You can’t beat the price: Just $5 to fix a knee or make an aging rear end look brand new again? Even members of Congress don’t have it that good.
Meanwhile, the clientele is quite select: Only “originals” who were born here beginning 35 years ago in this little White County community (as opposed to being mass manufactured and sold by the likes of Mattel and Toys R Us) are eligible to check in to Bath Camp at BabyLand General Hospital— essentially, the ultimate sick bay for the world famous Cabbage Patch Kids.
It’s a unique place that’s arguably becoming more unique with each passing year as toy collecting goes the way of last year’s smartphone. Experts say younger people show little interest in maintaining their older relatives’ doll collections.
“The times are changing,” says Judith Dommergue of Doll Doctor On Call in Roswell. “The young people that are in their 20s and 30s now, they’ll keep maybe one of Grandma’s dolls. The other 50 that they’ve inherited, they don’t want anymore.”
Babies’ birthplace
Tucked away in the North Georgia mountains, Cabbage Patch stands out as an obvious exception.
The doll maker’s Bath Camp plays a huge part in instilling loyalty in old and new customers.
“I’m a good mother,” Donna E. Shepherd said with the ideal blend of seriousness and humorous self-awareness you’d hope to find in someone who owns approximately 1,200 Cabbage Patch Kids — seven of which she’s sent from her Augusta home to Bath Camp over the years for careful cleaning and repair.
“I know what I can do and not do for my babies,” she said. “I can take care of dust and small little spots. But if it’s a major something, I’d rather send it to the experts on putting the arm on right side up.”
So would the owners of the 50 to 60 babies who go through Bath Camp every month, according to Margaret McLean, director of corporate communications for Original Appalachian Artworks, Cabbage Patch’s parent company. The pace picks up even more around the holidays as babies pour in to be spruced up for Christmas card photos (yes, really) or gifting to the next generation, said Angie Caldwell, a Bath Camp nurse whose expertise includes freckling and blushing.
“They are made to be loved and they definitely are,” said Caldwell, who’s seen “babies,” as they’re generally referred to in and outside of BabyLand, covered with everything from chocolate milk to bicycle tire tracks. “You can tell the ones that are really, really loved.”
Patients most commonly check in for the gently thorough, $30 bathing process that gives the institution its name. Yet others spend what’s typically a four to six week convalescence undergoing more complicated surgery and seeing various specialists:
To have their signature “outtie” bellybuttons repaired. Or address their “crack-itis,” which occurs when the special stitches that form the baby’s rear end need replacing. Even to have a leg reattached, which the surgeon may approach either from the outside or — ouch! — the inside.
Like everything else at camp, the actual bathing process is closed to outside prying eyes. Ask how the all-fabric, hand-stitched originals are cleaned, for instance, and you get some deliciously nonsensical answer that brings to mind images of chubby cheeked “babies” dogpaddling and lounging around in deck chairs.
“They have a lot of pool parties,” said Caldwell. “Some of them don’t want to go back home.”
Father of the kids
Cabbage Patch’s homegrown success story began in 1976, when Xavier Roberts, a 21-year-old art student and Cleveland native, used German fabric sculpture and Appalachian mountain quilting techniques to create what he first dubbed his “Little People.”
Two years later, he’d come up with the concept of giving each one-of-a-kind little person its own name and birth certificate and begun offering them for “adoption” for $40 apiece from a renovated medical clinic here.
Renamed “Cabbage Patch Kids” in 1982, a mass produced toy version went on sale for $30 the following year — and stores promptly sold 3 million of them. But they could have sold more. Desperate parents staked out toy stores for weeks leading up to Dec. 25th and Newsweek put a red-haired Cabbage Patch Kid on its cover with the headline “Marketing a Christmas Fad.”
All along, the painstakingly hand-made“originals” continued to be produced at BabyLand General. In a sign that the operation that’s sent more than 123 million “babies” into the world has never really lost its small town feel, no one can really say for sure when Bath Camp came into being. McLean says “long timers” remember making minor repairs for distraught owners almost from the moment BabyLand General opened in 1978; they generally agree that Bath Camp formally opened sometime in the 1990s.
In late 2009, the hospital relocated to an enormous new 70,000 square foot building featuring breathtaking mountain views, a hallway lined with signed photos of early celebrity fans such as Hugh Hefner, Donald Trump and Telly Savalas, a large function room suitable for proms and weddings and an elaborate “cabbage patch” where “live” births occur several times a day.
Admission to BabyLand General — whose handsome lobby is filled with display cases featuring some of the first and most valuable babies — is free. McLean says Roberts wanted to reward and thank people for their loyalty to his creations — loyalty that is now extending to a third generation in some cases.
“I was a bad mother and didn’t take her to college with me,” Christy St. Clair laughingly recalled about Doreen, the Cabbage Patch Kid her mother had stood in line at Northlake Mall to buy her as a Christmas gift in 1979. “She stayed with my parents. But she came back to live with me when my first child was born.”
That little girl is 9 now and St. Clair had come to BabyLand General with her parents, Nick and Gloria Morgan of Canton, to select a Christmas present for her: A Cabbage Patch Kid of her own to love and care for and . . . well, who knows beyond that?
“Maybe someday she’ll be here doing the same thing with her baby and her daughter,” St. Clair mused.
‘Feeling their mortality’
Beyond BabyLand’s metaphorical boundaries, though, it’s something of a different story. Veteran doll restorers report that a generational shift is occurring: In an age when young people can scarcely wait for their next text message, they wonder, who among them has the time or inclination to fuss over dolls, teddy bears or toys made eons ago?
At Atlanta Doll Clinic, many customers are “feeling their mortality,” said “chief surgeon” Linda Suzanne Blase.
“They come in saying, ‘None of my kids are interested [in their collection], I want to sell it off to people who really want it,” said Blase, who believes these customers want her help making their dolls look good for other reasons besides pure economics. “They want to find someone who’s a caretaker for the next generation.”
Still, the news isn’t entirely bleak. While holding onto an entire collection may have lost its appeal for many younger people, individual dolls still have the power to stir strong feelings in some. And that makes them willing to do almost anything to hold onto those feelings.
“Restoration and repair is an emotional thing, as opposed to a value thing,” said Blase, explaining about the younger customers who come in clutching dolls behind their backs: “Really, they’re clinging to their childhood, or they’re making an association with Aunt Tilly or their mother.”
At Bath Camp, they know you can’t put a price on that. Not even at $7.50 a bellybutton.
“We’ve had people come in here who got their [original] 30 years ago and now their daughter is having a baby and they want to give her their baby as a shower gift,” said Caldwell. “They’ll send it to Bath Camp and get it all fixed up and smelling good and [with] new ribbons in its hair.
“Being able to pass that baby on from generation to generation — they’re as attached to that as we are.”
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