My love for old dolls

I’ve been collecting dolls since I was in fourth grade. Sure, I had a lot of dolls long before then, but that’s when it really started for me.

When I was about five, my aunt gave me two of the dolls she played with when she was a little girl. One was a big, tall Patty Playpal–who was taller than I was when she was given to me! The other was a small doll that by my mom and aunt was called a “Ginny doll”.

Since Patty and I were about the same size, she got to wear some of my clothes, but Ginny came with a red trunk full of clothes. She was nothing like a Barbie or Darci or any of my other contemporary fashion dolls.

One day, for reasons I no longer remember I brought the Ginny doll with me when my family went out to dinner. (I was about ten years old… It made sense at the time.) There happened to be a doll shop in the same building, so after we ate, I went into the doll store.

Me being a little girl holding an old doll was too cute for the lady behind the counter to resist. She struck up a conversation with me and asked if she could look at my doll. I handed the doll up to the lady. She was older, had a sweet smile and was wearing this weird Hawaiian print dress that seemed so out of place in the doll shop, but yet it kind of suited the lady.

She told me that my doll was made by Madame Alexander in the 1950s and was worth about $125.

One. Hundred. Twenty. Five. Dollars.

To me, that was more money than there was in the whole wide world. She might’ve said the doll was worth a gazillion dollars and it would’ve been the same amount.

I walked out of there in a daze. Of course, I’d never sell the doll, but that was the beginning of a real fascination because I’d never even thought that people sold or bought old dolls. To me, dolls either came from my mom, my grandma, my aunt, my second cousin or from Toys R Us. Someone would pay money for my little doll? Someone would pay THAT MUCH for her? Wow. She must really be special.

That Christmas, Santa Claus brought me a Doll Price Guide (which I still have for chuckle purposes!) that I read almost like a regular book. I wanted to learn of every different kind of doll out there. I had no idea there were so many manufacturers, so many different materials that dolls were made of.

Then here’s the real curve ball. My mom had given me two of her dolls. One was a ballerina marked only with 16VW and the other was completely unmarked. How was I to find them in my price guide if they weren’t marked? I tried the library, but still couldn’t figure out who these two girls were.

Fast forward to college when I discovered dolls at flea markets and thrift stores and best of all, I had a car and could drive myself to the library or the bookstore.

Since then, I’ve amassed a collection of books. There’s always the internet, too. Not to mention ebay for a sort of real time price and identification guide.

I’ve also amassed quite a few dolls. I now have at least one from every decade from 1870 through the present. My passion is for the pre-1920 dolls, though. They have so much more character and I love doing repairs on them. More on that in later posts, I’m sure.

Meet the girl who started it all… Aunt Linda’s “Ginny doll”.

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