The Doll Hospital

One of my mother’s earliest memories reached back to 1919 when she was six years old. It was the day her maternal grandmother, Lucy Larman, took her to a very special place - a doll hospital.

Mom never mentioned what she was wearing but it would have been a dress carefully chosen and freshly washed and ironed for the day. Perhaps it was the white dress with the stylish black below-the-waist belt that she was wearing in a photograph taken about the same time, the one that would have contrasted so well with her thick, shiny auburn-black hair. Maybe she was also wearing her special black patent leather shoes with the single straps that she liked so much. And no doubt she would have had a big bow clipped to her short boyish bob.

“It was a warm sunny spring or summer day,” she told me in 2001. “The doll hospital was in an old red brick house on Toronto’s Bloor Street. I remember walking through the big wooden door and into a world of wonder.”

Inside was a room of shelves filled with what seemed like hundreds of dolls of all kinds and sizes. There was also a glass showcase with a wooden frame at just the right height for a child to see the many dolls inside.”

A big sign at the back of the room indicated the hospital part. But since my mother didn’t have a broken or sick doll she didn’t go there. She said that she remembered wondering briefly about dolls having their eyes replaced or their bodies re-stuffed but was too excited about her immediate mission to give it much thought. Instead, she walked slowly around the large outer room with her grandmother, their footsteps echoing on the polished but well-worn wooden floor. They took their time going from doll to doll. Mom looked at each one carefully for a long time. You see, she was being allowed to choose a doll of her very own and that was a huge decision for a six-year-old.

The first doll that attracted her was behind the glass case - a boy doll dressed in red leggings and matching tuque. Mom studied him long and hard. But in the end she chose a blond, blue-eyed baby doll with a hard washable body wearing a diaper, a vest, a long christening gown, and a bonnet. After making her selection mom and her grandmother walked to the wooden counter, worn smooth by many years of use, to pay for the doll. As the clerk rang up the sale mom silently watched the big black numbers on white squares pop up inside the brass cash register sitting above the glass showcase. Mom never said who got to carry her baby doll home but she did say she named her Ruth, after one of her first friends.

Being the eldest girl and the first grandchild in her large extended family my mother had a number of dolls when she was young. Her favorites were an Eaton Beauty doll with brown eyes and hair named Violet that her Aunt Grace had given her; a cloth doll named Lizzy - perhaps named after her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Wilson; and a clown called Dutch. She also had two bears that she said looked more like real bears than do today’s toy bears. One of her bears was named Marmaduke, the other simply Teddy.

Although there were many benefits to being the oldest child in her family there were disadvantages too. One disadvantage was that nothing remained of mom’s doll collection when she grew older except one photo showing her beside a small bookcase in her bedroom. The bookcase shelves were crowded with dolls, bears and books. Mom suspected that her doll family, along with her other toys and books were either passed on to her younger sisters, her brother, or one of her 18 cousins, or perhaps they were damaged by the damp weather when they lived in Florida. Mom’s dolls may not have been kept for her when she out grew playing with them but they were such an important part of her “family” that they were still a vivid for her more than 80 years later.

© June Coxon - September, 2006
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