I can never remember how these things get started, but a short while ago I found myself on E-Bay looking for this Memory card game from when I was a kid. Now, Memory has been around for ages, with all kinds of images on the cards, but I recalled 
one very specific set, and was in fact able to find it on E-bay. Not only did I find it, I bid on it and won! So now I have this Memory card set from 1966, and these images bring back such memories.
I mentioned last time that I’ve been in a very nostalgic mood, didn’t I?
I thought the acquisition of the Memory game would be my big excitement on the nostalgia front, but I was wrong! Again, don’t know exactly how this got started (though probably from thinking about playing Memory with my sister and cousins and next door neighbors) but I soon started thinking about some dolls I had when I was a kid. Well…E-bay is right there, so I look them up, and lo and behold! There they are!
Apparently these dolls are called “Whimsies” and were only produced in 1960 and 1961. The one doll that was most beloved to me was Trixie the Pixie, though I never knew that was her name, 
because to me she has always been Tessie. I don’t know where the name Tessie came from, but that was her name.
Some of these dolls are now going for $100 and $200, if they are in good condition, but I found someone selling a Trixie the Pixie in “not such good condition,” (“well-loved” is the euphenism, I believe) and the price was extremely reasonable. More importantly, though, seeing this picture of the doll, I actually had to wonder…could this be my EXACT doll? Could this BE Tessie?
The way I remember it, my sister, cousins, neighbors and I went through a time when we used to play in our garage quite a bit, since there was an old piano in there, some lawn chairs and maybe an old couch. We kept our dolls there, with their clothes and carriages and such, and sort of thought of the garage as our “Clubhouse.” That was where the dolls stayed. That was where Tessie stayed.
Only one day, suddenly…no dolls. They were all gone. Tessie and all of them. I never did find out what happened. A logical explanation is that my Dad got tired of us kids making a mess of his garage and threw everything out. I don’t know if that’s what happened, but if it is, I’m sure it’s not because he was being mean, it was probably just because we had made such a mess and never cleaned it up, and we were probably told repeatedly to put our toys away or else, and we never did. And being an auto mechanic by trade, Dad probably just needed his garage back! To him, these dolls would not have looked like anything special. Talking to my Mom recently, she remembers them as “ugly” and “peculiar looking,” and if it was my Dad who got rid of them, I’m sure they didn’t look any more appealing to him.
That may or may not have happened. Another explanation, one which my kid-mind could not fathom at the time: perhaps they were stolen? Perhaps the garage door was left open and some other kids in the neighborhood (or some bad teenagers?) saw them and stole them? Oh, I hope not!
But there is a third possibility. I don’t know if someone said something like this to me, or if it was simply my own overactive imagination trying to make sense of the disappearing dolls, but somehow I got the idea in my head that wild animals must have come into the garage in the middle of the night and dragged the dolls away. Perhaps wild dogs. Perhaps wolves.
Oh, that was the worst scenario of all! And I cried and cried! I can only remember a handful of times in my life when I’ve cried buckets of unending tears, and this was one of them, and possibly the first. (Though this may have happened around the same time that a well-meaning relative offered me one crisp dollar bill in exchange for my collection of 100 shiny pennies, and I cried and cried, feeling I had been utterly GIPPED! And by a family member, no less!)
There are several incidents in my life which stand out as entirely unfair and deeply sad, and the mysterious disappearance of Tessie and the rest of the Whimsie dolls is right up there on the top of the list. To this day, I have always thought of this as one of the open-ended traumas of my childhood. (The penny-gipping being another, and my parents not allowing me to go to a Grassroots concert when I was in 6th grade also right up there on the top of the list.)
But here’s the wonderful thing about being an adult in the age of technology: You can find just about anything you seek on the internet, and if you’re willing to pay for it, you can get it.
So I bid on the Tessie doll, starting at about $16.00, and going all the way up to $24.00. There was a small bidding war with one other customer for a few hours, but in the end, I did not even have to put out the whole $24.00. I got Tessie for $20.50 (and $12.00 shipping.)
She arrived yesterday, looking precisely as I remember, though perhaps a wee bit smaller. (Remember, I was seven or eight the last time I saw her. She hasn’t changed much, but I have.) It seems to me there is something familiar about the stain on the front of her dress. And the sparse matted hair on the back of her head is exactly the way I remember it. I’m not entirely convinced this is the exact same Whimsie doll I had as a kid, but I would not be at all surprised if someone could prove to me that she is.
One thing is different though. This Tessie that arrived USPS yesterday is missing an earlobe, apparently chewed off by some animal with teeth. That pack of wolves? Is that, in fact, how they dragged her from the garage all those years ago?
Has my Tessie been raised by wolves ever since? Funny…she does not seem at all wild, she simply seems content to be home. I gave her a sponge bath, cleaned her eyes and the corners of her mouth with Q-tips, and washed her outfit in Woolite. Unfortunately, the outfit still looks extremely ratty. (Well, how would your clothes look if you’d been wearing the same dress for 53 years?)
I searched though my “hope chest” of a few items I’ve kept from when my kids were babies, and found this nice little soft pajama set and put her in that. All clean and comfy, she seems happy to stay home and enjoy the house with Squee while I am away. At some time in the future I may visit yard sales and look for little socks or shoes, and dresses and other clothes in size 0-3 months, so she can enjoy feeling pretty.
We still have to do something about her hair, though. When she lived in the garage, I remember that one of our “toys” was an old brown wig we would sometimes put on her head, and she would look very glamorous. 
But I don’t think I want to do anything like that with her now. I think I’ll just gently wash her pink hair with Dawn (as suggested on this Whimsies website) and carefully brush it out, and maybe braid it up again. Her hair was never her strong point. Her charm has always been in her impish expression.
My Mom called her “ugly” and “peculiar looking,” and to some degree that is true, when you consider the pretty baby dolls some children like to play with. Not me. Besides the Whimsies, my other favorite “dolls” were TROLLS. (I had the troll clubhouse carrying case, and would often create outfits for them from the tiniest bits of fabric.)
So maybe I was somewhat of a peculiar kid. I don’t know, and at this point, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Tessie is home, and one gaping hole in my childhood has been satisfactorily closed up. Now my only concern is keeping those wild wolves from getting into our house and dragging her off again. But that shouldn’t be to hard, since we have an alarm system, and I doubt the wolves know the code.
