Reply #13: Cabbage patch dolls [View All]

[Tansy_Gold]

I have files and files and files of odd bits of esoterica and usually I can put my hands on the most bizarre and esoteric without difficulty. Finding my shoes or driver's license is frequently another story. . . .

from Garry Barker's "The Handcraft Revival in Southern Appalachia, 1930-1990," University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Barker was an executive for many years with various mountain handicraft organizations including the Kentucky Guild of Artisans and Craftsman, the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, and Berea College.

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(p. 117)

When shy, creative Martha Nelson first brought her "real babies" to a Kentucky Guild Fair, none of us knew we were witnessing the beginnings of a 1980s marketplace explosion. The "Cabbage Patch" dolls, which became a national rage, evolved from Martha's one-of-a-kind creations.

Martha Nelson not only conceived the "Cabbage Patch" doll, she also created the marketing ploy which was to be so successfully used by Xavier Roberts. Each of Martha's babies came with "papers," a name, and personal history; customers "adopted" their babies. Georgia entrepreneur Roberts first saw Martha's babies at the guild fair in Berea and tried to get her to go into business with him. She refused, not wanting to see her individual artwork turned over to mass manufacture. Roberts did it anyway, and we all know the eventual result in the marketplace. When I wrote Roberts (at Martha's request) to protest his use of her designs and concepts, the response was a rapid, threatening letter from Roberts's attorney who warned me that *I* would be sued if I said more. Roberts was willing to pay royalties to Martha Nelson, but she wanted the whole thing stopped. The courtroom battle lasted for almost a decade and ended in an undisclosed out-of-court settlement.

A "Cabbage Patch" predecessor, "Nettie," sits watching me write, a wry reminder that the nost successful ever craft-to-commerce transition was totally unwanted by the original artist.

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Capitalism and advertising, its handmaiden, have brainwashed us into believing that not only do we WANT things we don't need but that we have an inviolable RIGHT to have them. So Xavier Roberts and Coleco (IIRC) became rich and thousands of children had Cabbage Patch dolls because their mothers and fathers and grandmothers fought each other in the department stores over them. And now most of them are buried in landfills or falling apart in attics, forgotten and unlamented.

People all over the world survive -- some just barely and some quite comfortably -- with a lot less of the pure unadulterated SHIT that fills our homes. And usually there's someone getting buy with a whole lot less BECAUSE of the rampant consumption we feel is our right.