Dispensing With More Adult Concerns
Maybe there’s a collecting gene . If so, it must run pretty strong in Gilli Rhodes’ family. Her father collected Nippon china and always took her with him to garage sales, where she started on baseball cards and Jim Beam bottles, before moving on to old postcards, cigar box labels and her current passions of Raggedy Ann dolls and Pez dispensers. Her 14-year old son, Joshua, has a burgeoning shrine to Bart Simpson filling his bedroom closet.
Their tract home is filled with aquariums of fresh and saltwater fish that her husband, David, collects, while the couple paneled and floored one room with rough-hewn, charred boards to simulate a log cabin appearance. That room is home to various antiques, as well, incongruously, such as Rhodes’ collection of McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, hobbyhorses, Pez folks and Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls (some 130 of ‘em), lunch boxes, radios, lamps, books, phonographs and such.
Rhodes has a little-girl voice that over the phone gives the impression she’s only a quarter of her 43 years. It’s an impression she doesn’t mind fostering: “I’m still a kid at heart. That’s why I like the toys so much.”
Her adult-seeming fixations, such as the Beam bottles and her thousands of gilt, embossed, richly illustrated cigar box labels, were things she collected in her youth.
Now she gets excited by the McDonald’s toys and her 70 Pez dispensers. The latter, you might recall, are those little accessories that dispense candy tablets when their character heads are tilted back. Perhaps my memory is clouded by nostalgia, but this writer recalls Pez candies as being delicately chalk-flavored.
Rhodes is diabetic, so she gives the candy to her grandchildren, who love her anyway. She plans one day to pass all her collections to her progeny. While she keeps an eye on the value and “collectibility” of things, that doesn’t determine what she buys. Rather, “I just like what I like,” she says, pointing out her pile of Pez. “They’re just so cute. I mean, look at ‘em!”
There’s Santa next to the Hulk, beside Snoopy next to Garfield and a Halloween skull, living in harmony. Rhodes is the only Pez person she knows. When she asks antique dealers for them, she’s told they’ve usually thrown them out. A recent ad in the Recycler seeking Pez (try that in the Personals sometime) didn’t get one phone call.
On the East Coast, though, Pez collecting seems to be a big thing. Certain ones go for big bucks, such as Wolfman for $250 and the Green Hornet for $350, according to the recently published “Pictorial Guide to Plastic Candy Dispensers.” Grown people concern themselves over tiny details in such chapter headings as “The ‘Feet’ Versus ‘No Feet’ Controversy,” as if Pez dispensers getting plastic feet was some important link in the theory of evolution.
Though Rhodes did pay $22 for one Pez character called Mr. Ugly, she generally finds them in bags or boxes of old toys at garage sales. Her collection still lacks about 170 characters. With help from her husband, she goes out looking every weekend at sales and swap meets ranging from Long Beach to Garden Grove.
She’s joining an East Coast organization now forming called the Pezamistics. “The people who collect them heavily are called Pezoholics. The danger sign is, if you go a week without finding a Pez, your head starts tilting backward,” Rhodes said.
While she’s only recently started collecting Pez, she readily admits she has too many Raggedy Anns. “I’ve tried to stop collecting them, but every time I go out and see one, I buy it. Even if they’re real raggedy I still like them. Some may be worn and beaten, but that’s what makes them different,” she said.
Unlike today’s marketing department-derived toys, there’s a story to Raggedy Ann. Early in this century there was an illustrator named Johnny Gruele whose daughter, Marcella, was slowly dying from complications of a contaminated smallpox vaccination. Marcella had found a weathered rag doll in her grandmother’s attic and fallen in love with it. Gruele painted a face on it and nightly told her stories of the doll’s exploits, until Marcella died in 1916. Those stories became Gruele’s Raggedy Ann books.
Rhodes has one of the original books, titled “Raggedy Ann and Andy and the Nice Fat Policeman” as well as dolls by the Georgine company dating from the 1920s (these have orangish hair, as opposed to the bright red mops of later dolls). Most of her Anns and Andys sit piled on a couch, 130 bright smiles splashed on their faces. Underneath the clothing of every doll is a painted heart with “I Love You” written in the center.
In her youth, Rhodes’ dad had bought her an Ann and Andy talking alarm clock, which she still has, and the two still shout out a gratingly cheerful wake-up call: “Andy, Andy please get up! It’s time to call our friends!” “OK, Ann, I’m awake. Let’s shout it once again.” “We were meant to wake you. Now here we are to say: Please get up and brush your teeth and start your happy day!” Now Rhodes is getting her revenge. “I go in there every morning going, ‘Good morning! How are you?’ ” she said in a sing-songy lilt. “Other times I go in and have conversations with them.”
She finds that Raggedy Ann still serves the consoling, soothing purpose the doll first did 75 years ago.
“I have a lot of medical problems (including diabetes-related heart and kidney disease and the recent amputation of part of a foot), and the dolls take me away from thinking about all my problems. It’s my escape. I come in here every day, at least two or three times a day, and it just tickles me to see all their faces. I rearrange them and talk to them.
“I look at these guys in here and they’re just always happy. There are smiles on every one of these faces. I really, really do love them.”
