probably should have been a diaper except that would be impractical for water play. My mother sewed a bathrobe for my dolly as well. Based on some other items found down the basement, it looks like my mother used one of our old baby receiving blankets to make the bathrobe. Here is Rub-a-Dub Dolly showing every bit of her forty-two years, poor thing.

I think my mother would have preferred us to play with dolls like this for our entire childhood, although I'm not sure of her exact reasoning. One Christmas, though, my aunt gave my sisters and I Malibu Barbie and Skipper, with the really cool tan lines, and the damage was done. In my case, it launched me to a lifetime of both doll collecting and sewing, for dolls and otherwise. (I enjoyed hand sewing clothes for my Barbie dolls.)

The question is now, what do I do with these dolls? If they were to be given away, they'd have to be cleaned, rerooted, and get new clothes. I don't do rerooting, and I'm not inspired to sew for dolls this old. Would it be terrible just to throw them out? I have a bad habit of anthropomorphizing things like old dolls and stuffed animals, when sometimes they are just too worn out, or there isn't a need for them anymore. Once they were given away, I wouldn't know what eventually became of them, and that might even bother me, silly though I am. Know if any old dolls like this have been successfully given new lives?