This is my big sister Patti and I. She is holding her doll “Adorable.” and I am holding my brand new Tiny Tears doll. More about her below. The admiring little girl in the middle was my much older sister’s Carnival doll–won for her by some boyfriend.We are in my big sister Betty’s bedroom–all green and white and black plaid. Very sophisticated, we thought. I learned how to read cursive trying to read Betty’s love letters in a little cedar box on top of the chest of drawers to my right in the picture.
Dolls I have Owned (This post is really for Marilyn, but if you like dolls, you can look.)
Tiny Tears. I still have her but her rubber body totally rotted away. I have her head and arms and perhaps a leg or two…and the hard plastic tube that carried water down to her diaper that was inside the rubber body which totally crumbled away. She had a glued on wig, not rooted hair as later ones did. I loved this doll. Wore it out.
My doll’s face looked like this but her hair was strawberry blonde.
My Jan Doll was a replica of this one, but cooler clothes. She had those red clogs, which I loved, tight Levis and a white blouse with turned up collar, hoop earrings and a bottle of Coke that I still have!!! There were two companion dolls, Jill and Jan. I think Jan is the one I had but could have been Jill.
This was the Jeff Doll that went with Jill and Jan. Mine was not as much of a dweeb at this Jeff is! Ha. (Black socks with shorts? Was that ever cool?) He had neat pants and a jacket. I think I let him wear Jan’s Levis but not her high heeled clogs.
This was the Terri Lee doll I had. Never had any of her original clothes as I think they were $25 an outfit and up. Too rich for our blood.
This is the exact Cisette doll I had. (Madame Alexander doll) She was my last doll and I played with her all the time, made her clothes and had clothes made for her like mine. She came in this camisole with nylon stockings and darling silver high heels with a silver wraparound strap around the ankle. That bow was glued on! I pried it off. When I was in my sister’s wedding, the seamstress made her a long dress just like mine. I had a lot of clothes for her, including a lovely light pink dotted swiss with a green velvet sash. Also a wonderful peach dress with can cans and a bonnet with flowers. I loved that dress. I think she was my favorite doll of all times–got her for the last year or two I played with dolls and she took me into my pre-teen fantasies. Both she and her clothes were very well made. A class act.
I think this is actually the nightgown that came in the box with her, along with the items described above.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
I still have my Tiny Tears Doll only she has no clothes. I also have a Suzy Walker Doll that is the creepy one the kids don’t like. Love the pics….thanks for sharing
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I just added a new picture to that post, MLou. It is of my sister and me with our favorite dolls…I don’t remember my Tiny Tears coming with clothes, but since she has them in the picture, she must have come with them. Where do you suppose all those lost doll clothes went to???
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I think the doll I’ve been trying to identify is a Suzy Walker doll! I found a picture that looks just like her. I actually found her again in my sister’s attic when she went into managed care. I think she must have taken her for her kids to play with so she’s a bit the worse for wear, but I have her. Well, a friend does. I have to go to Missouri to fetch her one of these years. I’m going to add her pic to this post.
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My sister never played with dolls but from a young age our US relatives sent us REAL cowboy outfits with guns & holsters. She was Belle Star & I was Billy the Kid 1949! ☺ Anton
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Well no wonder you like dolls now, then. Poor boy..you were deprived of them in your early age.
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Very lovely Cissette. And I’d have recognized Toni and Tiny anywhere. They have such unique faces.
Unfortunately, I can’t do anything for Tiny. Once rubber rots, there’s no fixing it. Hard plastic and rubber are subject to a kind of bacterial infection (no, really) that is contagious to other plastic and rubber objects and there’s nothing to be done but toss them. I used to save heads in the hopes that I might find a body. When I was actively collecting, it worked out from time to time that a spare body part could be neatly attached to a damaged doll. If only we could do that with people, eh?
I can restring and repair hard plastic dolls (like Toni) if the body is essentially intact. I can repair composition dolls (the predecessors to hard plastic injection molded dolls) using epoxy putty and paint. I can re-wig, re-dress, repaint faces. I never learned to replace the eyes — that’s harder and if you do it wrong, your doll looks very weird.
If you feel like reliving your childhood, I’ve been trying to find homes for some of my dolls, especially the Tonis because I have so many of them. I couldn’t resist them, so I have them in all sizes, all hair (wig) colors, all kinds of dresses. When I stopped collecting, I sold off the really valuable dolls except for a couple of dolls that were duplicates of the ones I grew up with … and about a dozen or maybe more Toni dolls and a LOT of 8″ Madame Alexander character dolls. I finally gave away all the dolls in the boxes in the closet, but I have about three dozen Vogue “Ginny” around-the-world dolls that need homes, too. They are packed away, but they need air and love.
I can’t throw dolls away. It is like throwing away little people. I know it’s silly, but to me, they are little people and you can’t throw a person in the trash. No one wants these old dolls anymore. Kids don’t play with them. So if you want dolls … I have about 250 of them!!
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My mom and I once took a doll head out to the dump with a load of trash. Our small town dump was about 2 miles out of town on a dirt road. It had a high flat dirt road up above a gully on either side where we would throw the trash. We threw out several trash barrels full (This was before garbage bags) and when we did the last one, the doll head rolled out and was lying there on a heap of garbage about 6 feet from the road. We started to drive home and it was kind of quiet, and my mom said, “Did you want to go back and get that doll head?” I said, “Yes,” very quietly. We did and I don’t know what ever happened to it but I know neither my mother nor I ever threw it away!
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I would love to see them but all of my dolls are packed away. I sometimes use them in retablos. One day I’ll post my storybook doll retablos for you. The two very large dolls I found in my sister’s attic I have plans for–a very large installation piece making use of the two dolls and the walls of my old metal dollhouse. Wonder if I’ll ever do that? They are all in a very big suitcase in Missouri. I’d love to just build it there and find a museum willing to exhibit it. I’ve posted pics of these dolls but it may have been before you were reading my blog. Sound familiar? A woman just told me the name of the large walking doll and I Googled it and sure enough, it was my doll.
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Thanks for sharing this – I adore dolls, which I think you already know. All the ones I had as a small child and wore out (besides Josefina) are gone now. Now I just have the ones that sit prettily on the shelf and don’t get played with
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Some dolls I remember having in my childhood were a Ginny doll–a hand-me-down with millions of dresses–and a Toni doll that you could give a “perm.”
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Well Miss Judy D-B, obviously YOURS was an upscale Tiny Tears. Mine had modeled hair — wig for me on that one. But I did have another doll, much larger, made of that late 1940’s composet arms legs and head. She had a glued on lambs wool wig. It was wonderfully realistic and very soft and wonderful . I wasn’t allowed to play with her much — My aunt bought her and she was “expensive”
So Tiny Tears and my Barbara, the big baby doll with modeled hair I received for my almost 3 year old Christmas did heavy duty. Rides in the pram, changed into nightgowns. Dressed in an organdy dress and cotton lace trimmed slip for daily wear with a pink bunting and cap for outdoors. Barbara’s arm eventually was broken by a neighbor’s visiting grandson — Butchie Munson. I hate him to this day. He also poked out Rachel’s eyes with a stick. Rachel was the doll with lams wool hair. When Barbara came back from grandma’s hospital, her arm was splinted into a permanent upright position, as if she always wanted to answer the questions when we played school. Eventually she was naked as often as she wore clothes, but it mattered little to me, I loved her either way. Then came the year we were putting up the Christmas Tree and had the lights — they had the 1″ tall bulbs that were hot — strung across the living room to untangle them. No one noticed that one was on poor Barbara’s tummy. She had a nasty scar from that burn.
When we built a new house two doors away when I was about to enter high school, Barbara moved to the attic with my small ironing board and iron (that worked) the little kitchen cupboard and dishes, the stroller and pram, the doll beds, and all the clothes. When my parents moved from the house on new years weekend the winter before I was due to be married my fiance and I cleared the attic.
The other dolls had survived their rejection while i toyed with being a teenager well, but Barbara, bless her heart looked worse than ever. Years of being outside with me had turned her rubber body and limbs nearly black. The heat and cold and condensation of the attic had turned her head start white. She was stark nekkid and still waving that left arm in the air trying to get the teacher’s attention.
My father and my fiance were of one mind. they thought she should go into the bin of rubbish that would be heading to the dump later in the afternoon. At almost 21 years old, I burst into raw sobs until my knees buckled and I sank down onto the living room floor. Mom and I searched the box of dolls and clothes for Barbara’s warm flannel nightgown, her booties and hand-knit sweater and bonnet. Swaddled securely into a blanket I looked up at the men of our tiny family with fire in my eyes daring them to even consider taking Barbara to the dump.
Years later — after a wedding, the birth of three real children, the death of my mother and the loss of my father to a second marriage and the resulting move to California, I climbed to the attic of the farmhouse that had been my new family’s home for almost 16 years. It was an August afternoon as hot as the previous attic excursion had been frigid. I pulled the old chair over and with sweat dripping from my nose and mixing with the tears that had been too close for the previous month when it had become painfully obvious that the least of the horrible solutions was divorce. When I pulled back the flaps of the box Barbara, Rachel (with her eyes thankfully pulled back into place by grandma’s crochet hook all those years ago) and Tiny Tears and the other baby dolls were nestled on top, sleeping peacefully in their calm attic lives . I flatted the wrinkles from their buntings and blankets the later taffeta cocktail dresses, formals, shrugs, furry coats and smart little hats. that belonged to the enjoyed but never-named older girl doll that was my last doll.
As i sat there baking i the heat I wished that my problems could be fixed with grandma’s crochet hook for Rachel’s eyes or old fashioned adhesive tape for Barbara’s arm. How was I to know if the move I was about to make with my box of dolls and the boxes of my sons’ trucks and treasures and my daughter’s Barbies and cabbage patch dolls would help them heal or would wound them even more than the cold war they had been living in. Saddest of all I couldn’t dress them in warm flannel and wrap them in blankets as i saved them from the dump. They were too big and it was too hot. We’d just have to find our own paths out of this turmoil and sea of boxes and flood of tears the best we could.
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Oh, Judy. I loved this. My mom and I once tried to throw away a doll’s head and ended up driving back to the dump and scrambling down over the mounds of garbage and trash to retrieve it. We were both in tears at the point when we turned around. My mom said, into the silence, “Do you want to go back and get the doll’s head?” and I said, with a big sigh of relief, “Oh yes!” These dolls do develop a life of their own. Thanks for your wonderful story.
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Judy,
still have my dolls buried in a cedar chest. Remember we went to Pierre to the bookstore to buy them. They were much prettier than the eventual Barbie! Didn’t have a lot of clothes, but we played with them anywayl
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I had Cissette. Was yours a Madame Alexander as well? And remember when both of our moms conspired to each get us our last doll? We were 11 and they were those huge dolls they sold at the Super Value store stored over the vegetable bins. I think mine had a blue dress and yours perhaps a white one. We never played with them, but I remember lots of sessions with Cissette and Jan and the male Jeff doll I had. Wish I still had Cissette. I do still have the little blue closet at the clothes were in. I think…or maybe I left it at Betty’s where I found it.
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