Vox Popular : Collectors Keep Repairman Busy Reviving the Voices of Chatty Cathy Dolls

Locked in an attic for decades, the battered blond staring up at Kelly McIntyre would probably have quite a story to tell if only she could talk.

Soon, she will.

McIntyre lays her gently on his workbench and skillfully uses a knife and a small hammer to open her stomach. He replaces a rubbery organ--and a few moments later she speaks.

“I’m hungry,” says Chatty Cathy, finally breaking her long silence.

One doll at a time, McIntyre is giving voice to a generation of baby boomers who are discovering that they never outgrew the pull-string toy with a bucktoothed grin and baby-like vocabulary.

At age 37, Chatty Cathy has her own Web page, her own fan club and--in McIntyre’s backyard workshop in Reseda--her own speaker’s bureau.

It’s actually a cabinet loaded with used speakers and miniature record players. But the tiny turntables are outfitted with 3-inch vinyl records that contain 11 phrases such as “I’m hungry,” “Will you play with me?” and “Tell me a story.”

A tug to the string on the doll’s back activates a mainspring that causes a small rubber belt to drive the turntable. A broken or stretched belt is usually to blame when a Chatty Cathy turns mute.

“The owner of this doll probably hasn’t heard its voice in 30 years,” said McIntyre, reassembling the blond doll’s torso. “People are very happy to get their Chatties talking again.”

Chatty Cathy talked up a storm for nearly a million children when it was introduced by Mattel in 1960. Its childlike voice is that of famed voice-over artist June Foray.

Marketed to both girls and boys, the doll was joined by sibling talking dolls named Charmin’ Chatty, Singin’ Chatty, Chatty Baby and Tiny Chatty Baby by the time production was phased out in 1965. Later versions of the doll contained up to 18 phrases.

Variations in hair color and style, in skin tone and eye color and in specially tailored clothing gave the Chatties an individual look.

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“Even though they were mass-produced, the bizarre thing is that every one seems to be different,” said Beth Gunther, a 35-year-old Atlanta woman who has spent up to $1,700 for some of her 75 Chatty Cathys.

“No two of them look alike. They have their own personalities,” agreed Ruth Kibbons, who has more than 500 Chatty Cathys grouped in playful settings and arranged on shelves in a basement display room at her Burnsville, Minn., home.

Chatty Cathy fans say her voice is only one of the reasons her owners have clung to them all these years--or are now scurrying to find another to own.

They say the doll was more realistic-looking to little girls than the more famous--and more curvaceous--Barbie doll. Wholesome-looking Chatty Cathys sported page-boy haircuts, freckles, a toothy smile, knock-knees and a slight potbelly.

“They are reminders of a more easygoing time,” said Lisa Eisenstein, head of the 8-year-old Chatty Cathy fan club. Its 250 members receive a quarterly newsletter and meet annually for conventions.

“Chatty Cathy was special. They were well-made, not like the junk made now. They represent a special time for a lot of people. It’s a time that people want to bring back,” said Eisenstein, 44, of Readington, N.J.

Hollywood record producer Mark Mazzetti grew up surrounded by Chatty Cathys as one of seven children in his Wilmington, Del., household. Today, he is still surrounded by them.

“I have at least 250,” said Mazzetti, 38, who has produced albums for Sting, Dishwalla, Amy Grant and Aaron Neville.

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Mazzetti refuses to sell any of his dolls. But he sometimes gives refurbished Chatty Cathys as gifts to record company executives he works with and to artists such as Janet Jackson, he said.

“These dolls have to be some of the most beloved, most played-with toys of the century,” he said. “Not abused or wrecked, just heavily played with.”

Although Chatty Cathy’s record-player voice box was built to survive rough handling and frequent drops to the floor, the mechanism was more fragile than electronic chip-driven sound devices built into today’s toys.

When Chatty Cathy stopped talking, the easiest way to fix them in the old days was to simply attach the old doll’s head onto a new doll’s body.

Chatty Cathy owner Kathy Lewis of Thousand Oaks remembers watching Mattel workers toss broken parts into the trash.

“We lived in Lawndale about a mile from Mattel,” said Lewis, 40. “I’d walk over and stand by the back fence and look inside the plant. My dream was to be discovered outside the building and picked to be a toy tester for Mattel.”

Lewis was 6 when she received her first Chatty Cathy. It would not be her last.

By the 1980s she found herself searching doll shows and swap meets for them. Most of the ones she has found had long ago lost their voices.

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Attempts to repair them led to the creation in 1989 of a talking doll fix-it shop called Chatty Cathy’s Haven. During the next several years Lewis and her family repaired 6,000 dolls. She sold the business about two years ago to McIntyre.

“At the end our inventory room was our two-car garage, our spare bedroom was our office, our living room was shipping and receiving and our dining room was the main repair area. We ate on TV trays in the family room every night,” Lewis said.

McIntyre, 41, wasn’t a Chatty Cathy fan when he purchased the business. A television production coordinator sidelined by a bout with diabetes, McIntyre instead was looking for ways to fight boredom at home.

Lewis trained him how to carefully open the dolls and reseal them after the voice mechanisms were repaired. She also sold him her supply of cannibalized Chatty Cathy spare parts.

Still, “I didn’t know what I was getting into,” McIntyre said. “I was getting 30 calls a day and [would] go to the mailbox place and bring home eight or 10 dolls. In a couple of months I was 95 dolls behind. It took me six months to get caught up.”

These days, McIntyre is used to the ribbing he gets from TV industry friends when he tells them his new career is with Chatty Cathy. He also shrugs off the double-takes he gets when he totes doll clothes on tiny hangers to the dry cleaners.

His wife, Jody, a TV network production coordinator, helps with the business. And McIntyre has started his own Chatty Cathy collection.

His prize is a one-of-a-kind doll produced as a joke for Chatty Cathy salesmen attending toy shows in the 1960s.

Pull its string and this Chatty pulls your leg.

“Put me down, you bastard!” it commands.