Nostalgia has long been about returning home to a place and time most people recall as happy, innocent, and full of promise. These returnings are sometimes also laced with melancholy and pathos; as Thomas Wolfe said, “you can’t go home again.”
No longer true. Today, we can get back home by collecting. Of course, it isn’t the same experience exactly, but it may be the same “thing,” and the thing collected, be it a toy, old car, or phonograph record, is now in our possession, and it won’t go away, like our actual childhood worlds have. Many of us no longer want or need shrines and monuments to mark our crossroads or to be the destinations of our pilgrimages. Instead memory is now evoked by things, mostly manufactured, often in great numbers, things that can be purchased and collected long after we first encountered them. Sometimes these things relate to people, or even ideas, but often they do not, or only vaguely. And, unlike most souvenirs, they are not generally associated with a place or visit but with a time of life. These are the things of our “wondrous innocence,” the very particular memories of a personal childhood and youth, and frequently memories of consumption. I begin this discussion with toys and dolls, not because everyone collects them but because they are often the objects of our earliest memories.
On the face of it, collecting the stuff of children’s play seems absurd, even pathetic. In place of the majestic monumentalism of ancient cathedrals, we have the miniature; instead of the grandeur and national symbolism of the Lincoln Memorial, we have ephemeral bits of plastic, tin, cloth, and stuffing that we remember but that mean little to others, isolating us in our little worlds. Why has something seemingly as important as memory been reduced to the miniature? Still, how can it be otherwise when today memory has become so personal, so private, and so possessive?
Nostalgia for childhood stuff is an important form of the curious psychology of collecting, but it is also a significant deviation from that wide-ranging culture. To summarize briefly a large and complex topic, the impulse to collect art, artifacts, and curios had its roots in the modern but contradictory worlds of discovery, individualism, and preservation dating from the fifteenth century. Coming into full flower in the bourgeois world of the nineteenth century, this early form of collecting parallels the emergence of romantic nostalgia.1 Usually wealthy collectors claimed status as custodians of timeless beauty, ancient crafts, and rarities. Today’s collectors of Disneyana share the traditional quest for “completing” a series of related objects—Mickey Mouse figures, for example, rather than rare paintings or stamps. Their collections are attempts to tell themselves and others about themselves—their expertise, their taste, their stories. But the end goals of these two types of collecting are otherwise quite different. The object of bourgeois collecting was to define self through the aura of heritage (as in antique furniture and original art) and thereby to differentiate the refined collector from those lower on the pecking order. The goal of consumed nostalgia today is to collect personal remembrances and to find community with those who share those memories (sometimes even transcending social class). The pleasure comes not from an identification with the high culture of the past but from warm feelings about the stuff of one’s own childhood, no matter if it’s “childish” or even campy.2
The playthings that might affect us emotionally often do not affect others because these objects are part of that short time when we were children and others were not. These objects may separate us from our siblings, spouses, and friends even if they are only a year or two older or younger than we are. These things are small but consequently are personal and personally possessed. They represent a time that has only a very tenuous tie to our present—not to a lost golden age of culture but to a few seasons when we lived both in little worlds where our playthings made us feel big and in fantasies of adventure and caring that are long gone. These things and their magic have departed from our “dull” adult lives, and we want that wonder back. But, of course, the throngs who attend toy and doll shows may not be consciously aware of all this—and they have other things on their minds.
DOLL AND TOY STORIES
There is something curious about people in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond displaying and selling dolls. Many of the (mostly) women dealers that I talked with on an early Sunday afternoon in December 2010 at the Gaithersburg, Maryland, Eastern Doll Show were professional antique traders, some with years of experience in buying and selling objets d’art. The dolls, taken from their seemingly natural settings on the beds and in the arms of mostly little girls, are transformed by collectors, taking on the aura of antiques rather than playthings. Yet they were special because they evoked memories of childhood. This was an old show that once took up four buildings from the county fairgrounds but now is housed in just one, partially because of Internet shopping. Still, mostly middle-aged women came to see and sometimes possess the play figures of their own or someone else’s childhood.
Every seller seemed to have a niche. I met a long-retired second-grade teacher at a booth whose claim to fame was writing a book on Schoenhut toys and figures (an early-twentieth-century Philadelphia manufacturer of colorful wood play sets with jointed figures). A team of two women shared exhibition space, one mad about baby dolls, the other preferring costumed, adult-like figures. They joked that they “like to spend each other’s money” by being on the lookout for dolls that the other might want. Many seemed to take the advice offered in books on collecting: focus on a time, style, or type of doll; other collectors appeared to know only a little about the histories of their collections.
But this was not true of Elinor Champion, a sixty-four-year-old former officer of the United Federation of Doll Clubs, with whom I talked at length. While her organization has tried to bring together collectors across age and taste, she noted that many doll lovers have split into their own clubs—fans of Barbie or Madame Alexander character dolls, for example. She had a catholic perspective: she noted that “once you start collecting, it is hard to focus.” She admitted that “space is also an issue” and that “it’s harder to sell than to buy.”
Champion insisted that many doll collectors possessed skills and knowledge similar to connoisseurs of fine antique furniture or paintings. Members of her United Federation of Doll Clubs share information about doll history, the art of identification, and modes of restoration. Some collectors inherited the hobby from their mothers or mother-in-laws and then try to draw their own daughters into the tradition.3 Serious collectors of fine French and German dolls conduct research into the corporate records of doll makers in Europe as scholars and curators. “It’s just like going to the National Archives,” Champion noted. Collectors may start out trying to “regain their childhood,” but soon they get into art, history, and knowledge of the hobby. She made it sound almost professional.
But Champion also acknowledged that some collectors, especially younger ones, “actually play with their dolls.” This play takes many forms. A recent craze was collecting Bleuette dolls made from 1905 to 1960. They were first manufactured for a French girl’s magazine, La Semaine de Suzette, as a premium to subscribers; the magazine also published patterns for girls to use to make clothes for their Bleuettes. Today collectors find these patterns on the Internet and channel, as it were, those French girls of long ago as they make their own Bleuette doll clothes. Perhaps there is a snob’s appeal in reliving a French girl’s childhood; it happened far away and long ago, and this fact may make the fascination with the dolls seem less childish.
I persisted in my questioning, however, asking this doll expert to explain why women might play with dolls. Are these collectors regressing? Are they finding mothering substitutes for their children who have grown up or that they never had? She admitted that she found it “a little unnerving” and a “little creepy” when women dressed dolls in real baby clothes and treated them like newborns. “Something is missing” in the lives of these women, she concluded. Champion and other older collectors I met at this show still identified with the idea that they were private curators, preservers of a cultural legacy, and distanced themselves from the more recent trend of full-throttle identification with their inner child.
Champion expressed concern about the future of the hobby, especially in passing it on to the eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old set. Young people don’t collect as much, she noted, explaining why the people at this show were predominately over fifty. Some buy online instead, but her thirty-seven-year-old daughter was too busy with family to share her mother’s passion. Some get into it as the “needs of mothering lessen.” Still, she wondered if the next generation will embrace the hobby. She saw a gap between the boomers and the Gen-Xers. In particular she noted how many younger women now pass over traditional American dolls for Japanese ball-jointed dolls. Enthusiasts purchase customized dolls from a pallet of choices in body, hair, eye color, and facial expression, all designed to be posed and to project a personality. The attraction is not aesthetic or historical, much less nurturing or even a nostalgic return to childhood. Instead, the Japanese ball-jointed dolls today invite a new generation of young women to “believe in the power of play,” as one doll company encouraged, rejecting the adult/child distinction. Some collectors of the ball-jointed dolls were not so much returning to a childhood memory but denying a departure from the play of children.
Moreover, the doll collectors at the Gaithersburg show were skeptical of other collectors in general. One woman called stamp and coin collecting a “cold hobby.” She was there to sell dolls and make a profit, but she claimed that she received a “nice warm glow” when a customer told her a story about rediscovering the happiness of childhood in the purchase of an old doll or associated the doll with growing up in the 1950s. The women I met at Gaithersburg insisted that they collected differently from men. One noted, “Boys played with fun things. Girls played with what they were going to do”: take care of babies, cook, or clean. Boys’ toys were more childish, she suggested (thinking of balls and fantasy action figures rather than erector sets and miniature trucks). More revealing was the attitude of the two-woman team of doll collectors mentioned above: guys, they insisted, were more interested in the value and the hunt, not the personal memories or the shared love of playthings. Male toy collectors are into it for the “big bucks,” Elinor Champion concluded. Listening to these female doll collectors, I wondered why they saw so little similarity with male toy collectors. It was almost as if the women were returning to the perspective of little girls with their dolls, mocking the play of boys with their toys.
How, then, did the predominantly male collector think about his toys? In the summer of 2011, I attended a “typical” toy show in suburban Pittsburgh, the Steel City Toy and Comics Show. As with the doll shows, this conclave for trade in memory seemed to be in decline, even though it appealed primarily to Gen-Xers rather than older collectors. If the toys of the majority of exhibitors were much more recent in origin than the playthings of the older female doll collectors in Maryland, their stories were similar.
Most exhibitors were in their thirties or forties, offering row after row of still-boxed Star Wars and other action figures ranging from the late 1970s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. There were a lot of action figures: Transformers and Marvel Comics figures but also Halo, Skeleton Warriors, and DC Universe. Several booths featured professional wrestling posters and action figures (popular in the 1970s on TV). Few exhibited anything costing much over twenty dollars. There was only a token display of plaything collectibles identified with females. An air of arrested male development and bonding permeated the scene. A group of five guys in orange t-shirts gathered around a Pittsburgh-area retro radio station’s DJ, promoting monster movies and a “Monster Bash Oktoberfest.” The DJ was about fifty and proudly admitted that his life was “music and monsters,” passions he acquired when he was a preteen. Those interests lasted until he was sixteen, when he went through a decade-long obsession with girls and cars, after which he returned to his original true loves. Like others at this show, he had given up his childhood passion only briefly.
This fascination with monsters seems also to apply to the curious interest in muscled but obviously fake professional wrestlers. I met an interracial family with two boys, the elder of which was holding an Incredible Hulk figure. Asking about it, I found to my surprise that this toy belonged to his black dad, who at the time was off looking for other treasures for his extensive collection of wrestling and action figures. His indulgent wife explained that her husband (born in 1977) collected 1980s toys because they reminded him of his happy childhood before his parents broke up. These toys were what “he could count on.” When he returned, he explained that he had been obsessed by WrestleMania since he was nine and that he had a basement room full of shelves of wrestling figures in classic poses (a photo of which his wife showed me from her phone). It seemed that he needed the miniatures to access the old emotional attachments of his childhood. Like many others at the fair, he was not a “loser” but a professional—an art teacher for young schoolchildren. His sons seemed to share his interest—as did other father-son pairs I saw throughout the show.
One forty-year-old dad with his eight-year-old son was at the show to collect Marvel comics. The dad recalled a weekly ritual with his father—going to the newsstand on Saturday evenings to buy a comic book—and went on to gather a large collection of comics, which recently he had had to sell during hard times. Now the forty-year-old dad was bonding with his son via the project of restoring his collection; the son also searched for action figures based on his dad’s beloved Marvel Comics. All this suggests a curious pattern: a generation-niched crowd of men who never really gave up their toys and who defined (however obliquely and inexplicably) their ties to their fathers and connected with their own sons through the ephemerality of popular cultural objects. At least, this bonding is what they strived for.
While some certainly had supportive (or indulgent) wives, male aficionados of action figures and comic books showed no more understanding of female collectors of memory objects than did the female doll collectors of male connoisseurs of toys. The art teacher with his basement full of action figures, when asked about women posing dolls, had nothing more to say than “I just don’t get it.” When I told an older dealer in toy car and military figures what the doll collectors thought of male toy collectors, he admitted that male dealers were motivated strongly by the cash nexus. But he denied that male collectors lacked an emotional attachment: men were passionate about highly realistic miniatures of military vehicles and fully equipped toy soldiers and less about the “personalities” of the figures. Asian companies specializing in detailed reproductions of Vietnam or Gulf War figures attracted middle-aged men who remembered the machines, uniforms, and equipment of their adventurous youths and, in turn, associated these items with their long-scattered buddies in the military. These figures were, he claimed, displacing G.I. Joe figures that some of these men may have actually played with as seven-year-olds in the early 1960s.
All this may suggest that some men relate to and remember other men through the common link to things. The figures are mannequins for the uniforms and equipment that enchant these men and that express the shared memory of youthful male bonding (rather than to childhood, interestingly enough). Ties to the past and its people, be it to young childhood or young manhood, are mediated through very specific objects, conveniently reduced to toy miniatures. Was this just a male version of the female fixation on effigies and their costumes? Maybe it’s a bit more complex than that. So let’s dig a little deeper, first looking briefly at the history of toys and dolls and then at doll- and toy-collecting communities. I will draw on my own earlier research and reflections on the history of playthings.
HISTORICAL RETROSPECTIONS
Most toy and doll collectors have in common a basic emotional response to the things of their personal childhoods. But these childhoods differ, especially between males and females and, of course, across time. Playthings of memory are sharply gendered because, in part, as the first remembered possessions of five-to-ten-year-olds, these toys and dolls coincide with the child’s full development of gender identity. Few adults collect the toys of toddlers (which tend to be unisex), probably because as adults they have no memory of them. Gender differences in toys have persisted for a long time. Boys’ toy soldiers and girls’ dolls’ houses of the eighteenth century marked gendered spaces and activities, just as did nineteenth-century boys’ miniature work tools and horses and girls’ tin kitchen sets and dolls. Victorian work and transportation toys helped boys rehearse their future male roles of income-earning employment and symbolized for the boy his longing to escape from mother’s apron strings and go out into the world. And, of course, these gendered playthings changed with technology. The male’s toy horse was ceded to girls in the twentieth century with the arrival of the car and truck, which were passed on to boys in miniature. The play worlds of Victorian girls were far more confined than those of boys, but they were no less rich in tools and opportunities to rehearse anticipated future domestic and nurturing roles.4
In the twentieth century, these gender differences became, if anything, even sharper. In the three decades after 1900, boys’ toys were often associated with scientific and economic progress and preparation for careers in business or engineering (construction play sets and electric trains, for example). Later they were linked with science fiction and fantasy (Buck Rogers in the 1930s and Star Wars from 1977), as boys’ play became less closely tied to future roles and Victorian ideals of industrial progress. Girl’s playthings became more nurturing (especially in dolls that looked like children and babies by the 1910s) and more fashion and consumer oriented (for example, with Barbie from 1959). Even as these toys upheld gender divisions, their changes reflected profound transformations in cultural and economic life, especially a shift from anticipating future maturity and work roles to adulthood-denying fantasy.5
And all playthings became far more ephemeral in the twentieth century. This coincided with the birth of the modern consumer economy in about 1900 and its ever-shifting range of goods. Along with toys and dolls, there was a continuous flow of new phonograph recordings, movies, novelties, and the emergence of annual model changes in automobiles and other consumer durables. This transition to fast capitalism promised replenished profit in the manufacture of durable goods, and it subjected consumers to an era of continuous change. It particularly shaped the experience of children: the array of playthings changed yearly, sometimes dramatically, along with the adult fashion and novelty industries. Beginning with the craze for Teddy Bears in 1906, toy and doll makers continually tried to create fads of must-have playthings that have marked and segmented a succession of childhoods.6 Many other novelties followed, like the Kewpie doll, a childlike impish figure first appearing as an illustration in a story by Rosie O’Neill in Ladies Home Journal in December 1909 but soon licensed to doll companies.7
Fads were directed especially toward boys. The master of fad licensing was, of course, Walt Disney, who, in the 1930s, sold the image of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and many others across the world.8 Many character toys followed, becoming popular through comic books, Saturday matinee movies, and radio shows. Heroic radio figures like Tom Mix, Dick Tracy, Buck Rogers, and Superman offered boys a wide variety of fantasies. For example, the science-fiction world of Buck Rogers created opportunities to manufacture miniatures of fantasy weapons, vehicles, and characters, which were sold to eager boys in neighborhood dime stores. By the 1930s, boys’ toys were less about their futures at work than they had been a decade earlier and more about what was popular at the Saturday matinee or what superhero was featured at the comic-book stand. This was a rapidly changing fantasy world from which parents, especially dads, were largely excluded, and their hopes for their sons (to become engineers and businessmen, for example) were forgotten.9 Fast capitalism divided the memories and hopes of parents from the experience of their children.
Things were a bit different for girls. In the 1910s and 1920s, the childlike “companion” or “New Kid” doll partially supplanted the relatively formal Victorian doll, with her sometimes lavish ward-robe, fragile small head of bisque, and doll face (pursed lips and blank stares). The New Kids were made of composition (mostly glue and sawdust) and, later, hard plastic, and they were more sturdy to play and cuddle with than ceramic dolls. They were idealizations of the toddlers who owned them, exuding cheerfulness, energy, optimism, and “personality.” Many companion dolls came as sibling sets (for example, the Patsy dolls of the 1920s), which encouraged little girls to rehearse family roles (and to pester parents for complete doll sets). Also new were the baby dolls (By Lo Baby of 1923 and the “changeable” Dy Dee Baby and Betsy Wetsy of the 1930s) that pushed girls toward nurture play at a time when birth rates were falling and little girls had fewer opportunities to learn mothering. Themed dolls (like those of Madame Alexander, first appearing in 1923) encouraged collecting because they were manufactured in a series based on fairy tales, literature, and film.10 Shirley Temple dolls transformed the generic New Kid look by personalizing it in the form of “America’s Sweetheart,” shortly after the five-year-old Temple began her stunning career in movies in 1934.11
However, the 1930s produced fewer changes in girls’ playthings than boys. The difference seems to be that girls in the 1930s were much more closely tied to the sentimental wishes of their mothers than boys were to the traditional values of either parent. Girls’ play was less subject to the fad culture of fast capitalism. Mothers loved Shirley Temple dolls because these dolls reminded them of their childhood dolls. And this continued into the 1940s and 1950s, as mothers fondly recalled their own Patsies and Shirley dolls and saw their childhoods in their daughters’ play with their New Kid–style Ginny dolls. But by 1959, girls were ready for a break from maternal expectations: Barbie. And this produced the same sort of rapidly changing consumer culture for girls as had existed for boys since the 1930s, a culture based on peer-driven novelty, often tinged with rebellion.12
At the beginning of the 1960s, novelty toys and dolls for both boys and girls were dominated by diverse action figures, led by G.I. Joe and the long but forever changing Barbie fashion dolls. Although Hasbro’s G.I. Joe appeared first in 1964 as a miniature of the real soldier that most American boys expected to grow up to become (in an era of general military conscription), by the mid-1970s the Joes had become fantasy figures that changed continuously (first in the 1970s to “Adventure Teams,” abandoning military themes during the unpopular Vietnam War, and then to miniature “Super Joes,” science-fiction action figures in 1976).13
G.I. Joe’s transformation was followed by a generation of action figures, beginning with the miniatures and props of George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy (1977–1983). Even more than the sci-fi play of the 1930s, Star Wars was a boys’ peer-group fantasy, continually changing, as did the boys (mostly), who quickly entered and left the target age group. Unlike the westerns, whose stock characters and plots were shared by multiple generations of American males, Star Wars belonged primarily to the kids of that time.14
The action figure was not only a peer-driven kids’ obsession, but it emerged from the quintessential ephemerality of a movie series. Though seen repeatedly by millions of children, the Star Wars movies were set in a particular time—a media moment in the fast capitalism of modern entertainment (that could be repeated in rereleases in theaters and on TV as well as on VCR/DVD copies), not a socioeconomic era. This was even truer of a new spate of TV action cartoons that, like Star Wars, spun off action figures and play sets: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and the Transformers appeared in 1983, followed by the Dino Riders and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1988. It is toys like these, taken from the media moments of a generation ago, that draw the Gen-Xers to today’s toy shows. Tomorrow’s shows will be different. Fathers and sons may strive for shared obsessions (as evidenced by the Pittsburgh toy show above), but the narrow duration of the media moment of each fad limits cross-generational sharing.15
The girl’s story after 1960 differed in many ways. In 1959, Ruth Handler of Mattel introduced a doll in Barbie that has dominated girls’ play worlds over the past half-century far more thoroughly than did G.I. Joe. Handler found that when she abandoned mothers’ memories of their own dolls and images of the ideal child, she could appeal directly to the modern girl’s fantasy of freedom and fun. Barbie liberated the girl’s play from maternal standards and introduced her to the wider world of peer consumerism.16 Barbie continually changed her wardrobe, furnishings, vehicles, and “friends,” resulting in a rich array of novelty for successive generations of girls. All this created an endless demand for Mattel’s Barbie products, taking the doll line (as tentatively practiced in the Patsy dolls of the 1920s) to new heights of fast-capitalism sophistication. Even when she faced competition from Jem/Jerrica, Bratz, and the American Girl collection,17 these doll lines too (eventually) imitated the Barbie model.18
These toys and dolls continuously changed and thus marked time. Though many to an adult’s eyes seem similar, to the eight-year-old boy in 1990, the Turtles were cool and the He-Man of six or seven years earlier was dumb. Of course, the Lincoln logs and baby dolls of the early twentieth century survived for years. The Fort Apache play set, Louis Marx’s soldier and Indian set, was sold in Sears’s catalogs from 1953 to 1977. But these long-lasting playthings seldom inspire collectors. They don’t identify any particular individual or any particular point in time because they crossed the years unchanged. Modern nostalgia segments the past because the rapidly changing world of toys has separated six-year-olds from eight-year-olds repeatedly since the 1960s.19
The increasingly speedy turnover of kids’ stuff, thanks to the emergence of fast capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and the continued divisions between girls’ and boys’ play(things), has had a long-term effect. A generation or more after first appearing in American toy boxes, these playthings divided collectors of childhood memories and even made them disdainful of one another. Moreover, in recent years, as I saw at Pittsburgh, the impulse has shifted from recollecting material memories of childhood in middle age to never abandoning that culture from childhood on. All this makes the worlds of both doll and toy collecting similar, but, still, differences remain. Let’s take a closer look, by focusing first on collectors of girls’ dolls and then on boys’ toys.
THE CURIOUS MEANINGS OF DOLLS
Collectors do something unusual. They remove objects from where they were intended to be used and display them in a market and culture often very different. Doll collectors remove their prizes from the playful world of childhood and often imagine themselves to be art and history curators—as well as savvy speculative merchants. Nevertheless, for many collectors, dolls evoke feelings of nurture, emotions encouraged by mothers in their daughters’ doll play.
Dolls, especially when collected by adult women, evoke astonishing and diverse emotional reactions from others: disdain, pity, and even disgust from most men and many (especially young and/or professional) women. Men as boys often belittled or even defaced and “tortured” their sisters’ dolls. “Sophisticated” adults—men, but also women—have long associated dolls with “primitives” and today’s doll collector with a pathetic effort to compensate for an emotional loss or simply with a desire to regress into a fantasy child’s world. But, as the anthropologist A. F. Robertson notes in his extraordinary study of collector dolls, “The life of the doll and the child are intertwined, laying down complex layers of sensation and significance, from the erotic and maternal to the guilty and aggressive.”20
One way of getting at this complexity is by examining the doll magazine. Like their toy-magazine counterparts, these periodicals offer readers guides to prices and information about clubs, conventions, and doll museums; they also feature the “histories” of various dolls. Typically included in magazines (Doll Reader, Doll News, Antique Doll Collector, Doll World) are articles on the origins of Ginny dolls, the range of Hollywood collectors’ dolls from the 1970s, and the art of Mexican wax dolls.21 Articles are specialized but often written in personal, affectionate tones, sometimes recounting the author’s memories of loving a particular doll, losing it, and getting it back as an adult.22
Collecting these effigies of childhood has also often been fostered by people with strong personalities and unusual resources. Take, for example, Margaret Woodbury Strong, the daughter of J. C. Woodbury, a major investor in Kodak and other Rochester, New York, enterprises, who, when she was widowed in 1958, devoted her energy and fortune to creating a “museum of fascination” based on the domestic goods and ephemera of the period between 1820 to 1930 and concentrating heavily on dolls. She had gathered about twenty-five thousand dolls by the time of her death in 1969. This extraordinary collection forms the heart of the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum, which opened in 1982 and which today is a museum of play known simply as the Strong. Smaller and often ephemeral doll museums and exhibits sprang up from the 1950s. These included Greenwell’s Antique Doll Museum of Florida, the New Britain Youth Museum (Connecticut), and doll wings of the Old Slater Mill Museum in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and the Wenham Museum in suburban Boston. “Doll hospitals,” shops for the repair and restoration of antique dolls, served an emerging collecting community at midcentury. The link between collector and private museum has long been strong as doll enthusiasts seek public recognition of their treasures and ways of displaying personal collections. Still, few enjoyed the endowment level of the Strong, and many closed after a few years.23
The heyday of modern American doll collecting began in the late 1930s and was organized nationally with the founding of the United Federation of Doll Clubs (UFDC), which has held annual conventions since 1950. The predecessor of the UFDC was founded in New York City in 1937, and scattered reference works by folklorists and craft advocates concerning doll making and collecting were published from the 1930s. The authoritative work by Dorothy Coleman and her daughters, The Collector’s Encyclopedia of Dolls, published in 1968, is the culmination of this generation of collectors.24
Early doll clubbers did not openly and single-mindedly celebrate their nostalgia in the way that many do today. Mary E. Lewis, Janet Johl, Nita Loving, and other UFDC officials from the 1950s seem to have been typical white middle-class club women, free of career obligations and able to devote themselves to their hobby and to charity. Lewis, the founder of the UFDC, announced to the second annual convention that the group “promotes good will and advances the science of doll collecting through study and research.” Johl called collecting an opportunity to “work for a better understanding among the peoples of the earth” and to “show the values and the privileges of freedom.” From the beginning, UFDC members held doll shows to raise money for child welfare programs and to distribute small dolls and toys to the needy; they also offered parties for poor and disabled children.25 The clubs continue a tradition of charity (now raising money today for battered women’s shelters or providing dolls for orphans of victims of AIDS in Africa).26 All this fits a pattern dating back to Victorian America, when relatively privileged women with time and money formed social groups that combined an artistic interest with charitable activities. But the UFDC went beyond the status-seeking goal of collecting rarities and bourgeois noblesse oblige. Despite the “grown-up” tone of its publications, the UFDC Convention Journal (1959) still expressed a common sentiment. Although a doll is a “little girl’s dream come true,” when she casts it off, the doll “waits patiently for she knows she’ll be needed some day” when a grandmother will collect her for “the lonely days that come and go.”27
The traditional doll collector at times expressed an almost religious feeling for the sacredness of the child and doll, an emotion rooted in romantic ideas from the early nineteenth century. In the 1980s, the personal stories of doll collectors and their childhood “first loves” with dolls were common in UFDC convention programs. For example, the 1986 convention featured a photo of the president when she was three years old holding her long-lost “Rena Marie” doll. The caption beneath was telling: “Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to be a child again and enjoy the wonder of childhood?” This and other images of dolls and the little girls holding them were vehicles “for triggering a whole range of memories and emotions,” writes another UFDC member, Dare Boles: “Seeds of shared childhood are in every photo. … We really do know these children of another time and place—they’re just us in different guises at different stages of life.”28
This curious evocation of the universality and thus sacred wonder of childhood echoes the romantic spirit of William Wordsworth in his famous poem of 1804: “Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” Yet Wordsworth laments that the divinity of youth soon fades away.29 For the doll collector, it can be recaptured.
Still, the UFDC has tempered these personal sentiments with a devotion to preservation. Throughout its history, the federation has upheld the superiority of dolls made before 1945. Many members prefer French china dolls dating from as early as the 1850s. The UFDC’s house journal, Doll News, regularly has featured late-Victorian dolls and their makers (Jumeau, Marseille, and Bru, for example). An article on the famous Tony doll of the Ideal Company (from the early 1950s) appears only in 1996. The previous year, a survey of preferences of UFDC members found that 76.8 percent favored antique dolls, but only 53 percent liked modern dolls, and of these 36 percent preferred “modern” dolls before 1960.30 Although most UFDC collectors are too old for Barbie, nevertheless, contradicting my expectations, many of them don’t favor dolls of their own childhoods but prefer far older ones.31 These antiques, of course, enjoy the patina of heritage and antiquity, but they also represent a culture that these collectors associate with the ideal childhood that they wish they had.
Closely related to the antique doll is the porcelain collector doll (PCD), which were copies of Victorian fashion and early-twentieth-century companion dolls. A market for these dolls appeared in the early 1970s. Appearing quite naturally as rising costs of antiques priced many would-be buyers out of the market for “original” dolls, the PCD also offered women the representation of a dependent child. PCDs captured both the style of the past and the “timeless innocence” of childhood. In fact, PCDs were often “better” than their antique sisters because they were more realistic (made of porcelain, a material that produced a more exacting replica of the “ideal” child’s complexion and expression), especially when compared with the now-aged composition or hard plastic dolls that date from the 1920s and 1930s. By 1983 there were already thirty rival manufacturers of PCDs (including makers of commemorative coins like the Danbury Mint). These manufacturers grossed $7.6 billion in 1993, compared to $30 million a decade earlier.32
Advertised as a cute and irresistible addition to the family as well as a wise investment, (at average prices of $108 by 2003), these dolls combined emotion, status, and financial value. Manufacturers successfully employed the sales tactic of “line extension” by promoting “families” of dolls and theme sets to encourage multiple purchases.33 Advertisers of PCDs used an appeal to the supposed “neediness” of these dolls to attract empty-nest mothers seeking an emotional reconnection with memories of infant care or with recollections of childhood doll nurturing. This approach also won sales from childless women, who later in life may regret not having experienced motherhood at first hand. Three-dimensional and poseable dolls provided expressions of iconic moments of childhood—“A Christmas Prayer” (featuring a five-year-old girl doll dressed in a nightgown and on her knees), “My First Tooth,” and “I’m a Big Boy Now!” (posed for toilet training).34 All this “neediness” in the dolls has appealed to women who feel the need to be needed. After all, an American woman born in 1951 can expect to live fifty-two years after the birth of her last child and twenty-five years after the birth of her last grandchild. The PCDs give women permission to do what children do: personify effigies and project dependency on them. These dolls provide their owners with narratives of mommy care by inviting purchasers to talk to their dolls and make them family.35
PCDs look lifelike but escape the truth of life that change is unavoidable and youth and childhood fleeting. In fact, these dolls represent “children who were never born and children who have grown up.” An extreme variation is the My Twinn doll (1998), which offered collectors custom-made replicas of themselves as children (fashioned from a personal picture provided by the purchaser). This curious appeal to nostalgia but also narcissism confirms Robertson’s thesis: “denial of mortality seemed to be central to the passion for dolls.”36
BARBIE’S “GIRLS”
Most doll collecting seems to recall a childhood and nurturing past, and it certainly attracted adult women born before the 1960s. But perhaps something has changed in the rising cohort of the nostalgic collector.
An early marker of this generational break is the Modern Doll Convention, initiated in 1979 by younger enthusiasts whose childhoods were filled not with Madame Alexander dolls from the 1920s on but with Ginny dolls from the 1950s and, later, Barbies. In 1984 the UFDC finally established a modern doll division (dolls manufactured after 1945) and appointed A. Glenn Mandeville, an advocate for collecting Ginny and Barbie, as the judge in show competition. This was a long time coming. Though Mattel had advertised in UFDC publications as early as 1971, the federation was reluctant to embrace Barbie (even publishing an article in 1974 that aired common critiques of Barbie as a threat to girls’ creativity and for rushing girls too soon into sexuality). And, while Doll News occasionally featured Barbie and other modern fashion dolls from the 1980s, clearly the majority of doll collectors in this “establishment” group continued to favor more traditional dolls.37 And, interestingly, key players in publishing “professional” articles about these modern dolls (including eventually Barbie) were men, such as A. Glenn Mandeville and John Axe. Nevertheless, the dominance of the “golden age” of antique dolls was beginning to be challenged.38
Ginny represented a transition as a fashion doll, but she still remained in the companion-doll mold. However, Barbie took doll collecting (as it did doll play) in a new direction. Barbie was different from the childlike dolls of the past. As we have seen, she was an adult and, even more, an independent and infinitely self-transforming fashion model and ardent consumer. The opinion of one of Robertson’s research assistants is revealing: “Barbie is a solitary individual, missing ties to both past and future. … Barbie’s boyfriend Ken and little sister Skipper are mere accessories, and her relations with them vague and insubstantial. Barbie switches roles and identities with breathless ease, astronaut one minute, doctor the next, all with a change of clothes.”39
Adult Barbie collecting can be like the Barbie play of children; it is centered on acts of fantasy living through Barbie’s freedom as a consumer. Barbie collector conventions are not just about buying, selling, and collecting Barbies (though the 2011 convention included esoteric workshops on identifying “Ponytail Barbies” and the various looks of Ken) but also about becoming Barbie—dressing as and partying to a Barbie theme. In 2011, the convention’s theme was “Barbie® and Ken® Spring Break 1961” (the convention was held in Ft. Lauderdale). Included in the events was a birthday party for Ken. The convention website encouraged participants to “Dress to impress in your favorite party gear. You can select a Ken® doll fashion from your favorite era or maybe coordinate with someone else to come as Barbie® and Ken® dolls in those wonderful coordinating outfits.”40 In 2014, the convention was called “Every Day’s a Holiday with Barbie®,” with a pronounced pitch toward consumerism: “You can shop ’til you drop in the Presidents’ Day Salesroom” or “stock up on the unique, ultra-limited souvenirs in the Memorial Day Souvenir Shop.”41
The Barbie generation is certainly large, or at least potentially so. Not only did 90 percent of American girls five to eleven years of age own at least one Barbie in 1974, but Barbie fan clubs had been larger than any other girls’ club (other than the Girl Scouts) in the early 1970s.42 Unlike the nurturing memories of earlier dolls (and the retro PCDs), Barbies were about helping “young ladies make the transition from pig tails to pony tails and on to the hip hop and retro styles of today,” as Mandeville put it, a shift from dependence and “cuteness” to style-conscious teen. The key, he notes, is that “the history of Barbie is the history of style” then and now, for Barbie is about memory but also about keeping up. Moreover, collecting Barbie entailed more than recalling childhood. It was about high-end fashion realized not in wearing a designer gown to the charity ball but by displaying it in special-edition Barbie dolls. When the fashion designer Bob Mackie (of Dior) began providing stylish mini-clothes to Mattel, specialty stores began selling limited-edition Barbies as high-end collectibles. By 1989, FAO Schwartz had contracted with Mattel for the sale of “Barbie Doll Exclusives” for an upscale market (for example, the limited-edition “Night Sensation in Black Taffeta”).43
I saw an example of this unique approach to memory in a conversation I had with my lawyer in August 2010. While signing a will and other papers, I mentioned that I was writing a book about nostalgia. My lawyer, a woman in her early fifties, launched into a detailed, animated discussion of her own Barbie collection, which she sets up every Christmas on a special bookshelf near her family’s holiday tree. Not only does she have Barbie, Skipper, Midge, and Scooter (her mother didn’t let her have Ken), but she told me about how she sets up her display in a kind of tableau vivant around different themes—one year, going to a football game; another year, to a pajama party (the latter with cups and saucers for cocoa, a telephone for the “girls” to call their friends, pillows, and much else). She was particularly proud of her outfit for Skipper—“town togs,” a costume that she described to me in loving detail. In the middle of this, one of the office staff came in to witness the documents. And naturally she joined the discussion, which sounded to me, at least, like two eight-year-olds comparing their doll collections: one bragged that she had a Barbie wedding gown, the other that she had a really cool Francine doll. My lawyer is normally very serious and socially and politically rather conservative. But to her this bit of midsummer midday regression was anything but strange. The Barbie display “takes me back to the fantasies of my youth,” she said. When she set up her collection, she “can forget about the 4 am calls from clients. What other way is there to get back to childhood?” At the time, I wasn’t sure if these women were just having fun with me, putting on their eight-year-old selves, but now, after going to a number of toy and doll shows, I think that they were expressing a comfortable and comforting part of themselves, one emerging briefly from their adult, serious shells.
It shouldn’t be surprising that doll nostalgia often takes the form of rehearsing doll play or that this play would differ across generations. But it is striking how different the nostalgic play of Barbie’s girls is from their elders’ goals of returning to early childhood or to motherhood. By “putting on Barbie,” these middle-aged women expressed a seeming longing to reconstruct (or even hold on to) the fantasy world of freedom, youth, fashion, and self-indulgence that Barbie represented.
OLD BOYS AND THEIR TOYS
In the gendered world of nostalgia, mostly male toy collectors tell a rather different story than do the largely female doll collectors. One of the masters of early collecting was Louis Hertz. As early as 1937, he was writing articles for Model Craftsman about collecting late Victorian tinplated train miniatures, and in 1947 he published one of the earliest reference works, Handbook of Old American Toys. By 1969, when his definitive work, The Toy Collector, appeared, he represented an established tradition. He eagerly defended toy collecting from snobs in the antiquing community who defamed his treasures as insufficiently old and significant and even more from the “do-it-yourself psychologist” who mocked grown men collecting toys as “merely a retreat to childhood on the part of those with immature minds.” Hertz insisted that collecting miniatures (vehicles and tools but also milkmen in Edwardian garb and even cartoon figures like Happy Hooligan) recaptured the recent past “as well, if indeed not more successfully than any other medium.” These collections reflected an “appreciation of American industry” and a celebration of progress. While sharing with traditional doll collectors a defense of the hobby as culture, not regression, Hertz took a distinctively modern approach to preservation in his focus on date-specific toy novelties. While museum curators may acquire and display folk toys as illustrative of traditional artisanship and the distant past, Hertz desired only manufactured toys that closely replicated the mechanical world they represented and could be precisely dated and otherwise definitively identified. The object for Hertz and other modern toy collectors was to capture a precise point in time, not a romantic notion of an “era.” Thus the miniature train became a collectible whose value increased proportionately with exactitude, rarity, and purity (and innocent of signs of ever having been played with and thus adulterated by time).
Hertz’s generation recognized the rapid transformation of recent history and expressed the modern desire to recapture the “moment.” But it is not just a specific time of manufacture that is captured in the antique toy but the collector’s “time.” It is no surprise that some of the earliest collectors of rare mechanical toy banks from the 1880s were bankers who probably had played with them as kids (gathering them in the 1920s when they were in their forties and fifties). In his 1969 work, Hertz insisted that antique toys had more than monetary value; playthings are valuable also because they are “the windows through which the child first sees and realizes his full-sized world, and toys mold the viewpoints and ideals that are later carried into adult life.” Playing with erector sets from the 1910s and 1920s actually did spark careers in engineering. But this was not an endorsement of regression to that formative experience. Even though Hertz admitted that the “interests of many collectors frequently center on the toys they remember having owned or seen,” nostalgia for childhood, he claimed, was still “comparatively minor.” As if to ward off critics that toy collecting was somehow unmanly, Hertz emphatically denied that “real” collectors would “re-dress” their toys by restoring or modifying them, as did female doll collectors.
His book’s purpose was to inform collectors but also to set rules. Collecting required “uncommon discipline”; serious participants in the hobby had to specialize, become experts. The object was not primarily to collect memories but to master a category, often abstractly defined by material (tin, cast iron), function (transport, guns), or country or manufacturer of origin. As a defender of a genteel tradition, he disdained those who collected with sight merely to future value.44
A far different perspective appeared forty years later in 2008, when Harry Rinker, an appraiser of antiques and collectibles, whose writings and media appearances make him a leading authority, published Guide to Toy Collecting. For Rinker, “toys and childhood memories are inexorably linked,” and like Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, we all seek the “Rosebuds” of our lives, maybe not the sled of Kane’s childhood, but some toy or doll fetish. Gone is Hertz’s effort to legitimize collecting as historical preservation or a quest for intellectual mastery. Rinker saw no shame in playing with toys at any age, and from that desire came the motive to collect. From nostalgia for that special toy sprang the desire to collect others, Rinker noted, and, with it, the thrill of the hunt, growing expertise, sociable encounters with other enthusiasts, investment possibilities, and, most important, a greater sense of self. What had not changed since Hertz’s 1969 manual was the quest to categorize and specialize insofar as Rinker offered a comprehensive list of toy types. Gone with Rinker was the focus on Victorian and early-twentieth-century mechanical banks and trains that had obsessed Hertz’s readers; he added categories like Disneyana, action figures, and TV-character toys, for which dozens of well-illustrated price and identification guides had been published, often by hole-in-the-wall presses from small towns in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky.45
Hertz’s personal history mirrors the early history of toy collecting. This craze took off in the 1930s, and with good reason. The generation of boys born between 1890 and 1910 was the first to experience modern consumer culture (the introduction of brand goods in food, drink, cosmetics, appliances, cars, commercial music, and, of course, toys). Memories of these distinct wonders of manufactured playthings became an obsession thirty or forty years later when these boys had become middle-aged men. They began collecting toy savings banks; miniature horse-drawn vehicles such as carriages, fire pumps, delivery wagons, and circus bandwagons from the 1890s; and the somewhat later tiller-steered automobiles, quaint delivery trucks, and especially Lionel electric trains. Comic strip–character toys such as Happy Hooligan and Andy Gump reminded these men of their earliest fantasies, and the naiveté of these playthings served as a contrast with modern toys. From the 1930s on, this was a slow-growing (and probably for many an embarrassing, thus secret) hobby.46
Most of the early and most energetic collectors specialized in toy soldiers and ships. Early in the twentieth century indulgent dads and uncles gave boys sets of toy soldiers made by companies like Mignot (French), Heyde (German), the American Soldier Co., and especially Britains (English). Later, these toy soldiers became collectors’ items. The publisher Malcolm Forbes and his son, Robert, legitimated this seemingly childish pastime by displaying their extraordinary toy soldier and boat collections at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., in 1982.47
Even earlier in 1970, toy collecting had grown enough to have its own magazine, Antique Toy World, and through the 1990s it was a major promoter of Victorian and early-twentieth-century toys. The magazine regularly featured the writings of Al Marwick, a promoter and enthusiastic collector of pressed-steel toys from Buddy L (quality truck, car, and construction-machinery miniatures from the 1920s) as well as late Victorian navy ships from the German Märklin company. A car dealer from Kansas City, Marwick’s real passion was hunting for the rare quality antique. It was the “hunt” that was fun, and he insisted that “a natural curiosity for the origin and history should always accompany the collector of toys.” Marwick and other middle-aged men in the 1970s gleefully wrote their own stories, presenting themselves as fun-loving guys living ordinary, even humdrum lives, who found adventure in trolling the back roads of rural America looking for that special Bing miniature battleship that was for them the fulfillment of a life’s dream. Antique Toy World made room for Japanese robot toys (from the 1950s) and even conceded mention of “Disneyana” toys, but this traditional toy magazine mostly featured only the older and rarer Disney toys from the 1930s. Antique Toy World was the bible of the older and probably wealthier collector in the 1980s and 1990s who still shared Hertz’s belief that collecting the miniatures of technology (even if wrapped in nostalgia) was an intellectual and preservation-oriented task. In this, they shared the views of the UFDC’s Doll News.48
Whatever the collectors’ obsession, these toys brought back memories of a particular childhood. In successive years, not only did the older toys (like mechanical savings banks) grow too expensive for average collectors, but new types of toys began to attract the next wave of men trying to recapture their boyhoods. Robot toys of the early 1950s became popular collector’s items by the end of the 1970s, and toys based on TV characters from the late 1950s and early 1960s attracted attention by the early 1980s. Each consumer cohort (defined almost by the years that a particular toy line was sold) collected their own childhood memories. A toy expert could practically determine a collector’s age by his enthusiasm. Who but men born in the late 1940s like me would be interested in Davy Crocket toys (a craze of 1954)?
Rinker is clearly more reflective than Hertz of the toy collector today and probably of enthusiasts since the 1980s and 1990s. Like the emergence of the modern doll collector (of Barbies or ball-jointed dolls), it is no longer childish (and for males “unmanly”) to admit to collecting and even playing with the things of childhood. Moreover, the old identification of miniatures with steady technological progress has been replaced with the recollections of media moments of objectified fantasy. This describes the baby-boom collector of TV-driven toys. A typical toy collector from this era is Tom Frey, of the Pittsburgh area, who caught the toy bug in 1981 when he bought a Roy Rogers Chuck Wagon at a flea market, hoping to give it to his son. Naturally, in those golden days of Star Wars figures, his boy was totally uninterested in a 1950s toy based on a cowboy TV show. But soon the father was “recollecting” his own childhood rather than trying to relate to his son’s. Frey filled his own toy box, eventually writing a column in Antique Toy World about “classic plastic toys” from the 1950s and 1960s.49
Many of these toys were manufactured by Louis Marx, famous for his practically endless array of cheap sets of dinosaurs, cowboys and Indians, soldiers, American presidents, Roman centurions, and medieval knights. These figures reached far and wide into the psyche and media culture of boomer children. In 2001, Francis Turner opened the Marx Toy Museum in the small West Virginia town of Moundsville, the site of a long-defunct factory that had manufactured an extraordinary range of play sets in the 1950s and 1960s for Louis Marx. On display are not just the relics of boomer childhood but also manufactured goods just as they appeared on store shelves. They recall less the experience of the toy box and more the shopping trip and the anticipation of the purchase.50
Also popular with boomers were collections of toy vehicles, especially Matchbox and Hot Wheel cars. In 1953, an English toymaker, Lesney Products, produced die-cast replicas of a wide variety of cars, replicas small enough to fit into a matchbox and thus cheap enough to be accumulated in large numbers by British and even American boys. Matchbox vehicles prevailed until 1958, when the giant American toymaker Mattel looked for an alternative to its faltering cap-gun business by introducing a line of miniature cars called Hot Wheels. Though similar to Matchbox in size, Hot Wheels featured piano-wire axles that turned the cars’ tiny wheels quickly, allowing their youthful owners to hurl the cars across wood and tiled floors and on tracks. Annual model changes marked differences between one cohort of boys and the next. And this vast variety later provided the once child, now collector, with status as an expert in the esoteric knowledge of identification and appreciation of rarity in these toy cars. At a convention of Hot Wheel enthusiasts in 2003 in suburban Los Angeles, almost three thousand collectors (almost all men over thirty) paid a sixty-dollar registration fee to see and trade Hot Wheels for four days.51
Male boomer collectors abandoned Hertz’s curator role and no longer were embarrassed by regressing into childhood. Instead, they embraced childhood memories of play, memories materialized by fantasy objects that were animated by characters and stories from the media. Of course, these men might have strong emotion-laden memories of grandmothers and caring (or harsh) teachers or coaches. But the rituals of recollection were less often built on relationships (as was clearly the case with doll collectors of the same generation); they were centered on very particular playthings. And again unlike the traditional doll enthusiasts, whose love of Victorian and early-twentieth-century dolls reflected a “timeless” view of wondrous childhood, these boomer toy collectors focused on the “media moment” in fashioning their nostalgia.
BOYS WHO NEVER GIVE UP THEIR TOYS
Boomer nostalgia for toys was still a recovered memory. Toys were abandoned by age eleven or twelve for sports and girls and later for career and family. Like the women who collect PCDs in their middle age, these men saw their collections as a return to a past that had past. But a younger generation seems to have introduced a new factor—a tendency never to give up their playthings. This I saw at the Pittsburgh toy show. When Jeremy Padawer said in 2007, “What I think has happened is we’ve been unable to let our childhood go,” he may have been speaking for his company, Jakks Pacific (maker of a variety of licensed toy figures for adults as well as children), but his comment may apply to at least some Gen-Xers. By 2007, about a third of action figures ($1.5 billion worth) were bought by and for males over the age of fifteen. This trend began in the early 1990s and helped launch companies like Jakks Pacific and Mezco Toyz. The NECA (National Entertainment Collectible Association) since 1985 has featured action figures based on movie themes like Pirates of the Caribbean and Nightmare Before Christmas, many of which were taken from stories appearing long after the target collectors were children. Mezco Toyz prospered with a line of Family Guy action figures, based on the adult TV cartoon, and with figures combining humor and horror (especially the Living Dead Dolls). Adult collectors may not (openly) play with these figures the way they did when they were children, but the act of collecting and staging action figures seems to continue from boyhood well into adult life. In 2003, Jakks Pacific added a new dimension to Gen-X nostalgia with plug-and-play TV versions of early video games like Pac-Man, Centipede, Pong, and Asteroids, which originally had been played on Atari game consoles back in the 1970s.52
The drive to “play through” into adulthood seems to characterize at least young boomers and the Gen-X cohort of collectors (similar in age to younger Barbie’s girls). Brian Styles may be representative. In 2006, Styles was an owner of a successful software company with a wife and son but still was a nearly lifelong collector of Lego building sets. Though he abandoned the practice at sixteen, he returned to Legos at twenty in 1988 and by 2006 had seven hundred Lego sets.53 Styles saw no contradiction. Why ever give up the joys of childhood if it doesn’t interfere with successful adulthood? What for some boomers was rediscovered in middle age was enjoyed by some Gen-Xers without any wait. Collecting past fantasy culture might once have been a “utopian refuge” that required various forms of “legitimation” to transform what others saw as time-wasting activity into an art.54 Hertz’s generation and even older boomers held onto childlike things in self-delusion and sometimes in secret. Today, a younger generation can brag about it. Still, both boomers and Gen-Xers shared that “utopian refuge” that at least began in the “wonder years” of the six-to-twelve-year-old. In modern times, these are the years when not only is everything new but when freshness and delight is intensified and highly individualized by makers of playthings who know how to excite wonder and sustain desire. It’s no surprise that these wonder years are recalled in fondness or never, or only reluctantly, given up.
RETRO AND THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF SHARING MEMORIES
Despite the pleasure gained by these collectors, it’s hard not to notice some disappointments, and they seem to have grown over the years. In 1994, about ten thousand men showed up at a G.I. Joe collectors’ convention commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the G.I. Joe doll—or action figure. Many, often more modest, gatherings followed. One of the leaders of the “movement” was Vincent Santelmo. In 2009, at forty-eight years of age, Santelmo claimed to own “99.9 percent” of every Joe figure, uniform, accessory, and other piece of equipment manufactured in the 1960s and 1970s—all in the same mint condition: “My collection is priceless.” But the appeal of Joes and conventions devoted to Joe collectors may have peaked by 2006, with the Joe Show of the New York collector James DeSimone, who had organized up to ten G.I. gatherings a year up to that time. The recession of 2008 and rise of eBay dramatically decreased crowd size (by 90 percent), and DeSimone finally abandoned this business in 2009. Santelmo too had decided to close the books on his hobby (and promotion of G.I. Joe through his numerous publications). G.I. Joe may return, of course, or take on a different form in the Internet age or in a later revival. But, like other consumed nostalgias, Joe may be a wave that has hit the beach. It will be just a matter of time before another wave appears for the following generation, but probably with even less lasting power, given how fragmented collecting culture has become.55
Toy companies have repeatedly revived old lines of playthings, both to sell nostalgia but also to win the imaginations of a new generation. In 2002, for example, Hasbro featured Mr. Potato Head (on his fiftieth anniversary), and Mattel offered a “Matchbox Across America” series (with a car for each state). That year, Mattel’s Masters of the Universe line was also reissued for a retro twentieth-anniversary “celebration.” A Japanese company relaunched the most popular toys from the Transformer line two decades after they first appeared. This was not merely a lazy marketing ploy to sell the tried and true (a motive behind the endless array of movie sequels and copycat TV shows) but an effort to tap into the nostalgia boom while simultaneously drawing in new kids who hadn’t been born when the toy or doll first appeared. As the Vivid Imaginations chief executive Nick Austin, a promoter of retro toy lines, noted in 2003, “You get a multigenerational groundswell of affection when you relaunch the properties.”56 New versions of 1950s-era Radio Flyer vehicles were introduced in 2001, including tricycles, foot-powered scooters, and wagons. While designed for kids, Robert Pasin, a company executive, admitted that the line was intended to appeal to boomer grandparents and other gift givers who had owned Radio Flyers as children. This continued throughout the decade as other toys reached their twentieth anniversaries (Cabbage Patch Kids, My Little Pony, and Care Bears, for example). This suggests a “twenty-year nostalgia cycle that’s built into the pop culture in the twentieth century,” notes Gage Averill of the University of Toronto, as toy (and music) makers tap into the “vivid” impressions of those who were children a generation ago.57
These retro duplicates point to the desire of adult buyers to share their memories with the kids in their lives. These grownups try to regain their inner child in the expression of delight in their giving of gifts to actual kids. Toy makers hope to profit from this impulse. But does this fantasy of cross-generational gift-mediated bonding happen that often, and, if not, what does this say about commercialized nostalgia?
Perhaps typical is the response of the daughters of the journalist Peggy Duffy in 2001, when she gave them new Barbies clad in neon-orange bikinis and dragged out a box of her old Barbie doll clothes that her mother had saved to share with them—her memories of doll play. Not surprisingly, the girls were unimpressed. “They looked at each other, sharing something unsaid between them. It was that generation thing. We all felt it.” Duffy recalled that she “wanted to pass along those hours of pleasure and somehow forge a link between my childhood and theirs.” The daughters accommodated her for a few months when she bought them some new Barbie outfits, but without the same excitement that she recalled, mostly “mixing and matching the new clothes with the old, creating some wild, eclectic attires.”58
Duffy was lucky: her daughters might have tossed out the Barbies, demanding Bratz dolls instead. This line, appearing first in 2001, had a vaguely ethnic look about them: big, almond-shaped eyes with heavy shadow and lips painted with bright gloss. Bratz dolls offered the same array of fashion and consumer themes as Barbie had done for decades, but to many parents, including women who had played with Barbies, these new dolls seemed suspect, even “whorish.” Probably without full awareness, modern girls’ fascination with Bratz dolls is an expression of youthful rebellion similar to that of early Barbie enthusiasts.59 In another twenty years, the girls, who may have abandoned Barbie for Bratz in the first decade of the twenty-first century, will recall Bratz dolls not as the street-wise anti-Barbies that offended their mothers but as cherished memories of childhood, and their daughters might well look to something else in their quest for identity and independence.
But elders still try to win the young to their way of collecting memories. After giving a talk at the Heirloom Doll Club of Kansas City, in November 2011, I chatted with a group of about twenty women, mostly in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, about their efforts to get their children and the younger generation interested in their hobby. One woman declared that members of the younger generation “don’t have the connection” with their elders’ dolls; understandably, they look back not on “my childhood” but on their own. Moreover, the motivation of younger collectors is surely different from the middle aged. Consider an older member who started with hard plastic Madame Alexander dolls (from the 1950s) but, when she later encountered the dolls that her mother and grandmother had as children, switched to collecting these much older antique dolls. Even though she never met her grandmother, she “got to know her” by collecting dolls and making clothes for them just as her grandmother had. She seemed to think that she somehow enhanced her grandmother’s memory by owning dolls that her grandmother might have wanted but couldn’t afford. Her motive was to link with the past. This was no longer the case with the young. She and other members noted that younger women don’t have our “downtime” because today there are “so many stimulants.” There was room in the club for women who identified with Barbie and even the “interactive” ball-jointed dolls from Japan discussed above, but there was only one such member, and she was a newcomer.
The problem of winning younger members to replenish the ranks of older doll collectors has increasingly obsessed the UFDC. While membership grew from 7,263 in 1976 to about 17,000 in 1986, by 2011 club membership had dropped to 10,381 (and of these 1,333 were at-large members who signed up online but did not take part in local club activities). The mean age in 2002 was sixty-four, and a recent administrator, Teresa Faller, estimates that it was about seventy-three in 2011. Clearly, women collectors have less time and willingness to join local doll clubs (a problem shared with other volunteer organizations). Moreover, the leadership no longer consists of affluent homemakers with a lifelong dedication to club activity but instead recently retired professionals or small business owners.60
The UFDC also has been trying to address the other problem—the seeming break in generations where mothers and grandmothers today seem less able (or willing) to recruit their young to their fascination with antique and increasingly old “modern” dolls from the postwar era. Of course, they have found room for Barbie in Doll News, but then Barbie was a half-century old in 2009. Instead of trying to appeal to that young-adult generation, the UFDC has taken a different institutional approach: encouraging clubs to sponsor “junior doll clubs” for girls up to seventeen and to open the convention to girls from eight years of age, all in an effort to instill memories of doll wonder early in life so that it might be picked up again in adulthood. Clubs not only teach girls about classical dolls (no Barbies or Bratz) and the arts of sewing doll clothes and making dolls, but the annual convention has held a “tea party” for junior collectors since 2003. Club leaders, it seems, hope to duplicate themselves in the wonder years of today’s girl, not to address the challenge of “Barbie’s Girls.”61
While I saw men sharing their nostalgia for Marvel comic action figures with their eight-year-old sons at the Pittsburgh toy show, the past is too personal and the cultural gap across generations still too wide for many to bridge. In this era of fast capitalism, playthings change too often (though they may well share common purposes) for kids from one year to the next to share common memories. This is one of the great disappointments of commercialized nostalgia, as the following chapters will show. Despite all the other things that divide enthusiasts of memory, their obsessions are not much ado about nothing but guys’ toys and gals’ dolls. They are witnesses to a modern quest, a return to a childhood long gone, a childhood in many ways irretrievable but still sought in the certainty of possession and collection.