DEL.ICIO.USCABBAGE PATCH KIDS TURN 25
Doll creator: Coming up with fresh ideas will be the challenge
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, September 20, 2008
For a man whose signature is scrawled on the left buttock of about 115 million babies worldwide, Xavier Roberts, 53, is a shy guy. Inspired by an old German artform and his quilter mama, Roberts created dolls he called Little People in 1978 — they’re hitting the big 3-0 this year — a move that led to the Cabbage Patch Kid craze.
It’s tough for him to pick a favorite among so many sweet-faced options, but if you make him, Roberts sighs that there’s always Otis Lee, a blue-eyed baldy born in 1978.
BabyLand General Hospital
Xavier Roberts and the staff at BabyLand General Hospital are working on a new 70,000-square-foot space for the Cabbage Patch Kids and their fans.
BabyLand General Hospital
Roberts was inspired by an old German artform and his quilter mama.
• Cleveland, Ga., will celebrate its Fall Leaf Festival and the Cabbage Patch birthday Saturday. The festival and events at BabyLand General Hospital, 73 W. Underwood St. in Cleveland, are free. For more information, visit www.cabbagepatchkids.com or www.clevelandbetterhometown.org.
• Cabbage Patch Kids turn 25
• Send us photos of your favorite Cabbage Patch Kids! | See yours!
LIVING
Latest Headlines:
• More Living Stories
• Living photo galleries
• Georgia Aquarium news and photos
• Zoo Atlanta news and photos
Otis lives in Atlanta, in Roberts’ home in the Four Seasons in Midtown, but traveled to New York to celebrate the Kids’ birthday. “I think he still likes all that,” Roberts says. “He has more clothes than I do.”
What else has grown up out of the cabbage patch? Consider, according to Roberts, the Kids’ past, present and future.
Past
“The original idea was that they were really pieces of contemporary art, pieces of sculpture. In art school, that’s what I wanted to do,” says Roberts, who attended Truett-McConnell College in Cleveland, and says he’d still like to finish college. “I never saw them as toys. It was the adult that was always collecting them.”
The largest collection of dolls might belong to Eileen and Bob Cancilla of San Francisco. Eileen Cancilla says she waited in line in 1983 to buy Betsy, a pony-tailed doll, Matilda, a pig-tailed doll, and Homer, a bald baby boy, for her daughters and herself. Now the Cancillas have 1,700.
“They made everybody in the family happy,” says Eileen, now 62, who is in Georgia to celebrate the Kids’ anniversary. “It’s hard to explain. You either just totally love them or you think, ‘Those people are crazy!’ “
Present
“They’ve grown up so fast,” Roberts lamented during a phone interview from Cleveland this week. He can hardly believe all his Kids, even the little ones he named out of a 1937 baby book and dressed with garage sale clothes, are 25 or 30 years old.
Throughout all the manufacturing changes, he says, they tried to produce new faces, hairstyles and fashion. They played around with electronics, but that all brought them back to more traditional babies with soft bodies and whimsical looks in their painted eyes.
“To make it fresh and new and at the same time keep the essence, that’s something we’ll struggle with the next 25 years,” Roberts says.
So why did it survive beyond a holiday shopping craze? It’s hard to know. “I think it’s just magic,” Roberts says.
Future
Roberts and the staff at BabyLand General Hospital, the medical clinic he converted into a baby-building attraction in the 1970s, are working on a new 70,000-square-foot space for the Cabbage Patch Kids and their fans. The new building is located on 96 acres in Cleveland and will include retail space, offices, archives and yes, birthday party space. It’s expected to open in spring 2009. “Mother Cabbages” will keep hand-stitching Kids on the old site until the move.
“It’s just dreaming,” Roberts says. “I guess that’s what I’ve learned: you never know who you’re going to meet and how you’re life’s going to change.”
.JPG)
-1.JPG)
Services »
