Not Just Toys, They’re Something to Identify With : Dolls Match Their Owners’ Handicaps

The dolls in Susan Anderson’s back shop are firefighters and hikers, baseball players and ballerinas, Scouts and skiers, physicians and pretty girls dressed for parties, and their chins are all turned up, assertive and saying: “Glad to be alive.”

And they are all unmistakably handicapped.

The Eagle Scout is an arm amputee, the skier has lost a leg, the pretty girl is blind and the baseball player has a leg brace. Other dolls command racing wheelchairs, boldly display hearing aids and wear hats or bandannas to cover the ravages of chemotherapy.

“They’re not just handicapped,” Anderson said. “They’re handicapped and doing something.”

Extraordinary Need

And they have met an extraordinary, pent-up need among handicapped children across the country: a doll to identify with.

“I AM HANDICAPPED,” cerebral palsy victim Mary Ann Benka, 15, laboriously typed in a letter, using a pointer affixed to her head. “OH PO PLEASE PLEAASE SEND ME INFO ON HANDCAP DOLLS.”

“She’s so excited,” her mother, Doris, added in a telephone interview from Lowell, Ind. “She’s nonverbal, and she’s in a wheelchair, but her IQ is normal. We’re getting a doll with a wheelchair, and we’re going to have a helmet with a head pointer.

“It stresses her handicap and says, ‘I’m OK too.’ It gives her the feeling there’s something for her too.”

“We are all handicapped,” nine schoolchildren, aged 8 to 13, from Paramus, N.J., wrote. “Some of us have trouble walking and talking. We were very excited to learn there are dolls with handicaps just like us.”

“The child wants a doll with the disability closest to his,” said Anderson, 37, the co-owner of the struggling company that makes the dolls, called Bestfriends. “An order comes in, and we try to make it. We’ll do anything we can.”

Used in Schools

But the dolls are also finding their way into the larger movement of winning acceptance for the handicapped. They are going to school as teaching aids to help children deal better with the handicapped.

“The handicapped dolls were very neat,” wrote a pupil from Texas named Ashley. “We lernded things like not to stare at them.”

“I learned not to laugh at people that are handicapped,” Trey wrote.

“The doll that had cancer minds me of my next door neighbor,” Brittany wrote. “Because she had cancer.”

It was the real-life differences among such children that prompted the dolls in the first place. The soft-sculptured dolls began in this tiny mountain community 40 miles west of Denver largely as a whim. A friend of Anderson, Audrey Boxwell, was sorting dolls at home here one day when the manufactured perfection of them struck her. Later, she would ask Anderson, “What do you think about handicapped dolls?”

It was a natural thought in this mountain valley near the Winter Park ski resort, which has extensively promoted and taught skiing for the handicapped.

“We’re more cognizant of the handicapped here because of Winter Park,” said Anderson, who formerly worked in real estate and resort development. “The kids here race against handicapped skiers.

“And lose.”

Anderson pursued the idea, and sketches of the basic doll were finished in the fall of 1983. A prototype doll emerged in early 1984.

“It’s not an accident they have a chin-up stance,” Anderson said. “They’re assertive . . . not scared to be alive. And their heads are too big for their bodies. It’s something you want to hold, even if he has leg braces on.”

Still, there was the matter of taste, so Anderson took the dolls to a national handicapped skiing competition at Jackson Hole, Wyo., “to see if people stoned us,” she recalled. “But women were crying over them, and men loved them. We knew we could handle it.”

Seamstresses working at home began supplying heads and bodies, some lacking an arm or a leg. Some have all their limbs but have dark glasses, a hearing aid or are designed for a wheelchair to be added later. The straggly-haired chemotherapy dolls come with a matching full-size hat or bandanna for their owners.

“Almost everything we have done,” Anderson said, “has been at the suggestion of professionals” who work with the handicapped.

The custom-made dolls now cost $70, but she is looking for ways to reduce the price. A year ago, the dolls started becoming close companions to the handicapped and others.

“I would like to order one for my son, who is normal, but who I want to accept and understand all people,” a woman wrote in December.

And that is what Susan Anderson would most like to see. “When I walk into Toys ‘R’ Us and see Bestfriends sitting next to Barbie and Ken--that would be the measure of our success,” she said. “It would be acceptance. If we can accept that doll on the shelf, it would mean acceptance generally of people with handicaps.”

To show how important she believes that can be, she retrieved a newspaper clipping: “WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. UPI--Two of four boys, ages 4 to 13, who admitted beating to death a 6-year-old deaf-mute in a dispute over potato chips, will be charged this weekend. . . . (Police) said there are indications the children had ‘picked on’ the victim ‘because he was a little bit different.’ ”

Anderson is contemplating naming her hearing-impaired Best-friends doll after the victim.