Thief Takes More Than Dolls From Woman’s Small World

When I first talked to Pat Bayley on the phone, the sadness threading through her words made her stop and sigh. “This isn’t news, is it?” she would say, and I would answer, “No, probably not.”

We kept talking, though, just because. Pat’s dolls, Barbies mostly, had been stolen. She’d discovered the crime, at an Anaheim storage locker, only hours before. The police had been pretty blase, but at least an officer came out.

The speculation was that the thief would try to sell the dolls quickly, say, at a swap meet, maybe use the money for drugs. But what did it matter now?

Pat was trying to put her feelings into words, and hollowness and even devastation were the sentiments that were coming through. Still, she’d step back a bit, shadowed by the bigger ugliness all around, and I could hear the frustration crystallize in her tone. “But those were my kids.”

Thievery has become so rampant, so mundane, that too many people are beginning to lump it in into that oxymoronic category known as victimless crime. No, it is hardly news.

Lose a car stereo? The kid’s bicycle gone again? We’re supposed to think of theft as an urban tax, for the sake of our blood pressure and possibly, our lives.

Except I got the sense that Pat Bayley, 58, wasn’t nearly that hip. She doesn’t want to be. There are larger issues at stake, underpinning the cut corners here and there, and she refuses to allow them to slip away. At least in her own life, that is.

Pat would talk wistfully, with lots of pauses, when she’d recall her stolen dolls--the Madame Alexander dressed as Scarlett O’Hara that her mother bought her in 1940, the Spanish Barbie, even five Cabbage Patch Kids--and you’d have to respect their place in her life.

The police officer told her to write up an inventory of the missing dolls--she thinks they number about 160--and include their worth. That’s why when I went to see her a few days later, she’d just bought a book, “Doll Values,” that she hoped would help.

Pat is not a doll collector in the traditional sense, not like the man in San Diego whose $1 million Barbie collection was stolen, and later recovered, last month. His was believed to be the nation’s largest and most valuable of its kind.

In his well attended press conference, this man made a point of saying that every one of his Barbie items was in mint condition and therefore worth the big bucks.

“They’ve never been played with,” he said.

But Pat’s never considered how much her collection mattered in dollars and cents. It wasn’t insured--she never thought about it--and wouldn’t have had the money for a policy even if she had.

“They were never meant to be sold,” she says. “They were meant to be loved.”

As Pat is saying this, she is showing me a Madame Alexander doll--her other two were stolen--this one dressed as Anne of Green Gables, she of the book fame.

Pat has a fantasy that, some day, she’ll have a doll house just like Green Gables and that she’ll decorate it just like the home of her Canadian pen pal on St. Edward Island, whom she actually visited two years ago.

From inside the doll’s little carpet bag, Pat pulls out the nightgown that Anne wore in the orphanage. Pat holds it up so that I might admire it too.

The dolls that Pat had kept in her small Anaheim apartment are still here, as is a shopping bag full of Barbie imitators that she had picked up at garage sales and thrift shops over the years.

The thief who ransacked the storage locker left those dolls behind, along with everything else--some old appliances, newspaper clippings, phonograph records, fabric, yarn and an artificial Christmas tree that has seen better days. But many of her best dolls, with the longest memories, are gone.

“It’s not the money I put into it,” Pat says. “It’s the time I spent selecting each one, the time I spent adding each one to my family. If the Barbies were bigger, I would have slept with them. And here I am a grown woman. I loved them. I changed their clothes. I smoothed their hair. I put their shoes on. I’ve still got the kid in me.”

She stops here, and her gaze takes on a distant cast.

“I don’t like the big city. It’s hostile and angry and cold. I would go to that place in Canada and live there.”

Pat was visiting the locker to pick up some yarn when she discovered the crime. It takes her two buses to get there. Because of her spina bifida, she cannot drive.

For 16 years, she worked as a librarian in Catholic girls high schools, but she gave that up in 1973 when the workload became too much. Now she volunteers her library skills twice a week at the Catholic Diocese of Orange.

Her husband of 20 years, Harry Bayley III, was a travel agent until the agency down the street went out of business last year. “Hap,” which is short for Happy, is what his friends and family call this man.

Wheelchair bound, he has spina bifida too. He’s left his resume at travel agents along the bus routes, but he’s had no luck. Pat receives Social Security Income and sells her crochet work when she can. She’s even had some customers on the bus.

I spent a few hours with Pat, meeting Hap too, and as I was about to leave she said she was amazed that I allowed her to “ramble on” about her dolls--who gave them to her or where she bought them and why--and about her own life.

Of course, I didn’t see our conversation as Pat did. All crimes have victims. She’s made sure that I won’t forget that anytime soon.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.