Our Twin Gerber Baby Dolls

Dolls sculpted to resemble drawings by Dorothy Hope Smith.

       Gerber baby dolls have been made for little children for as long as I can remember. These twin versions are from our family collection. Gerber baby dolls have very distinctive head molds that are based upon a portrait of Ann Turner Cook drawn by a neighbor when she was but a small baby in 1928.

Details of knit baby clothes trimmed with pom poms.

       These adorable twin Gerber babies were sold in 1979 along with a bath set each. They were made to celebrate the fifty first anniversary of Gerber baby foods company. They are 12 inches tall, have open mouths, rolling eyes, soft vinyl skin, swollen baby-like tummies and that classic, molded hair cowlick!

• Gerber Baby Doll Find at Goodwill
• 1994 "Gerber Baby" Doll that speaks

More About Ann Turner Cook: (born November 20, 1926) is an American mystery novelist, who was the model for the familiar Gerber Baby artwork seen on baby food packages of the Gerber Products Company.
       Cook is the daughter of a syndicated cartoonist Leslie Turner, who drew the comic strip Captain Easy for decades. Their neighbor was the artist Dorothy Hope Smith, who did a charcoal drawing of Ann when she was a baby. In 1928, when Gerber announced it was looking for baby images for its upcoming line of baby food, Smith's drawing was submitted and subsequently chosen. It was trademarked in 1931. The drawing of Ann Turner Cook has been used on virtually all Gerber baby food packaging since.
       After retiring from teaching, Cook became a novelist. A member of the Mystery Writers of America, she is the author of the Brandy O'Bannon series of mystery novels set on Florida's Gulf Coast. The adventures of Florida reporter and amateur sleuth O'Bannon are detailed in Trace Their Shadows (2001) and Shadow over Cedar Key (2003).

• Ann Turner Cook, the original Gerber baby, turns 93
• First Gerber baby with Down syndrome

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