"I'm Going To Buy A Paper Doll"

Was a favorite song in the 50's but I have taken it literally and have collected over 50 books of paper dolls. My favorite is "Gone With the Wind" reprinted for the 50th Anniversary of the movie. Meagan's mother Jennifer bought them for me. The reason I like them so well is they are an exact replica of the kind we played with in my early grade school years.

My first set of dolls was when I was about 5. I remember because we were in the white house on the South Side of Glendive and all my brothers and sisters were in school. It was a large Snow White and all the Seven Dwarfs. I would play school with them all over the living room. You can't find a set like that anymore. Nor can you find the Bride and Groom set we had with all the attendants, flower girls, ring bearer, plus mother and father of the bride.

I probably did not have many of my own, but my friend Donna had many sets and they were all kept neatly in boxes in her closet. She and her sister Pat had a huge double bedroom with beds to the side of the room so we had a lot of room to spread them out. Donna and I would play for hours, she was a year younger, but we had lived next door to each other on the South Side and we followed them to the Heights. Our parents fished together among other things so we were together quite a bit.

Her mother always had homemade vanilla ice cream and Hershey's topping and often home made cookies. It was a nice place to be. Sometimes I would stay till after dark and because I was afraid to walk on the sidewalk by all the bushes and hedges, I would walk for a block in the middle of the street and sing "He Walks With Me", a hymn I had learned at the Methodist Church, and then I would run up the dark hill to our house as fast as I could go.