Pantyhose, a pattern, and a prayer: Shoddy Goods 022

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I’m Jason Toon, back to jingle up another Christmas edition of Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell. Those of us of a certain age and socioeconomic background may remember a fascinating phenomenon when millions of Americans said “no” to the must-have toy of the season and made their own version instead…

A Pennsylvania store manager armed himself with a baseball bat as a thousand keyed-up shoppers massed outside the locked doors. A mob of five thousand stormed a West Virginia department store. An Iowa grandmother enlisted her football-player grandson and two of his friends to muscle their way through the local crowds. The New York Times compared the mania to the rowdy gas lines of the 1970s, and reported that a Connecticut store had their stock delivered by armored car.

In the run-up to Christmas 1983, and again in 1984, it seemed like everyone in America was fighting over Cabbage Patch Kids.

“One of my earliest memories in my life,” a friend told me, “was going to the Toy Chest on South Lindbergh (in St. Louis) and seeing this horde of violent mothers climbing over each other to get a chance at catching a doll as the store manager frantically tried to hand them out!”

But there was another, quieter response to the madness. It played out not in shopping malls and parking lots but in sewing rooms and basements. Why fight for an overpriced Cabbage Patch Kid when you could make your own?


Misshapen with love

Black-market babies

If you know, you know. The homemade versions might have outnumbered the real ones; they certainly did in my Midwestern working-class world. My grandma made bespoke CPKs for my sisters and my girl cousins. My wife and her sisters got them for Christmas, too, as did a bunch of my friends who I asked about it. The official Cabbage Patch Kids were supposedly all unique, but these were really unique.

Like the oversized ones given to a friend of mine and her sister by her grandmother. “We loved them because they could wear real baby clothes, unlike real Cabbage Patches which were smaller. Ours had weird short fake fur hair.”

A parallel industry of Patchalike patterns and kits popped up in craft stores to serve this quiet but widespread movement. But if you didn’t have the skills or time to make your own, there was probably a black-market dollmaker in your church, your office, or your neighborhood who’d stitch one up for a price. I love picturing this underground of samizdat seamstresses, sewing away at the behest of desperate parents, each putting their own twist on the fad formula.

“There was a lady from church who made them, so my grandma got me one from her because she was not about to ‘buy one from the store’,” says one friend.


Better Homes and Gardens: handbook of the doll underground

“Got one made by a neighbor,” says another. “The biggest difference was the head. It was a good attempt at recreating that specific facial shape, but it was obviously not the plastic head of the real deal ones. Otherwise the imitation was pretty remarkable.”

That wasn’t always a problem: some kits included a plastic head to get you started. But whether their heads were storebought molded plastic or soft-sculpted with little more than pantyhose, a pattern, and a prayer, they filled a need that the corporate market created but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, satisfy.

Some kids, of course, were old enough to know the difference, and some of them were old enough to be status-conscious about it. “I totally got a fake one for Christmas one year,” a friend told me. “My mom bought it from someone, but stayed up all night sewing clothes for her. The ungrateful brat I was, I made her forge Xavier Roberts’ signature on the doll’s butt.”

Obviously, it’s also true that trying to replicate the “so ugly they’re cute” appeal of Cabbage Patch Kids could take the homemade versions into some weird places. Another friend of mine recently inherited one from a great-aunt that, sentiment aside, was just too unsettling to keep. “I felt bad for finding her creepy,” she says, “but couldn’t just sell her or dispose of her, so I found a nice immigrant family who wanted her, and I gave her to them. They sent me a photo of her watching the Grammy Awards.”

But however kids may have felt at the time, you can sense the warmth and appreciation when they talk about their unofficial Cabbage Patch-style dolls now. Their parents and grandparents were doing their best to come through with a Christmas miracle in a tough situation. Forty years later, it’s the thought that counts.


Doll-it-yourself

Back to their roots

So why Cabbage Patch Kids? What made them something unique in American toy history: a commercial phenomenon reclaimed, its distinctive stylistic details co-opted for a folk handicraft? As far as I know, there was no big groundswell of do-it-yourself Rubik’s Cubes, or Barbies, or Beanie Babies.

For one thing, the real ones weren’t just in short supply, they weren’t cheap. Their $30 list price is equivalent to $93 today, which would put them in the same premium doll league as American Girl. For a lot of families, that price tag was reason enough to figure something else out.

And that’s if you could score one in a store. All bets were off in the resale market. Classified ads for Cabbage Patch Kids in December 1983 listed prices as high as $600, more like $1900 in today’s dollars. We can only hope those resellers were visited by a series of ghosts on Christmas Eve.


The classifieds: where the Christmas spirit goes to die. From the Arizona Republic, one week before Christmas, 1983

But it was the style of Cabbage Patch Kids that made them so ripe for imitation, a folksy, imperfect, country-cottage look that you could mimic without a precision lathe or a machine press.

That’s no accident. That’s exactly how Cabbage Patch Kids started: as a folk-art craft project, something you could make at home. And despite what he told the media during the flush of his fame, Xavier Roberts had nothing to do with it.

A Kentucky artist named Martha Nelson Thomas had been selling her soft-sculpture Doll Babies kits since 1971, complete with adoption papers. She met Roberts at a craft fair a few years later, and he loved the kits enough to strike up an agreement to sell them in Georgia. But after Thomas ended that arrangement, Roberts started making his own very similar “Little People”, which turned into Cabbage Patch Kids, which turned Roberts into a kajillionaire with his signature on countless plush little derrières. Eventually Roberts settled a lawsuit brought by Thomas for an undisclosed sum.

Fortunately, no lawsuit could stop the grassroots surge of homemade, handmade, lovingly made unofficial Cabbage Patch Kids. If some of them were grotesque, they were a lot less grotesque than the spectacle of adults brawling for the right to spend a day’s wages on a hyped-up corporate toy. And while they were never my jam, I think it’s a little sad that we’ll probably never see another “toy of the year” with a booming DIY equivalent. Not even my grandma could sew me a PS5 Pro.


The “knockoff” that the “real” one knocked off: Martha Nelson Thomas’s Original Doll Baby

I remember brainstorming new Garbage Pail Kids with my elementary-school pals, and enlisting the slightly more artistic of the group to sketch out absurdist caricatures of them. I’m sure they looked ridiculous, but I do wish we still had those around.

What were the must-have toys when you were growing up? And what’d you do if you couldn’t get them? Share your nostalgic knock-offs and see what everyone else tried to hack together in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat!

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Won’t you give one of these adorable Shoddy Goods articles a loving home?