The Un-Unsentimental Niece

  Regular readers of the blog may have read mention of my niece,which I refer to by the code name Unsentimental Niece. I call her that because, amongst other reasons, she sold off bits of her childhood for a few dollars at yard sales. However, I recently found out that she's not totally unsentimental.
  When my niece was about 5 her parents divorced, and soon afterward a close friend of the family gave her a stuffed Garfield the cat doll.

Like this one I found on an online auction. I'll remove the picture if asked.

  The giver of the doll soon became her mother's boyfriend and my niece was very fond of him. She loved Garfield until his stripes wore off. She took him to Kindergarten everyday. Soon her father became jealous of the boyfriend and gifted his daughter with a stuffed bear she named Bear Bear. My niece gave up Garfield. Bear Bear became her special toy. You know. that one toy you keep forever.
  Over the years my niece has moved around a bit. She is 38 now, and she has lived in California, North Carolina,Ohio,and repeats of the same, plus who knows where else. On her last move from California she misplaced Bear Bear. She thought he had been accidentally thrown away in the move. That was 5 years ago. She made a trip to visit a friend in California a few weeks ago and guess what?

  Said friend had been holding on to Bear Bear for her for 5 years. Unsentimental Niece was overjoyed to have him back. Maybe I will have to give her a new code name...   

A Happy Reunion: One Woman's Search for Her Favourite Childhood Doll

  I received a message in my comments the other week that led to a story I have to share with you. The message was from a lady named Debbie,who had seen my post on  Doll-A-Day 94. 

The star of Doll-A-Day 94 was this red haired girl with freckles, wearing a pretty flowered raincoat.

  The doll was the same as her favourite doll from her childhood. Here's what she wrote:
"I have been looking for this doll for a bizillion years....it was my favourite doll when I was a little girl. Any chance you remember where you found it? Or would you be willing to part with it? Please let me know. Thanks so much!!!!"
  I asked the lady to send me her email address and we would discuss the matter in private. She did, and we have exchanged several emails. I have several dolls with similar faces and bright orange hair from my own childhood. That and the pretty rain coat are what attracted me to 'her' doll. I wondered if it was the face that was the same as her old doll,or did hers actually have the raincoat too. She was pretty sure this was the same as her doll, raincoat and all.:
  "It's funny you say that you have some other dolls very similar with bright orange hair. My old doll did have bright orange hair but the same or a similar face to this one.  I then thought maybe I remembered the hair wrong,  lol. I had named her Cindy but my Mom thought maybe she was already called Cindy when she got her for me.   I have been looking for her for many many years but am going by memory as I don't have any pictures of her.  :( "

  I had described the raincoat girl as having 'strawberry blonde' hair. I sent her some pictures of other dolls with a similar face and bright orange hair in case one was closer to her old doll. She was still pretty sure it was the same doll though.
 "I think I could be remembering Cindy's hair being brighter but in reality I think it's like the flowered raincoat doll. I got the doll when I was very wee so not sure what outfit she originally came in and then one day I decided in my youthful non-wisdom to sell her at a garage sale. I've been searching practically my whole adult life for her. And this is the closet I've been ever able to find!" (It's just as I always say: Beware all you teens who can't wait to sell your childhood loves for a dollar here and there! Someday you may regret it!)_
  I had another look at raincoat girl's hair, and it was a brighter orange than I thought. So yay! Even closer!

  I was curious as to how she finally managed to spot my pictures and find 'her' doll after all these years. Here's what she said:
 Basically I have been googling "red or orange hair dolls 1960s" and it brought up a bunch of pictures as well as sites.  I was looking through the pictures and came across the doll and then clicked and found your website. Very excited as it was the doll I remembered.  When I showed my brother the picture he immediately remembered my doll Cindy.  It was fantastic.  I have spent many years going antiquing and to doll shows and not finding anything close to what I remembered about my doll. Until now.

Wow! I am thrilled to be able to reunite her with her 'lost love'!  "Cindy's" new owner is pretty thrilled too.:
 "This is sooooo exciting.  I can't wait to see my pretty doll again in person!"

   Today I got an email from Debbie saying 'Cindy' had arrived home at last.

We got the doll today. Yay!!! I'm so happy to have her here. Thanks so very much again. I can't 

thank you enough for reuniting me with "Cindy".

She even sent me a picture of the two of them, together again:

   What a wonderful story! I'm so happy I got to be a part of it!

Doll-A-Day 174: Charlie Chocks Doll

  A lot of you, especially the younger ones, will be saying about now, "Who the squat is Charlie Chocks?"

  I suppose it's been a while since Chocks vitamins were sold, so they're becoming forgotten. But when I was a kid, we took Chocks vitamins every day. (The 'chocks' of the name referring to, I suppose, how they were 'chock full' of vitamins.) My mom was very big on vitamins, and I was anemic too, so that didn't help. (It sounds really astounding when I tell my kids that when I went to the doctor they tested my blood thus: They would puncture my finger. Then the nurse would squeeze my finger to make it bleed, and take a little rubber hose and put one end to my bleeding puncture, and the other end IN HER MOUTH and suck! When the hose was full she would put a finger to each end and leave the room with her haul to test it. Can you imagine?! In her mouth! These days they put rubber gloves on to even touch you.)
   I was much more willing to eat the sweet,cherry flavoured Chocks chewables than the liquid iron supplement I had been forced to consume up to that point. That stuff was thick, and brownish green, and stinky, (Honestly, it smelled horrible.), and tasted about like it looked. Chocks were available as mixed fruit flavours, or cherry,(Those must have been the 'with iron' ones. We always got the cherry.) I used to eat them slowly by scraping them with my front teeth and letting it melt in my mouth.I don't remember Charlie Chocks very much, but I remember they had a character that was supposed to be a Chocks vitamin and he looked more like a pillow. We had loads of the empty bottles around and we used to keep stuff in them. I still have a couple. I have one of the lids that we managed to take the plastic off of, (that made it seal closed tightly), and we used to play with it as a doll sized I Dream of Jeannie bottle, because that's what it looked like.

Turn that lid up side down. It's Jeannie's bottle, I swear.

Once that plastic cover is removed from the glass lid, it narrows at the top, just like Jeannie's bottle. Plus you can then use the plastic thing as a doll bowl...or something.

Chocks were made by Miles Laboratories, who also made Alka Seltzer. Miles was later bought out by Bayer. Chocks kind of faded away after Miles began making Flintstones vitamins. They completely disappeared about the same time I was no longer anemic and too old for Chocks anyway.

Charlie Chocks was supposed to be something like a fighter pilot, except that he wore trapeze artist tights.

Whaaa??

 He appeared in marionette form in commercials that look very "Thunderbirds" inspired.

 (Ok, now you're asking what Thunderbirds was! Thunderbirds, Supercar, and Stingray, which my sister and I loved, were 1960's British made tv series' made by Gerry Anderson, using what he called 'Supermarionation', (very cool marionettes, and very realistic looking sets.)

Stingray. Looks like the guy on the right is sitting in a bumpercar.Uhh, but I'm sure it's really some high tech thingy...

 Some of the Chocks commercials can be seen on YouTube. Miles got a lot of criticism for heavily pushing Chocks in these commercials during Saturday morning cartoons. (Now do I have to explain 'Saturday Morning Cartoons'? See, back in the Stoneage, when I was a kid, cartoons were really only shown on Saturday mornings, and maybe a half hour during afternoon kid's shows. You couldn't find cartoons on at any time of the night or day like you can now. See, there were only three channels, and then they invented PBS--oh forget it...)

  The doll was sold  for $1.00, 'no purchase necessary', except, isn't the 'coupon' provided on the Chocks package?

21" tall and four colors. Ooh! This must be the older, pre-Jeannie bottle lid.

The guy carries Chocks on his belt like it's grenades or something. I guess, if you were unhealthy, he'd lob Chocks at you.

  A lot of last week's haul will end up going to help pay for a radiator repair, (We have a leak and can't keep coolant in it.), but this guy will probably stay, as part of Ken's advertising collection, and as part of my childhood memories. (He's not exactly worth a fortune anyway...)

  For the record, my kids never took vitamins, except for when I fell for that when Emma was tiny. I always felt that if they were fed healthy food they didn't need vitamins. I always fed them whole grain bread and lots of vegetables, as well as plenty of protein, and whole fruit juices. It worked, and none of them have ever been anemic, and they are hardly ever sick. These are kids who were also raised vegetarian and have never eaten meat in their lives. They were sick way less than the kids they went to school with. Other than their diet I always attribute some of their healthiness to the fact that they were all breast fed until they were about two years old, tapering off a little at a time until they eventually quit altogether.
  That's it for today's doll. Join me again tomorrow for more of the SA haul. (I'm a poet!)

Doll-A-Day 140: An unusual couple of things, and Part 3 of My Cousins' Toys

   Well, it hasn't been 24 hours yet, but at this point there have been no takers on the competition. Remember,you can enter until, we'll say 6:00, Monday evening Eastern Standard time, May 27th. For details of the prizes and how to enter, see yesterday's post on the Blogiversary, (Not the doll-a-day post.)
   I really shouldn't call this part 3 of How I Coveted My Cousins Toys, since this is more about toys that were gifts from my cousins. I didn't necessarily want them before they were given.
  Today I'm showing you some gifts from a third set of cousins. These we didn't see nearly as often as the other two sets I already told you about. These were my Dad's oldest brother's children, and they were much older than we were. At least, most of them were. The two youngest kids were older than my sister,and so, much older than I was. But apparently, as evidenced by this picture, my sister did play with them.

That's my sister on the left, and my cousin 'Sis' on the right. That's Sis's brother Bruce in the background,up to his shoulder in enjoyment of the Trix cereal.
  I remember Sis gifting me with a pair of Ricky doll jeans. We had no doll that properly fit them, but my Tutti sized Buffy doll came close enough if I rolled up the legs. She wore them, along with a crocheted old fashioned dress Sis also gave me. I have passed both on to Emma, who used the jeans for her favourite doll, Emma the Doll, and the dress for Emma's best friend Susan. They have made them their own now.
  It was my sister who coveted Sis's toys. A couple of years ago my sister admitted that the Barbie bra and undies we had as kids were stolen from Sis. Sis gave me the jeans and dress, but I guess she wasn't letting go of the Barbie underwear! (Not willingly, anyway.)
  Sis also gave me a headless doll-purse...purse-doll. We gave it the head of my sister's Polly doll. She hated Polly anyway, because Polly was so ugly, so I guess she didn't mind giving up the head.

I've seen these purses elsewhere, and they usually have heads like this little doll.We'll see more of her tomorrow.

  One of the two, probably Bruce, gave me this glow in the dark plastic lion.

  He's always been one of my favourite toys. In fact. he still stands on the vanity in my bedroom. And why am I 52 years old and still have a plastic lion standing on my vanity? He GLOWS IN THE DARK! Duh! He glows a really cool blue colour. No other glow in the dark stuff I have glows in his colour.(And yes, I have several things.And yes, I have checked, and he glows the wrong colour to be radium.) I think he was actually a Christmas ornament, because he used to have a loop on his back for hanging him from something. I just checked, and there is actually one on Ebay right now, and they're calling it a Christmas ornament.

  Bruce also gave me some really cool 'engine people' from some model cars he had. I still have those too, even if they do have some broken bits.
  That's it for 'cousins who gave me stuff'.(Maybe that's what I should have called these posts. It doesn't have the same ring though, does it?) And then, there's always the opposite: 'Cousins who snatched my stuff', but there's only one cousin who qualifies for that one. I've already ratted on her to you. (My Susie Slicker!) Of course, maybe my cousin Sis would like to write about that one!
UPDATE:See parts ONE and TWO with these links.
  Tomorrow we'll see if anyone has entered the competition.

Doll-A-Day 138 : Beany by Mattel, and Part One of How I Coveted My Cousins Toys.

   Today's doll is one I bought recently, to have a really nice version of a doll that was a special gift I received as a kid.(But he'll never replace him.) He's this pull string talking Beany doll from Beany and Cecil.

I spotted him in the glass case at our local Salvation Army a few weeks ago.He was part of a silent auction.He was in such nice condition, and I got even more excited when I found out he still talks.

Their suggested minimum bid was $49.99, but I wasn't going anywhere near that! I bid much lower and hoped. Later in the week I noticed their minimum bid had gone down to $29.99. Seems they were having trouble getting anyone to bid. By the end of the auction no one had bid their minimum, so he was put into the next week's auction.I was advised by one of the ladies who work there to leave my bid the same,even though it was still lower than the minimum.(I think I was the only one who had bid at all. I probably could have gotten him much cheaper.) At the end of the week I got the call that I had won him.He was made by Mattel in 1963.  

Apparently there was a slightly shorter, non-talking Beany that looks just like this one. 

  You can see the commercials for both Beany dolls and their friend Cecil the Sea Serpent HERE.
This one is missing the red propeller on his beanie hat.Most of them are.

Beany and Cecil was a cartoon that I used to watch as a kid. Cecil was a sea serpent.There were talking and non talking versions of him too. Cecil's worth a lot more money than Beany these days. I don't know why.

Beany and Cecil were created by Bob Clampett, a former animator for Warner Brothers, (Home of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.). He originally created them for a puppet series in 1949. The series ran for 5 years, and was accompanied by a comic book series.


  In 1959 an animated series began. The shows were repeated between 1962 and 1967, which had to have been when I watched it, since I was  born in 1962.
  At some point in my childhood I was given a Beany doll by my cousins. I'm not sure if they gave him to me because I had admired him or not,but he became one of the all time favourite dolls of my childhood.

 

His shoes were one of my favourite things about him.These days they'd probably be considered lethal weapons. They're heavy and pretty hard.

 

It's nice to have this really nice one, that actually talks, but I wouldn't trade my original for him.

We had a few sets of cousins that were near our ages. Most of them lived far away and we seldom saw them But we had a couple of sets of cousins near our ages who lived a bit nearer, and we saw them on a more regular, if infrequent, basis.
    One set was our Kentucky cousins, Gary, who was my age, Vickie, in between me and my older sister, and Bobby, who was a little older than Vickie, but younger than my sister. 
 

Bobby, Gary, Vickie, me, and my sister, holding our dog Lahoma.We usually called her Homie. This is at my Mom's Mom and Dad's farm.I think this was the year Homie somehow got hold of some chewing gum. She'd chew it all day, and at night she would put it in one of Grama's car tire planters and get it back out the next day. She chewed it until it fell apart.

This made it easy for us all to play together when we were smaller. When you are younger the age difference doesn't matter so much. The older ones usually rule, but at that age the younger ones either don't mind or are at least resigned to it. We only saw these Kentucky cousins once a year, when we went to Kentucky for 2 weeks on vacation. We usually stayed one week with Mom's mom and dad, and split most of the other week with Dad's side: staying part of the week our other grama and aunt, and part of the week with our aunt and uncle and cousins. As much as we loved our grandparents, we wanted to spend as much time as we could with our cousins. We lived on a farm in The Middle of Nowhere, and we didn't see any other kids all summer when school was out. Also, we loved being with our cousins.  There is something special about having cousins your age to play with when you are a kid. They're like built in best friends. Before I started school and actually met other kids,they were my only friends. They lived very differently from us too. For one thing, they lived in TOWN. They could walk  to places. (The closest place to our house was miles and miles away.)They went to the Dairy Queen, and knew other kids in the neighborhood.(They had a neighborhood to know other kids from!) And since there were three of them, the whole way they related together was different from my sister and myself. I always saw them as the 'all for one and one for all' sorts. They were a team.They were the kind of kids who played so hard they had no grass in their yard.One year they gave me the Beany doll. My sister thinks he was Bobby's originally.Beany was missing a hand and had had his talk box removed, but he was one of my favourite dolls. I loved the heft of him. He was heavy, even with no talk box,and solid,and it felt good to hug him.I still have him, even though he's not quite the same anymore.My sister was always disturbed by the way his tongue looked in his open mouth.
  

Gee, I don't know what her problem was...

 She used her badgering technique to convince me that I should allow her to cut it out with that handy razor blade that seemed to figure prominently in her life at the time. (The stuff kids were allowed to play with in those days. It wasn't enough that Penny Brite's hair bow was held on by sticking a straight pin into her head.My sister ran rampant with that pencil sharpener mini razor blade.)  Finally I relented and she removed his tongue, thereby opening his mouth...and causing it to split at the corners. Eventually she had to sew his face up to keep him from having a smile that literally went 'from ear to ear'. With all the stitches he started to look like Frankenbeany. After years of living in a packaway box his hollow rubber head kind of caved in, one of the major reasons being the lack of solid face to hold it up. In the long run I think the decision to cut out his tongue was a pretty bad one, but there you go.   
  Beany wasn't the only toy they gave me.One visit Gary gave me an elf off a Christmas decoration.(Vickie seemed to have a habit of cutting herself on something every time we visited. Once it was on a nail in a piece of wood,leaning against the side of the house, as were were all chasing each other. Almost immediately after Gary gave me the elf she stepped on the piece of wood he came off of and got a nail in her foot.And no, the removal of the elf did NOT expose the nail.)

Vickie, on one of the few occasions when she wasn't being gouged by a nail.

Bobby was pretty ticked when I named the elf after his brother in honour of the gift.I promised him I would name my next elf after him to make it fair. (I had several elves, and I still have them all.You know the kind. Like the Elf on the Shelf. They have felt bodies and plastic heads and can usually sit holding their knees under their chin with their arms wrapped around them. Pixie, who I featured on Doll-A-Day once is an elf like that.) Months later my Dad brought me an elf from somewhere when he came home from work one night. I named him after  Bobby  and both elves sit in the branches of my Christmas tree every year.

Bobby. We always thought he looked like "King of the Road" singer Roger Miller.

  The other toy I was given by one of these  cousins is the most touching. I never loved it with the affection I still feel for Beany, but it was given out of complete love and was a great sacrifice. Gary is about a month younger than I am. Vickie always preferred my sister, who is older than she is and must have been pretty cool to her for some reason. And I wasn't of much interest to Bobby since I was just a little girl. But Gary loved me. He told everyone he was going to marry me when we grew up. Everybody kept telling him, "You can't marry her. She's your cousin." (And no cracks about this being the south!) We were so little, he just couldn't understand why. 
 

Gary. He got his front teeth broken out when he was tiny, tussling with Bobby. We only knew him without teeth, so when we went to visit one year and he had grown front teeth, it took some getting used to.

He had a favourite toy at the time. It was a rabbit named Rabbit McCoy. Rabbit McCoy was purple, with a black and white checked bottom half that was supposed to look like pants, and he had no eyes.Gary loved him. Rabbit McCoy was ever present and his position as top toy was well known. One summer Gary gave me Rabbit McCoy. I tried to refuse, knowing how much he loved Rabbit McCoy, but he insisted. My mom eventually restored Rabbit McCoy's vision by sewing red button eyes on him.(Well, he IS a rabbit.) I still have Rabbit McCoy, in that box with Beany and other toys. I haven't seen him for a while, but I know he's there, and I think of him with love. Kind of like my cousins.
Tomorrow we'll see another doll I loved, that belonged to a different set of cousins. 
  UPDATE: See part two HERE and part three HERE.
  

Doll-A-Day 26: Newborn Thumbelina by Ideal

Today's doll is Newborn Thumbelina, made by Ideal in 1968.

Thumbelina was originally produced in 1961, to compete with Vogue's Eloise Wilkin Baby Dear.

Personally, I think Thumbelina was much cuter. Baby Dear has a much grouchier or 'grunt face', as Unsentimental Niece used to say. Thumbelina was made in 18" and 20" sizes, and had a wooden knob in her back which made her wiggle when it was cranked. (You'd wiggle too if somebody stuck a wooden knob in your back...)The later, smaller Tiny Thumbelina's had a plastic knob. Newborn Thumbelina had a different face mold from all Thumbs that came before or after them.

  This is my baby. I got her for Christmas of 1968.

And here she is on the day.

Christmas, 1968.Cocoa, me, Mom, and my sister.Cocoa is obviously the favoured present of the year.as she made it into the posed photo!By the way, it's Christmas, so Mom obviously made me wear my hair down. It was normally in a ponytail like Tammy World's.

 She's wearing her original clothes; a blouse and tights. She has lost the flower applique that was on her yellow ribbon,and she was apparently wearing one of those beaded Baby ID bracelets. That's possibly around here somewhere. I know I still have the one from my Tiny Thumbelina.The outfits on all of the Newborn Thumbelina's are pretty similar: the same blouse, with maybe a couple of different ribbon colours,(occasionally white but usually yellow), and hot pink,pink, yellow, orange,or chartreuse tights.

Zooming in didn't help much. I guess my dad wasn't much of a photographer. It's not something he did a lot of.

  I saw the Newborn Thumbelina dolls in a bin by the check outs at a Harts store the year I got her. (They were apparently supposed to come in open front cardboard boxes, but I remember all these dolls being loose.) There were all sorts. I remember thinking the blonde ones looked cold and ugly, and falling in love with this girl

My sister named her for some unknown reason. She called her Cocoa, and I went with it. I was 6. Most of the names I thought of were still so weird and convoluted I had a hard time remembering them, so it's just as well.

 Newborn Thumbelina only came in the 9" size. I had had two other Thumbelinas, the large 18 or 20" doll, and the smaller, 14"  Tiny Thumbelina. By the time I received Cocoa I was a single Thumb owner. My first Thumbelina had been relegated  to the trash pile in the woods near the house years before I got Cocoa.(That's where unburnable trash went in those days, as we had no trash pickup out in the country.) I don't know why my mom threw her away, but I can still clearly remember her on top of the trash pile. She had white hair and I begged my mom to let me get her down.My second Thumb (That's what we called her.) is still here, in my closet usually. She's the kind with the plastic knob you crank to make her move 'like a real baby'.Of course, my mom threw her knob away. Anything that wasn't attached and looked useless or broken was history if Mom found it.I didn't leave Thumb's knob in her back because I used to play with it as other things. It was frequently a sucker.(Don't ask me why.) Newborn Thumbelinas didn't have a knob. They were all modern, with pullstrings in their backs.

Her arms and legs are vinyl, like her head. Her body is cloth, and very soft.Most of her mechanism is in her head.

 Cocoa's hair is still in amazingly good condition.

It's a smoother hair that doesn't get crispy and break off like Tiny Thumbelina's.(My sister made Thumb a wig from one of Mom's old stockings and some yellow yarn. Her heart was in the right place, but it looks like a thatched roof and never stayed on very well.I still have it though.

Cocoa still works. Not as well as she did before I let Unsentimental Niece play with her for a while. When her string is pulled she moves her head slowly, (accompanied by a mechanical whirring sound that would set any real baby bawling.)

  Like most people who collect, I don't usually leave something good behind when I find it at a yard sale or thrift store, even if it isn't something I want for myself. At a yard sale a few years ago I found a blonde Newborn Thumb and  bought her for a quarter or whatever. I took her apart, cleaned her, put her back together. She worked. I sold her to a lady who told me this story: When she was a little girl she had seen the blonde Newborn Thumbelina in a store while out shopping with her dad. She wanted her badly. Christmas was coming,but things were hard for them at the time, and there were a lot of kids in her family. She knew she would never get the doll, but she still wanted her. Here it was, almost Christmas, and she had spotted my sale and it all came out again. Now she could give herself what she had wanted for so long. She was so happy. When she told me this, before I had mailed the doll, I wrapped Thumby in Christmas paper and put a tag on her; "To **** From Santa". She sent me an email when she received her in the mail. She said she had put her under the tree just like that and wasn't going to open her until Christmas morning. She was so excited. It was so nice to make someone so happy. That's one of my favourite stories.