Doll Maker Enjoys Teaching Art of Creating Beautiful Objects

Janet Coronel’s Agoura home is a doll’s house. Not the kind Ibsen wrote about, but a place where she makes dolls.

Coronel, 53, learned the art 30 years ago from a German couple who were her next-door neighbors, and she has been making dolls and teaching others how to make them ever since.

Doll making has existed since man began walking upright. The toys have evolved from cornhusks with eyes to a multimillion-dollar industry featuring dolls that cry, talk, wet and exhibit anatomically correct body parts.

Coronel’s dolls don’t do any of that stuff. They are just beautiful.

What a concept.

“The dolls I sell in stores go for between $300 and $1,000,” Coronel says. “They are all porcelain or porcelain with cloth bodies and can be personalized to the wishes of the buyer.” Coronel said people for whom she creates dolls often ask her to make them look like their children or grandchildren as a timeless remembrance of the youngster--a keepsake to be passed on to generations to come.

Coronel sells her delicate dolls through several outlets, including the West Hills Antique Center in the Fallbrook Mall in West Hills.

She makes the dolls from one of the thousands of molds that she keeps at her home studio, which also includes a kiln.

On Jan. 17, some of the molds were destroyed or severely damaged by the earthquake, but Coronel says she isn’t heading for FEMA anytime soon. “I can replace them. It isn’t like I lost my home,” she says.

Coronel says she gets her greatest pleasure from teaching others how to create these porcelain treasures. “It’s a skill that is meaningful for both the doll creator and the person who receives the doll,” she says.

For many years Coronel taught at small arts and crafts outlets.

“Several times the Los Angeles Unified School District people wrote to ask if I would like to teach through the adult-education system, but I didn’t answer them because I didn’t even have my high school diploma,” she says. “I didn’t think it would work.”

She says she thinks the school district singled her out because she is one of the few people willing to go into the classroom to teach doll making.

“There are wonderful teachers in Southern California, but they don’t want to have to schlep all their equipment into a classroom. They teach at their studios,” she says.

Eventually Coronel went back to school, got her high school diploma and took the courses required to teach in the district schools. She taught her first class for the Kennedy-San Fernando Community Adult School in 1986 and has been instructing for that adult school ever since.

Her classes now meet at the Rinaldi Adult Center in Granada Hills, where Kennedy-San Fernando moved after the earthquake.

People start anytime of the year for a $35 registration fee, which pays for the instruction and porcelain clay.

“The students buy their own paints, brushes, cleaning tools and other equipment, which costs about $100 and should last a long time,” Coronel says.

For years Coronel kept the first doll she ever made, for less than sentimental reasons.

“Whenever someone in class would say they weren’t happy with their first effort, I would show them mine,” she says, with a laugh.

That first doll was a victim of the Northridge earthquake, according to the doll maker.

“I have others,” she says, philosophically.

Slovakians Taking Pride in Their History and Culture

For thousands of years, Slovakia has been a reluctant bride shotgunned into forced marriages with muscle-bound nations that wanted to protect her and tell her what to do.

First it was the Hungarians, then the Russians, then the Czechs, all of whom thought they knew what was best for little Slovakia.

But after the 1991 Velvet Revolution, when what was then Czechoslovakia booted the Communists out and elevated Vaclav Havel to something approaching sainthood, a segment of the Slovak population said to their much better known and celebrated Czech neighbors, “Who needs you? We’re outta here.”

The separatists got their wish in 1993, while the Velvet Revolutionaries were still figuring out how to govern the newly capitalistic Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Divorce came to be.

The divorce established what is now known as the Slovak Republic and independence for its people, even though some in Slovakia grumble over the dissolution of Czechoslovakia.

Leon Danihels of Woodland Hills is not among the grumblers.

He’s president of the Slovak World Congress, which supported independence and now aspires to educate the 4 million expatriated Slovak people and people of Slovak origin around the globe about their newly independent homeland.

The Congress is a nonprofit umbrella organization, chartered in New York, which since independence has taken on the qualities of an International Chamber of Culture and Commerce. Now in the midst of his four-year, non-paying presidency, Danihels is an ambassador without portfolio from Slovakia to the world.

Danihels estimates there are about 100,000 people of Slovak descent who reside in or around the San Fernando and Antelope valleys, many of whom already are members of local Slovak organizations.

Danihels, a local real estate developer and entrepreneur, also says he is privy to the current Slovak government and its goals and aspirations.

He says he is just back from a talk with Slovak President Michal Kovac, but declines to expound on the discussion, saying those things are not for other people to know.

What he does want other people to know is that Slovakia is a beautiful place to visit, particularly if you are a person of Slovak heritage as he says Robert Urich, Tom Selleck and astronaut Eugene Cernan are.

The Czechs are often painted as the world’s intellectual and Bohemian darlings with their glittering culture, crystal and castles. The Slovaks have been painted dull and drab.

It is Danihels’ job to make certain you know the Slovaks also have their intellects.

And, he says, their castles are second to none.

Learning Slovak Language Requires Overcoming Obstacles

You are convinced.

You are packing your bags for Slovakia.

But, wait, first you need to know the language.

Curtis Barrett may be your man.

Barrett, a Woodland Hills electrical engineer of Irish-Slovak heritage, decided he wanted to speak Slovak several years ago. He couldn’t find a teacher, so he basically taught himself.

Must have done a good job. He’s now offering classes through Cal State Northridge extension school.

Actually he had been offering them, but since the earthquake the class has nowhere to meet.

He says the extension program is helping him look for space and the class will be starting up again soon.

He’s hoping for sometime next month.

Overheard:

“He’s the Robin Hood of Academy voters. He puts the ballot on the wall and throws darts at it to decide who to vote for.”

--Woman to companion at Crown Books, Studio City