GLENDALE : Dolling Up Some Antique Pedal Cars

Cliff and Lucy Cooney’s Glendale home is filled with kids--none of them taller than 4 feet.

Though they look human, these so-called pedal car kids are the creations of the Cooneys who have been making these life-sized dolls for the past five years.

For the Cooneys, it was a merging of two passions. Cliff had been collecting antique pedal cars and Lucy had been making and collecting dolls.

At first, she tried putting Raggedy Anns and teddy bears in her husband’s pedal cars.

“They looked terrible,” she says. “It’s not what we had in mind. We wanted them to look like children who belonged there.”

The Cooneys who have four grown children who are also collectors, have 10 large pedal cars (one is a plane, another a firetruck), replete with dolls sitting in them. They also have car accessories such as a gas pump, complete with attendant appropriately dressed (they made him too) standing next to it. They have kept enlarging their home to accommodate their collection of cars and “kids.” They also have miniature cars, buses and trains.

“When you touch something, you know it could really tell a story,” Cliff says. “Who played with this? Where did it come from?”

When they began making the “kids” they learned that a doll body was too small for their purposes, so Cliff took the doll apart and enlarged it. A mold is made and it is cast. The body is made from the mold. The same process is followed for the heads. It takes a day of sanding and filling to get the heads ready for paint. After Cliff puts the color on the heads, Lucy does the eyes and lips. Then they go shopping in thrift stores to find the clothes from the appropriate year. Some of the boys have molded hair; the girls have very large doll wigs.

Though the Cooneys love their “kids,” they are wondering just how many more to add. Lucy says, “We really are running out of space.”