Playing With History : In a world of Barbies, what’s the draw of five historically correct dolls? Confidence and courage for starters.

The Wrobel family was off for a long weekend, headed to the uplands of Wisconsin from their home near Chicago, three hours away.

Not so fast, 7-year-old Casey Wrobel announced. The family simply couldn’t pass so close to Pleasant Company without paying a visit, she declared. Now, with her 5-year-old sister, Maxine, in tow and her beloved Felicity doll in her arms, Casey was pressed against the display cases, drinking in the details of her heroines’ lives.

“The girls wouldn’t let us go anywhere else until we stopped here,” Nancy Wrobel said. Like hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of pre-adolescent American females, her daughters are held in thrall by five fictional girls whose lives span the gamut of American history, from Colonial days to the home front of World War II.

These are the American Girls, characters Pleasant T. Rowland dreamed up nine years ago in hopes of imbuing 7- to 12-year-old girls with the kind of timeless values she grew up with in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Confidence, honesty, innocence and courage were what Rowland intended to impart when she created Felicity (spunky Colonial girl), Kirsten (tough pioneer child), Addy (proud daughter of runaway slaves), Samantha (beguiling Victorian orphan) and Molly (helping out on the home front).

The five characters form the core of Rowland’s Pleasant Company, which last year recorded sales of more than $150 million--up 40% from 1992.

Historically correct dolls, furniture, accessories and clothing account for the majority of Pleasant Company’s vast, largely direct-mail business. Here in the cornfields outside Madison, an average of 15,000 telephone inquiries pour in daily to Rowland’s 350,000-square-foot command post. Next year, Pleasant Company expects to ship between 29 million and 30 million merchandise catalogues.

Many nonfiction writers would pine for the 30,000 first-run printing that accompanied each volume in the American Girls “Pastimes” collection of craft books, cookbooks, theater kits and paper dolls. American Girl, an advertisement-free bimonthly magazine launched two years ago, boasts more than 400,000 subscribers at $19.95 per year.

Recently, Rowland took the American Girls to school, offering a $50 curriculum package to elementary school teachers. Fashion shows packaged by Pleasant Company for nonprofit organizations regularly attract thousands of mothers and daughters, many garbed in their favorite American Girl costumes. A tea party that Rowland threw at Colonial Williamsburg in 1991 to introduce Felicity drew 11,000 guests.

Book signings turn into similar mob scenes. Clutching their American Girls dolls in one hand and their American Girls books in the other, a thousand girls wait hours to meet an American Girls author. A series of six books tells the story of each character; together, the American Girls books have sold more than 20 million copies. The “Addy” series alone has sold more than 1 million copies in the past six months.

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All of which often strikes Pleasant Rowland as “humbling.” But never does her success surprise her.

“I guess there is some inherent arrogance in saying that my gut told me this was the right thing,” Rowland said. “I knew it was right. I just did.”

She paused, looked straight ahead and managed to make the following statement without sounding the least bit sanctimonious: “And I have come to believe that this was what Pleasant Rowland was put in the world to do.”

The oldest child of Pleasant and Edward Thiele grew up in comfortable affluence outside Chicago. Her mother stayed home with the kids. Her father was president of a large advertising agency.

It was an idyllic time when television had not yet raised what Rowland, now 53, regards as its monstrous head in the lives of American families. She read voraciously. She played outside unsupervised. “It would never have dawned on us to come home and sit in front of the television for four hours,” she said.

She studied education in college, taught school, then switched briefly to--horror of horrors--television, anchoring for KGO in San Francisco. In her 30s she edited textbooks and developed teaching materials. At 36, she followed her heart to Wisconsin when she met and married the owner of a printing company.

Attending a convention at Colonial Williamsburg, Rowland experienced a full-scale epiphany. “I was just blown away,” she recalled, “not just by the beauty, but by the vision of the man, (John D.) Rockefeller, who put it together.”

Rowland felt she was in a ready-made history classroom. But to her dismay, “all the materials were geared to adults.” She went straight to the foundation that runs the facility and proposed a more child-friendly approach. Soon she was developing Colonial information packets for kids.

About the same time, she went Christmas shopping for her nieces. She wanted to buy them dolls--toys they could treasure and maybe even learn from. But this was 1984, and all she could find were Barbie or the Cabbage Patch Kids.

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Rowland’s concept quickly sprang into her brain fully formed. Historically themed dolls would be accompanied by books, furniture, accessories and clothing. “There was an intuitive, unshakable sense that if I did this, other people would want it,” Rowland recalled. “I just believed; I knew I was not the only woman who wanted an alternative” to a bosomy bombshell doll or a scrunchy vegetable doll.

“All that stood between me and its success,” she said, smiling in retrospect at her own naivete, “was figuring out how to execute it.”

Rowland gave herself a crash course in business. She started Pleasant Company with about $1 million of her own, most of it from textbook royalties. She had “a vision,” but no steel-belted business plan. Her market research consisted of sending her sole employee to the park one day to talk to some mothers and daughters who were picnicking.

Today, Rowland employs 350 people year-round, and two to three times that many during the holiday crunch. Less by design than by circumstance, about 80% of Pleasant Company’s staff is female. “The estrogen runs thick around here,” Rowland said. She calls herself “sort of the Mother Superior,” adding, “and we all think for the good of the order.”

She has filled her huge headquarters with a collection of American art so spectacular it comes with its own catalogue. One giant hanging sculpture features colorful squiggles that go every which way. The artists, Pam and George Castano, call it “Confetti.” Some Pleasant Company employees call it “Pleasant’s Brain.”

They do so cautiously, and only behind the boss’s back. Rowland rules with meticulous attention to detail and fierce control. Pity the poor employee who fails to poof the tissue paper sufficiently in an outgoing order.

She is adamant that her company’s name must never be modified with the . Corporate news releases carry the reminder that “the name of the corporation is ‘Pleasant Company,’ not ‘the Pleasant Company.’ ” A staffer explained: “The characters make for ‘pleasant company,’ get it?”

Rowland is equally jealous of her privacy. She seldom gives interviews, fearing headlines that read, “Lady in Cornfields Makes Good.” A photographer is permitted in her office only if he agrees to leave his equipment outside; she provides a flattering studio head shot.

But Rowland can also be candid. The suggestion that her gender-specific company might somehow imply a bias against boys prompts her to reply: “I can’t solve all the world’s problems. I’m just here working for girls.”

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The same bluntness arises at the mention of the recurring “knock” against Pleasant Company: Its $82 dolls are way out of the price range of most families, its concept is too rarefied, and owning a tiny silver tea set just like Felicity might have used has very little to do with the present or future lives of most American girls.

“Oh, that’s such an old knock,” Rowland said.

“First of all, the company would not be as successful as it is if it were too expensive,” she continued. Then Rowland trotted out statistics asserting that the average American girl owns eight Barbie dolls. “I think eight Barbie dolls do not give nearly the kind of value that one American Girl doll does,” she said.

Besides, Rowland went on, parents of the ‘90s are sick of “junk and disposable plastic. . . . They are making their purchases more meaningful. It’s not ‘how much stuff can I give my kid to prove how successful I am.’ ”

Rowland found it less easy to slough off some of the criticism that fell to Pleasant Company when its product line was all white. An African American doll was always on the agenda, she said, but timing and the right approach were critical.

So Addy, the most recent character to join the American Girls lineup, came into existence in 1993 after a carefully orchestrated gestation. Rowland and her scrupulously constructed board of advisers agreed that a discussion of the African American experience had to center around slavery.

Wilma King, a professor of history at Michigan State University, was part of the seven-person advisory panel that reviewed the Addy doll and books during the development process. She said questions about using a slave child--albeit one who moves north and gains freedom, as Addy did--as a toy or role model are misplaced.

“Slavery makes some people uncomfortable. But you can’t wish it away,” King said.

“What is important to know is that Addy is a fictitious story, and it is written for entertainment,” she added. Nevertheless, “Like all good children’s stories, there are some lessons to be learned.”

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Addy’s enormous popularity was unsurprising to Rowland. “Our buyers embraced her,” she said, noting that the African American doll has managed the unusual feat of appealing equally to black and white kiddie consumers. “We could have pushed the diversity button sooner.”

Creating Addy was “a wonderful experience,” Rowland said. “And if I got hit by a truck tomorrow, I could die knowing that we made toy history. We made a black doll an object of status and desire for white children.”

She is determined to link girls of today, the women of tomorrow, with those who came before them. Her message is quietly feminist, packaged in--of all things--dolls.

“Little girls have always been brave, spunky and honest,” she said. “But they’ve had their lives circumscribed by society’s expectations.”

In the lobby of Pleasant Company, the Wrobel family was a case study in Rowland’s philosophy. When Casey wanted a three-foot-tall Barbie doll, her father, Bob Wrobel, countered with the offer of a Felicity doll.

“The history ties all these girls together over the years,” Nancy Wrobel said. “It becomes a good reference point for them.”

Rowland was a relatively young woman--44--when she first sketched out the goals of Pleasant Company. She had “an enormous amount of energy,” and she had no children of her own.

“It doesn’t take Freud,” Rowland observed, “to say that I wanted to leave a lasting legacy.”

America today is a much tougher place than the country she was raised in, Rowland concedes. Perhaps American Girls will supply some sense of continuity to offset the confusion of modern life.

“I just know how important it is for children to have wonderful and memorable childhoods,” she said. “I’m very excited about helping to do this, and I just want to get on with it.”