The great article on rare cloth dolls will go in one of my scrapbooks full of doll information. Imagine a collection with 20 Izannah Walker dolls!
I keep hard
copy scrap books I have had since the 1950’s, much reworked but a few of the
original pages are still in it, going back in at least one case to a 1930’s
antiques mag clipping. Many 40’s and 50’s clippings from mags given me by Stella
Hart of Cleburne who was my doll collecting mentor from the beginning. That
little lady when in her late 70’s and early 80’s would set out on a greyhound
bus headed for UFDC convention every summer with a little black leather valise which would
contain three small dolls, house shoes and a change of unders and little ,more.
She would clamp a hat on her head and away she would go, and return with
her dolls wearing ribbons. She lent me hobbies mags, and talked about her dolls
and introduced me to Dallas collectors, notably Mrs Tyler who invited me into
her home to study and photograph her dolls. Wonderful days.
I was living on a
ranch in Comanche county then, and drove back and forth to Dallas every few
months to see my parents there with my little girls in the car with me. I would
stop at Mrs Hart’s and show her what I had acquired or was dressing or such. My
mama was searching the goodwills in Dallas for any doll item of merit. One item my mama
turned up for me back in the 1950's was a Steiff bear, of pretty good size not a small one, which I
traded to a collector/dealer in Hamilton Texas for a child’s chair. The bear
looked great in the chair but when the trade was done neither of us had them
both to enjoy! The little chair went through our fire, and is now painted black
and is with me still. It is perhaps my earliest New England piece.
Many year later Elizabeth P some how turned up in Ft Worth with two brown cotton print dresses from Mrs. Hart’s estate. Mrs. Hart would never cut them up for dolls dresses, but EP did so. I have tiny scraps of them still. e