‘Granny’ Revives the Warm and Fuzzy

Somebody who doesn’t know any better might be inclined to throw it away, just set it out one morning with the trash. Here, take this old thing too.

That somebody just does not understand, so you explain: It has been with you all these years, right by your side, it was a gift from someone dear, it reminds you of a time that once was, of things that ought to be remembered.

No matter that the doll is old and broken down, the teddy bear barely distinguishable from a dirty mop.

You will keep it, you say, forever.

One day you might even want to pass it on to your child--this special treasure of your childhood and all the memories it holds. And you might need someone to help preserve it.

Someone like 84-year-old Ollie Dearing, a bona fide “doll doctor.”

Ollie Dearing can do what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never do: Dearing can fix things that are broken and make them whole again.

She works her magic from a bedroom in her Van Nuys home, converted into a workshop equipped with things essential to creation and healing.

“Call me Granny,” she says, standing on the porch of her home. “Everybody does.”

The dolls arrive at her door ravaged by time and decades of love. They come in faded clothes, missing eyes or hair. Sometimes they come in pieces, a bag of legs and arms, hanging together by a thread, or not attached at all.

The teddy bears and purple cows are equally pitiful. They have been hugged and cuddled and dragged to the point of breaking; their stuffing hangs out and they wear that dingy gray pall that comes from too many jelly-faced hugs.

Ollie sees more than that when she sees them, resting in the arms of their owners.

“They are treasures,” she says. “They are real treasures.”

So she treats them just that way.

*

Helen, for example, is an old soul.

She was created by German doll maker Armand Marseilles and given to a 10-year-old Filipina girl in 1936, a gift from her father who was a general in the Philippine army.

That little girl is now 70 years old and her daughter, Evelyn P. Mojica of Palmdale, has placed the doll in Dearing’s care for restoration.

“The only thing that was intact when I brought it to her was the face, it was falling apart,” Mojica said.

Dearing went to work, in true Geppetto style.

First Helen had to be put together. The papier-mache trunk and wooden arms and legs were no longer connected. Dearing restrung the parts, using the original style rubber strings to preserve Helen’s authenticity.

Dearing fashioned new toes of wood dough, added eyelashes and gave Helen a brown wig, coiffed just so.

Today Helen stands upright and healthy, elegant even. She wears a gypsy costume that Dearing sewed, with velvet skirt and gold sash. A gold-colored tambourine hangs from her waist, fashioned by Dearing from a bottle cap.

So far Helen has not taken to hanging out with crickets or singing or talking--Pinocchio style--but she looks like she could, and one can only imagine the stories she would tell.

Mojica is more than grateful.

For years Mojica’s mother had wanted to give the doll to her only daughter, but hung back because of Helen’s decrepitude. Now it is Mojica who will give the doll as a gift, returning it to her mother when she visits the Philippines.

“Until she’s gone I want her to have it,” Mojica said.

Alan Kaplan brought Chauncey, the family duck, to Dearing’s for some intensive care.

Kaplan’s daughter Sarah and the duck were playing one day and poor Chauncey got the worst of it. Chauncey is about 20 years old, a mallard of velvet and corduroy. Sarah is 5, a kid’s kid.

“I was playing with him real hard,” Sarah recalled. “And then he just started to get his head torn off. . . . I was riding his back and pulling his head.”

Sarah was heartbroken, Kaplan said. She thought Chauncey had died. Kaplan and his wife were upset too.

Dearing stuffed his cotton innards back and sewed him up by hand. She even tied a new white satin ribbon around his neck to hide the scars.

“It was like a miracle, we didn’t think that he could be put back together,” Kaplan said.

“Really, what she’s repairing is people’s sense of connectedness to their childhood, to the sense of believing in fantasy, that toys have a bit of life in them--which is why people as children become attached to stuffed animals and toys,” Kaplan said.

“It’s a precious connection. You lose that ability as adults.”

Not Dearing.

Her house is full of dolls. Dolls she has collected from her travels abroad, dolls that were gifts, dolls that she made herself.

It started when her daughter was young.

“I would make dolls for my daughter, that was my joy,” she said. “We didn’t have much money.”

During her younger years, Dearing worked as a seamstress at a department store, and with furs and leathers. After retirement she took a correspondence course in doll restoration, and five years later she enrolled in a course in doll-making with famed doll-maker Valentina Solo.

Since then she has belonged to a group of doll makers, Solo’s students who get together to share their craft and their lives. But there are some things Dearing did not have to be taught, like how to sew a candy heart inside the Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls that she makes, “to keep them alive.”

Or how to be gentle with things that mean a lot--regardless of how they look.

Dearing keeps before and after photographs of the toys she has restored. She remembers their names and shows their photos proudly, like grandmothers do.

“There’s Freddy,” she says, pointing to a brown stuffed monkey, owned by a man who has had him since infancy.

*

Froggy is there too. Froggy is a 30-year-old stuffed green frog given to a little boy by his grandfather decades ago. Now that boy is a man and the father of a 9-month-old boy named Jesse. Dearing gave Froggy a good bath and added stuffing to his neck, which had started to droop. Froggy has a new lease on life and Jesse has a new--and old--friend.

“I think this keeps me young,” Dearing said. “It keeps my mind off my hurts and my heartaches and whatever else I might have.”

And along the way, she gives gifts to her clients.

After Maryann Cudahy’s mother died at the age of 92, Cudahy found 25 dolls packed in the garage, in trunks and throughout her home. One doll was 90 years old. Dearing restored them all, and gave Cudahy a history that made her into a novice collector.

“I treasure them because they were my mom’s,” Cudahy said. “My mother left me a legacy, but Ollie opened the door for it.”

Maybe it would be easier to throw out old things. Start over. Buy something new.

But things have a way of binding themselves to lives they enter. Things that hold something special, something that money cannot buy nor time steal.

If you come to Dearing’s door carrying a beat-up bundle in need of her skill, you may not be able to explain why, but you know some dolls should always be there.