The woman’s vision was as vivid as the day she walked into the museum in San Francisco and happened upon the room:
“In the museum one of the rooms had a display of an antique bedroom. In the bedroom was a child’s bed. Along the side was a rocking horse with a doll riding the horse. The doll was a Bester doll. I always remembered that name and now to actually own a Bester doll brings back those wonderful memories of visiting the museum.”
The woman Gayle Maria had just received a Bester doll, and the memories of that day at the San Francisco Museum at the Mint came pouring out of her. She had her doll! It didn’t matter that the doll was in need of restoration and should have immediately been rushed to a doll hospital.
Gayle Maria looked beneath the surface and saw a sweet little doll on a rocking horse.
Her memories were not the usual childhood ones that many women – and men, too, with their GI Joes – have of their favorite dolls. This was a grown-up recollection of a doll that left a mark, because regardless of age, dolls always remain special to us.
I don’t have any of those wonderful doll memories, but I know that many people do. For young girls, it was society’s way of preparing us for motherhood. But more personally, it was more about fixing the hair, changing the clothes and having a playtime friend. And companies like Ideal, Effanbee, Mattel and Vogue were obliging, producing all manner of dolls from tiny to tall. Gayle Maria’s Bester doll was made by a New Jersey company that was in operation from 1918 to 1921.
For little African American girls, manufacturers weren’t making many dolls back then that they could have birthed. Through auctions and research, I have come across a few that were made in the skin tone of black girls – although some did not mimic their features. An unmarked Topsy doll ended up in a box lot I bought once. The name was used by manufacturers during the first half of the 20th century for dolls made to resemble the character from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
At another auction, I spotted an anatomically correct lifelike African American baby boy doll similar to the Berjusa doll.
In the late 1940s, the Terri Lee doll company produced Patty-Jo, a black doll whose genesis was a cartoon character of the same name created by Jackie Ormes. The cartoons appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper, and Ormes is considered the first African American female cartoonist.
Today, Patty-Jo and many of the old dolls are collectibles. Some of the most popular were spawned by special occasions and celebrities: the Dionne quintuplets in the 1930s, Shirley Temple, Patsy, Barbie, Madame Alexander and Ginny.
Several dolls made the list of Time magazine’s 100 greatest toys:
1950s: Barbie, Chatty Cathy, Troll
1960: GI Joe, Ken and Flatsy
1970s: Baby Alive
1980s: Cabbage Patch Kids
1990s: American Girl
2000s: Bratz
I’ve come across some of the early 20th-century German bisque dolls by such companies as Simon & Halbig, as well as French manufacturers like Jumeau. The heads of these dolls are so delicate that I wonder how any of them have survived.
All of these dolls have their own story connected to those who owned them. What’s your favorite doll story?
