My Something to Love; The Doll Museum Progresses

So, I’m back!  Trying to keep up, but setting up the museum takes all I’ve got these days.  It is a small, but temporary space, a chance for us to begin while we pursue a larger building for our permanent home. As Pym wrote, though, we all need something to love.

My friends have stepped up in unimaginable ways, from Michele, who made the building available, to Diane, her business partner who has helped with supplies, and costumes, and doll accessories, to Dick and Nancy who have offered their help in so many ways. 

Gloria, Caroline, Clara, Jill, Marie, Kathy, and Nancy S., and everyone else who has donated dolls to us, to the Friedken family for the little trike, and to everyone at Good Will, Salvation Army, Erin at Rescued, Dennis of The Treasure Chest, and our many friends in the antique and thrift community who have helped me, and given me encouragement and advice.  I wish my Mom and Dad were here, and my doll friends now gone, Mary Hillier, Stephanie Hammonds, Mikki Brantley, and so many more wonderful writers and doll artists, my friend and pen pal, R. Lane Herron who currently writes for Doll Castle News, and so many others.

Believe in your passion, follow it, and you will be happy.  Success is measured not by monetary gain, but by true happiness.  It has taken me my entire life to get here; I started collecting when I was three, and I never met a doll, or toy, I didn’t like.  I studied, my folks helped me travel, my Dad carried home dolls from all over the world, even one given to me from executives of Mitsubishi.    My mother made them, repaired them, dressed them, and put up with old things, which she really didn’t like.  At least, not at first; she changed her mind later.  My husband, Dino, has been a huge help, my editor, my best friend, my navigator in this journey. Our friend Greg, gone too soon, believed in me, and Mark, our other friend, contributed a lot.

I’ve had antique adventures with my friends Rosie, Lori, Nancy T, Danyelle, and more.  My Aunt Rosie and Uncle Tony looked everywhere for old dolls for me, and Rosie made them in her ceramics studio for me.  My Uncle Tom brought one home each week for me, and my Uncle George cruised Berkley and Lost Gatos looking for stores that sold dolls. My grandma’s collection of international dolls inspired my collection; two of them began it.  She also dressed dolls, sometimes over night.  Doll nudity offended her.

We hope to open November 30, 2019, Small Business Saturday; for the first time in a long time, I’m looking forward to something, and the sun is shining again.  Thank you to all who read me blogs and postings, and to those who have bought and read my books.

Thinking outside the Doll House, A Memoir, will be out soon.  You can read my entire doll story there.  Thank you, and I love you all!

Guest Blogger; Dr. David Levy with Skyward, California and the Universe

Skyward

October 2019

California and the Universe

Since early in the last century, astronomers dreamed of the clear sky over California as a place to unlock our imaginations and study the Universe.    In 1917, the 100-inch Hooker telescope was opened to the poetry of Alfred Noyes, who wrote:

          We creep to power by inches. …Even to-night

          Our own old sixty has its work to do;

           And now our hundred-inch: I hardly dare

           To think what this new muzzle of ours may find.

The Seth Nicholson Dome

The one hundred inch telescope

And just think what the telescope did find;  among many other things, it revealed that our Universe was double the size we thought it was.  Despite the fact that I have visited Mount Wilson many times, my most recent visit in September gave me an insight I hadn’t experienced before. I was a guest of Scott Roberts, whose Explore Scientific telescope company had organized an observing party there. The place literally oozes history through every stone, piece of wood, and gear revealing the progress of our understanding of the Universe as it increased during the 112 years since the observatory’s founding in 1907. 

During my visit there I felt as though I was standing next to some of these great astronomers, now long gone.  I was standing next to George Ellery Hale as he struggled to build the Snow solar telescope, the mighty 60-inch, and the 100-inch Hooker telescope.  I was standing next to Fritz Zwicky as he used the 100-inch on so many nights.  Zwicky had quite the reputation as a curmudgeon.  He might have included me among the many colleagues he called “spherical bastards” – meaning a bastard no matter which angle or prism you choose to look through.

I was standing next to Walter Baade.  There is a story that, at the outbreak of the second world war, he was declared an enemy alien and ordered to stay near his Pasadena home.  Since he, or someone, allowed the vicinity of Pasadena to include Mount Wilson, Baade essentially enjoyed three years of uninterrupted observing time on the 100-inch.  With Los Angeles under occasional blackout conditions that darkened the Mount Wilson sky still further, Baade made his crucial observations of individual variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy that he, and Bart Bok, later used to determine the size and shape of our own Milky Way Galaxy.

George Ellery Hale was unsatisfied with the size and abilities of the big 100-inch telescope, and he longed for a much larger one.  He hired Russell Porter, the amateur astronomer who had founded the Stellafane telescope makers meeting in 1925, to work on a 300-inch telescope. When that was deemed impractical, a 200-inch telescope was built instead.   Porter’s drawings of the 200-inch were stupendous.  Realizing that the 100 was unable to reach the north celestial pole due to its English double yoke mount design, he envisaged a beautiful and elegant horseshoe design so that the 200-inch could point right at the pole if needed.    Even the lowly 18-inch Schmidt camera telescope, the first telescope at Paliomar, made history as the instrument Zwicky used to discover 100 supernovae in distant galaxies, and, near the end of its useful life, it was the telescope used in the discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.

I close with a variation of a quotation by Sir Kenneth Clark.  What defines the great observatories that look to the stars and revolutionize our understanding of them? I don’t know.  But I know them when I see them.  And the observatories at Mounts Wilson and Palomar are them.

The International Doll Museum blog: Kane County Doll Show; Opening of our Museum

The International Doll Museum blog: Kane County Doll Show; Opening of our Museum: Today, a life-long dream started to come true.   We took possession of our doll museum building, and began moving in cases.   I put post-i...