Meet Princess Elizabeth. She has curly blonde hair, blue eyes and pale skin. She is wearing a long yellow dress and a red cape. She looks like a beautiful little girl, but she’s about 75 years old. Elizabeth is based on the Princess who became Queen of England in 1952. She is one of thousands of dolls at Dee’s Place of Dolls. The store is located in Covina, California, and specializes in restoring and selling both antique and modern dolls.
like an egyptian
Dolls are probably the oldest toys in the world. They were popular among ancient civilizations and even found in Egyptian tombs that are more than 4,000 years old. Traditionally used in magic and religious rituals, dolls became increasingly popular as toys during Victorian times and are now valuable collectibles, too.
As well as restoring and selling dolls, Dee’s Place also sells dollhouses, clothes, shoes, furniture and other accessories. It has occasional classes where people can learn to make porcelain dolls. And it sells supplies for dollmakers, including wigs, eyes and a variety of doll bodies.
INTERVIEW: hello, dolly!
Charlene Hess is the owner of Dee’s Place of Dolls, which was founded by her mother in 1960. In recent years the store has provided dolls for TV shows like CSI, Glee and Pretty Little Liars, as well as for the 2014 horror movie Annabelle. It has also repaired some remarkable dolls. One 19th century French doll, for example, was worth over $10,000:
Charlene Hess (Standard American accent): I think the lady got it in France and then brought it over here, so it had had a lot of damage to the body because after so long with them playing with them with… nowadays, the dolls are like throw-away dolls, but back then, the doll would go to the doll hospital every time to get repaired before it got turned over to them on Christmas again. It was kind of a thing that they did back then. The doll hospitals were a little more… available because they couldn’t afford a new doll every year, so they would just repair it. So she’d had it since her childhood.
image problem
Unfortunately, horror movies like Annabelle have helped give dolls a rather creepy image:
Charlene Hess: I think it’s from the movies because before, kids loved dolls. Everybody had dolls when they were little… It’s the same thing with the clowns. People are scared of clowns now and that used to be a big thing – everybody liked clowns at their birthday and everything. So I think that’s part of it… I have been here since I was little and I have yet to meet a possessed doll, or one that talks, or one that’s just very mean. There’s no such thing. They’re all very… just wanting to be loved!
what we have lost
So are dolls falling out of favour?
Charlene Hess: Maybe just a little bit. Some kids do really like them still… You know, I was lucky when I was little, my grandmother used to take me and sit me on the floor when I was like three years old and put the antique dolls around and I used to be able to sit there and play and she’d play tea with me and the dolls and stuff. I think it’s something that families need to do. They need to sit down and play with their kids because, when you have a doll, you also know how to hold a baby. It’s a learning process – learning to love something, learning to be able to hold something, you know, a doll or a child. It’s, I think, a very important part of our life.