Looking into a Century of Dolls

MARION - Walk into Janet Flanagan's shop and 600 pairs of eyes stare back at you.

Spooky?

Nah. The eyes are not alive; they belong to dolls. Cloth head dolls, China head dolls, metal head dolls. Flossie Flirt, Betsy Wetsy, Chatty Cathy.

The birth dates of the dolls range over more than a century, from the 1860s into the 1970s.

"Come visit your childhood," says Janet, 68, who opened All Dolled Up on earlier this year at 915 Eighth Ave. in Marion. "A lot of these dolls are from the boomer period."

But you won't find even one version of the most popular doll ever.

"I don't do Barbie," Janet says. "That's a whole ‘nother shop."

But artistic dolls (right) occupying a sofa near the front door, many with human hair. They range in price from $250 up $400.

"I think anything more than that is a car payment," Janet says. "I just don't do it."

Instead, most dolls are around the $100 mark. They're a continuation of not only Janet's childhood on a farm just outside Farmersburg, but the doll shop she had in Rockford, Ill., for 11 years.

With Janet's retirement on the horizon her sister, Nancy Simon of Cedar Rapids, talked her into opening a shop in the area. When Janet visited Marion, she was like a child falling in love with her first doll.

"I am so impressed with Marion," Janet says. "They have an uptown group that's always coming up with something."

She leased this 1865 house with a wraparound porch, found an apartment in Marion and moved four U-Haul truck loads of dolls to Iowa.

Janet's mother loved dolls, so Janet and two sisters would look in a catalog, add the doll they wanted to their Christmas list with the page number and the doll would appear beneath the tree.

"When people said there was no Santa," she says, "I said there is. I probably believed longer than most kids."

Janet, who has taught high school English and worked the last 24 years in the office of a newspaper clipping service, started a doll club in Rockford in 1986. She opened her first doll shop in 2000 and it grew to cover 5,000 square feet when the lease ran out this year.

All Dolled Up offers repair service, free layaway and accepts credit cards. Janet has no Internet site or Facebook page, preferring instead to meet customers face to face, especially children.

"That's the next generation of doll collectors," she says. "We fuss over them."

Open the front door and Janet enthusiastically leads you on a tour of wax head dolls, papier-mâché dolls and bisque dolls from Germany's golden age, 1890 to 1915, before factories were converted for World War I.

The shop has 15 Shirley Temple dolls, the oldest from 1935, that sell in the $150 range. If you're looking for something earlier, a 1924 Flossie Flirt (right) with rolling eyes is $125 while 1950s Betsy Wetsy dolls are $60 to $150. The 1960s Chatty Cathy dolls, because they don't work, are around $85.

"In my 11 years in business, I've never had one that worked," Janet says. "Those strings were just pulled and pulled."

Great Christmas presents of the past, these dolls still fascinate Janet and make her feel good as she works in her festively decorated shop.

"To have a house like this for my hobby," she says, "was always my dream."

Comments: (319) 398-8323;