Things We Lost, (and Didn't Lose) in the Fire, Part 1 And Doll-A-Day 2023 #138: Eugene Doll

   Okay. So our house caught fire on January 11th. We've rescued things from the house that were wet or melted. Emma rescued poor Tammy World the night of the fire. She was very sooty and stunk of smoke.

Look at the clean ring under her chin!

But she's been bathed and had her clothes washed. She smelled like smoke for a while, but she's fine now.

Tammy at Emma's, in the room where we are sleeping. Clean, but missing home.

She still needed her hair combed at this point, but at least she was clean. All my doll combs are at home, so she has had to use my full size person brush. I did buy her some new hair elastics.

 She's very upset that she doesn't have many changes of clothes though. I had to resort to buying a Skipper doll from a Goodwill in Indiana just to steal her waffle nightgown. 

I washed it, and for a while Tammy was sitting around in a nightgown, like an invalid. 

 Less than a week before the fire I photographed Tammy in the new Veggiesaurus shirt Emma and Emma the Doll got her for Christmas, because Emma wanted to see how she looked in it.

Yes, it was January 7th, and I still had Christmas stockings on the bed post and wrapping paper behind the bed. So sue me.

She posed on my bed. That's the last picture before my wallpaper became black with soot. I put that wallpaper up in 1996. The whole room may not be blackened, but Emma says that back corner behind my bed is. Ken thinks I may have to strip it and start over, but it's supposed to be washable. I'm going to at least try to clean it before I give up on it. It's supposed to be 'cleanable', but it's very papery though, not the plastic coated kind.  It may not take to scrubbing very well. And how to get the smoke smell out? We'll just have to see.

  At least Tammy, who was in my bedroom, just inside the doorway, survived though. A lot of things on the landing didn't. Let's look at some of those.

  First of all, my telephone truck, made by Auburn Rubber, and probably originally belonging to my older sister, hasn't even been spotted yet. (It looked like this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/353359677107 ) 

I think it must have melted into an unrecognizable lump. It was displayed on the landing with Ken's car collection, because he used to live in Auburn, Indiana. The irony is, someone had carried it into the bedroom at some point, and it got left there for ages. It became part of the things displayed in the bedroom. Until just before the fire. Maybe a week or two before the fire I picked it up, and thought, "I don't know why this is still here. It can go back on the landing where it belongs." And I took it out and sat it on the vintage wooden pop crates that held Ken's Coke and car collections. The crates that burned from the heat. The car collection that melted. The irony. If it had been left in the bedroom just a little longer, it would have survived. On the other hand, there were some things that worked the other way. I took them off the landing not long before the fire. My Diamond Select Statler and Waldorf, from The Muppet Show, is one example.

  You see, the fire was only in Fuzz's room. But the heat that came out of that room melted a lot of stuff on the landing. To make it easier for you to understand, here's a bad recreation of our landing, as seen from above:

Sorry it's hard to read. It isn't easy writing with that draw programme, especially sideways.

  As you can see, our bedroom is directly across from Fuzz's room. Next to our room is a bookcase where Ken displayed and stored a lot of his collections: Coke stuff, advertising toys and stuff, his car collection, and his pin collection, which he had displayed on hats that hung on the corners. On top was a big, stuffed Vlassic pickle stork. Emma said he was so melted that she thought he was a duck of some sort. There was also a Star Trek Barbie and Ken that I bought Star Trek fan Ken for Christmas one year, Here's what happened to that.

Emma's friend Laurie with Start Trek Barbie and Ken. Laurie is so nice, She stopped when she saw our house was on fire and called Emma and came to see we were okay. She stayed with us until the ambulance took me away, and she went in with Emma and AJ and helped rescue some stuff from the house. She's a keeper.

  Emma thought it was amusing that Captain Kirk lost his head, (It melted off.), but still managed to get out of his shirt. (The front if it melted off too.) Typical.

  In front of that there were some plastic drawer units with my fabric in them. Amazingly, they didn't melt. On top of one of those was a monkey I bought on vacation in Kentucky when I was a kid. The poor guy, named Barnaby Withersticks, didn't stand a chance. He was made from what I always thought looked like gathered thick white plastic trash bags. with a stiff rubber face, hands, and feet, and hard plastic eyeballs. He looked sort of like this guy I found on Ebay, only all white, and with eyes separate from the face part. Buggy oversized ping pong ball type eyes.

Similar monkey found online. Barnaby's face ended with the nose part. His eyes were two big half orbs of hard plastic above his nose.

 Emma says he's not that bad, but he's pretty melted. Her friend Erin said he looks like an interesting art project. I haven't had the heart to look at him yet, but Emma has him in her closet.  

  Just below and in front of Barnaby Withersticks was the Muppet Show Starship Swinetrek playset I showed you HERE. Emma said the set is probably fine, but the packaging is scorched and the plastic front is melted. I finally saw it, and she may be right about the set itself. I think I might be able to wipe down the box and replace the plastic front so I can still display it as is and keep the dust out...once I clean all the soot out!

Looks okay inside the box.

  I found a hunk of melted, sooty plastic that looked like a dirty piece of pink chewing gum, stuck to the top of the box. I think it was Barnaby's foot. That's where it would have been.

On the other side of the bookcase is Ivy's room. Luckily her door was closed. It doesn't even smell like smoke in there. Next to her room is the bathroom. All the stuff in the bathroom either evaporated, or melted. The shower curtain became a strip of melted plastic. All the stuff inside the wooden bathroom cupboard was covered in soot. And the doors were closed! Next to the bathroom is a metal cupboard that used to sit in Fuzz's kindergarten classroom. We bought it when the school closed. It's not the prettiest thing, but it stores a lot of stuff, and I can use magnets on it to display things. It's covered with drawings the kids made years ago, photos, and the magnets we just bought on our trip. Those things are mostly ruined now.

This miniature painting magnet we bought in Bruges...

Presented here by Tammy in January, not long before the fire.

...is now this...

On top of the metal cupboard were those wooden pop crates and Ken's cars. I've only been brought 3 of those to save or not. 

The Coke truck, bottom right, was past it. It had to be thrown away. The Anheuser Busch truck, (top), has a partially blackened sign on the side, paint damage, and slightly melted tires. Not perfect, but savable. And the Meijer store truck, bottom left, amazed everybody. It came out of that packaging looking brand new. I'm sure Ken would have preferred to have the Coke truck over the other two, but that's the way it goes.

  Next to that cupboard is Emma's room. Luckily her door was closed, but it got opened, so some of her stuff smelled like smoke. Her room backs, (or 'sides') onto Fuzzy's, so maybe the firefighters wanted to make sure there was no fire in there. Who knows.

  Next to Emma's, between Emma's room and Fuzzy's room, is a wooden cupboard. This cupboard, which seems to actually be an antique bar cabinet, has beautiful wood. Or, did have. It's supposedly pretty scorched. I don't know if it will be savable and just needs refinished, or if it will turn out to be trash. Inside are a lot of my favourite movies and shows, on DVD and maybe even still some videos. My Dave Goelz (Muppet Gonzo) autograph! I think I moved all the home movie videos downstairs to begin copying them onto DVDs. I hope so. Because even though Emma said she peeked in the cupboard and everything looked fine, there were videos on top of the cupboard that had melted cases. Not the slipcases. The actual plastic case that houses the tape itself. She chose to keep some of them that weren't melted because they were the Monkees TV show tapes she watched as a kid and teenager, that made her fall in love with the band, and contain the ads she remembers watching over and over again growing up because I had taped the show off MTV in the 80's. As for the ones with the melted cases, I'm not sure they'll still be watchable, or if the heat affected the tape too. Emma said she had to throw away my Beatles Yellow Submarine tin that Lori bought me as a gift. It was on top of the wooden cupboard. It was too melted to save. 

  As for the other stuff on top of the cupboard, I had dolls displayed there. Not many, but some I liked, and some that I had shared with you on the blog. This may be hard to see.

  Remember Carol Burnett as Starlet, from the Went With the Wind sketch?

  You can see that post HERE. You may not want to see what she looked like after the fire. I sure didn't. But it could have been much worse.

  The funny thing is, the setting they have her pictured in is the staircase at Tara, after it had been burned by the Northern soldiers. The railing is sooty and the walls are missing plaster. Now, so is our house. The firefighters chopped Fuzzy's (open!) door, closet door, and attic door off, and knocked out most of the plaster on the walls and ceiling of the room.

  Emma thought Carol might be savable, so she brought her back for me to work on. That plastic really melted. The places where it melted over onto itself are very thick and hard. It was going to be hard to cut her out of there.

  

The back of her box faced Fuzz's room.

 But let's worry about getting Carol out of there. AJ loaned me a knife.

 

It was hard to cut through!

There she is! How unharmed though?

If you look closely you can see her melted hair. 

The top of her hat was melted to the plastic, but pulled away undamaged. But can you see what is damaged?

Oh, before we get to that, here's what it was like inside the back of her box. The plastic bag her certificate was in melted.

But here's Carol!

At first glance she looks relatively unscathed. But look closer. She's 'scathed' all right.

Her hair melted!

And she has one mitten hand.

Overall, she looks better than I could have hoped for. I never opened her because I liked the way she was displayed in her box! Well, I can still display her on her background.

 

That sooty looking background is actually printed that way. 

She's had to air out, because she was, (only slightly), smokey smelling. She's okay.

  Another doll that was on top of that cupboard was My Melody Barbie. You may have seen my post on her. She looked like this then.

I never opened her because I thought, 'she's worth quite a bit. I might have to sell her some day'. Ha! When Emma brought her back she looked like this:

She was closer to Emma's room than Carol was.

That doesn't look good!

Her bangs pulled away on the plastic!

Look how burnt the edges of her package are. Her bangs are melted, and so is the top of her hair.

The melted plastic pushed her head back and it's a bit misshapen.

You can see the clean ring under her jawline. Her head is sooty. It's also permanently in that position now.

Melted hair. In this picture you can see the bruise on my arm from the IV at the hospital. This wasn't long after I was released for my smoke inhalation.

  Also on the cupboard was my Mooshka doll. Remember those? I showed you that doll when I got her for Christmas in 2014.

  And my small Madame Alexander Alice. I showed her to you in 2014 too.

  Emma told me those two didn't survive. I have seen the Alice, and her dress may at least be salvageable. However, my full size Pillow Featherbed Lalaloopsy is, she says, just fine. She was over by Emma's room, and behind My Melody Barbie. I had a cardboard Lalaloopsy display box that was really cute, that I was going to display my mini Lalaloopsies on. Well, not now! It's gone. I didn't see it, but if the Yellow Submarine tin next to it melted, I can imagine what happened to it.

  Only Hearts Club Prince Trevor was the doll of the day back in 2017. Back then he looked like this.

Well, he was sitting by Alice. When I got him after the fire he looked like this:

This is the top. The plastic top melted and sunk right in.

The back of the box was scorched.

That plastic top was melted to his crown. His hair is a little melted too.

I didn't think I was going to get that loose.

There was something lurking in the box with them! What is it?!

Still stuck.

I finally got the box top ripped loose from his crown.

The Thing. It turned out to be a carved wooden bassett hound, which I remember having, but nowhere near these guys! It's solid charcoal now. I could draw with it.

And there they are! Finally free!

His hair is a little melted, especially his bangs.

And on the side of his head.

The unicorn got a little melted too.

Now that's what I call a butt hole.

The bottom of Trevor's shoe is blackened.

 

   Also on top of that wooden cupboard was Ivy's Scarlet O'Hara doll, which I showed you for Oscar Week HERE. I haven't seen her, but Emma tells me she's fine, because she was slumped down into her box. Of course, Emma also said Prince Trevor was okay.

   When I was a little kid we stopped for gas at a Sinclair station. My dad, who always brought home all the gas station premiums for us, went in to pay, and came out with two Sinclair dinosaur banks for me, and my sister. She got rid of hers years ago. Mine was displayed on the landing, on the wooden cupboard, because Ken collects advertising stuff. Emma saved him for me, but he's seen much better days.

And this is his good side. Well maybe not.

  I cleaned him up, but this is the best I could do with him. Here he is in the box the Christmas stockings were in, in our bedroom, across the landing from Fuzzy's room. The lid was on the box, but you can see the soot outline of the stocking and a couple of ornaments that were in it.

   Only one stocking had been put away already. The others were still hanging on the bed post or laying there, waiting to be put away. I really wish I had done it, and not tried to hang on to Christmas a couple more weeks. I have two stockings. One Ken bought for me, and one is my childhood stocking that my mom wrote my name on with marker when I was a kid. We have a four poster bed, and My, and Ken's, stockings were hanging on the posts. The stockings that were out got very sooty. I was able to wash all of them except the one Mom wrote my name on. I was very afraid it would wash off. I did a test spot and it didn't look safe to wash it. So it looks crappy now. 

It will never be clean red and white again. That made me very sad. 

  But you're here for dolls you haven't seen before. I do have one for you. Let me give you some back story first. We bought our house in the Fall of 1995. Fuzz was a baby, and Emma was four years old. The house had been owned by the same people since 1939, so there was a lot of old stuff in the house. The house was being sold by the kids of those owners. They cleaned the house out, but left some stuff. I wish I had caught them sooner, because by the time I told them they could leave anything they wanted, they had already gotten rid of a lot of stuff. But they did leave a bunch of stuff in the garage and the basement. Some of it they said they were going to come back and get, like an old humpback trunk. But they never did. I ended up redoing the humpback trunk when I was doing Fuzz's room over in 'Pirate'. I saw it in a picture the other day. Weirdly enough, it may still be okay, along with the trunk Fuzz and I made for the school production of The Pirates of Penzance. 

  When they didn't come back after a couple of years, we cleaned the garage out. They had left two old dolls, probably from the 1960's. When we were cleaning out the garage, Fuzz found them, and absolutely loved one of them. I still remember the blur that was that doll riding on Fuzz's shoulders around the driveway. Fuzz named him 'Sake'. There was no parting them. Sake stayed, and became one of Fuzz's special toys. 

  Sake was in Fuzz's closet, but if you remember, the firefighters chopped the closet door off. I think part of it burned away, and the stuff inside started to catch fire, because the fire fighters threw a couple of stuffed toys out the window. One, rescued from the roof, was a beautiful jointed Dakin bunny named Uncle Jacques. I had that bunny before I even met Ken, but I always thought he was very special, similar to Mr. Boo from the book Twilight Tales that I featured recently as the Doll Book of the Month. I always thought that if I ever had a kid, they would get Jacques. Fuzz was the lucky kid who got him. Jacques just has some scorching. I ran him through the wash and he's fine except for his scorch marks. Another one rescued had a worse time. It was a stuffed Creature from the Black Lagoon doll from CVS that Fuzz named 'Gill'. Gill now has one cloudy eye and one normal eye, and a partially burnt leg and foot. I need to get some green plush fabric and fix him. 

Jacques and Gill

  Those two have gone to storage. I don't know why I let them go. I kept some others here, where they are safe from mice and storage mold. One is a bear named Stuffy. Stuffy got his name because he was in a plastic bag when he was opened on Christmas, and Ken pretended to be the bear talking and said, "Oh! It's stuffy in there!" So, it was 'Stuffy' in there. (Get it?) I actually bought Stuffy, thinking he had to be for Fuzz. But when it was nearly Christmas I thought I didn't have enough stuff for baby Ivy, and gave him to her. But she was afraid of him, or didn't like him or something, so Stuffy ended up going where he should have gone in the first place: to Fuzzy, who loved him. Ivy later got a girl version of the same bear, and we called her Stuffette.

Another was a white rabbit named Uncle E. They've both been washed, and Stuffy even got a split back seam repaired, and his constantly falling off leg put back on again.

  And then there is Sake. Uncle E was a bit sooty, and so was Sake. But Sake is a plastic doll by Eugene. He couldn't go through the washing machine. He had to be hand washed.

Sake was wearing a little pair of pants belonging to a stuffed Mickey Mouse. You can see where the straps were.

But he cleaned up quite nicely and dried in the bathtub on the folding rack, with the Christmas stockings. (The black one is a 'manly' stocking I got for AJ.

This is Sake today, back in his freshly washed Mickey Mouse pants.

I don't know what his name was originally, or when he was made. I'm guessing he's a 60's doll, but he could be a 50's doll.

He's about 18 inches tall, and has a softer head and a hollow plastic body.

He has a bottle mouth, and I believe he is a drink and wet doll.

He's something of a phoenix, because he just keeps getting rescued, this time actually from a fire.

  Sake and Stuffy and Uncle E are here, and they keep me going, thinking, well, they made it okay. They're saved at least. Things that didn't make it can make me quite sad at times.

  That's it for today, and Part 1 of Things We Lost, (and didn't lose), in the Fire.