The Inventor of the Walking Doll

Watercolor of Walking Doll
from The American Design 
Collection. This antique 
walking doll is on a winding
mechanism that has wheels.

        The business woman came next. It was in her shop working with her dolls that I found Mrs. James Paul Averill, who invented the wonder doll that walks and talks. I think it must have been Mrs. Averill's desire for perpetual motherhood that, combined with her business acumen, made a financial success out of her doll, for she admitted that the doll of her invention is just a small cry of the little girl her daughter was at the age of three. Maxine, the daughter, is now eighteen years old, but in the walking and talking doll Mrs. Averill made, she has immortalized her as she was fifteen years ago.

       Mrs. Averill is a native of Denver and was at one time a resident of Salem, Oregon. It was while she was a patient in a Portland hospital that she made her first dolls. This was natural for not only was she a mother with a mother's love for children, but she was the wife of a professional toy salesman as well. While confined to the hospital as a patient, she spent her days of convalescence making rag dolls for the juvenile patients. This work gave her an idea. The idea was to produce what she calls "character" dolls.

       Living in the Northwest these dolls naturally took the form of cowboys, cowgirls and Indians. After she returned home she made and sold some of the dolls. The readiness with which they sold stimulated her to greater activity. She dyed feathers, strung beads, cut and sewed and stuffed and painted dolls with her own hands and sold them all. Finding that the Indian dolls met with the readiest favor, she made a small replica of an Indian woman famous in the Northwest. Princess Angeline, they called her, "the Pocahontas of the Northwest."

• Read more about Princess Angeline 
• Suquamish woman named Angeline, daughter of Chief Seattle
• Princess Angeline - Pacific Northwest Royalty

       When Seattle was an outpost of civilization. Princess Angeline, then a young Indian girl was sent by her father, Chief Seattle, to warn the settlers of an Indian attack. The warning saved the settlement, but made Princess Angeline an outcast from her tribe. She spent the remainder of her life in Seattle selling straw baskets on the streets. Her face, wrinkled with advancing age, was familiar to thousands of Washington and Oregon citizens. She was famous for her honesty. Although she was never rated in Dun and Bradstreet, her credit was good in many a Seattle store. When Princess Angeline died at the age of one hundred and ten, Seattle erected a monument to her. She had become a heroic figure.

       Mrs. Averill's first venture in doll manufacture on any important scale was the creation of the Princess Angeline doll. During the first six weeks of 1914 she made $2,700 from the sale of this doll. Then she and her husband moved to San Francisco and later to Los Angeles where she opened a doll factory to make Indian dolls, papooses, cowboys and cowgirls. These dolls were dressed in pastel felts. The felts were purchased in New York. When the war came on and she had difficulty in obtaining felts so she came to New York to find a substitute. By this time Mrs. Averill knew that her future lay in doll-making. It was about this time also that the urge, understood of all mothers, to keep her child eternally by her side, began to influence her.

       "Maxine was seven years old then," Mrs. Averill explained. "She was growing up; she was getting to be a big girl and my baby no longer. Somehow I wanted to keep her always a baby. I wanted always to have a baby such" as she had been when she was three or four, just a little doll, all dimples and chubbiness and curls. Strangely enough Maxine had never cared for dolls. She used to toss them aside and talk and play for hours with imaginary playmates. She had two favorites, creatures of her own imagination. She called them, 'Gook and Myrd.' The names were her own invention, too. I think I those imaginary playmates had much to do  with my invention of a big doll - one that might really serve as a playmate and talk. 

       "I had no thought, then, of inventing a walking doll - just a talking doll. But after working for months and developing just the kind of doll I wanted - an adorable little being with a baby face and curls, chubby hands and legs and dimpled elbows and knees - a doll that could say 'Oh, Mamma' with just the proper voice, I had a sudden inspiration. One day I picked the talking doll up and said: 'Time you were learning to walk, young lady.' As I said  that I put the doll down on the floor as if she were about to walk. I noticed that by giving the feet a certain pressure, the body seemed to move automatically. So I went to work again and invented a doll whose feet and legs were heavy enough to give the requisite poise and motion. By a practical use of the law of gravitation and the trick of holding the doll's hands and slightly lifting them alternately, the feet moved and the doll toddled along with her youthful mother."

       As Mrs. Averill explained it to me it all sounded very simple. Yet the fact that the walking and talking doll has been a sensational seller for five years, that it is known all over the world, that it is the biggest-selling high-priced doll on the market, and the further fact that the crowd around her Fifth Avenue shop at Christmas time often requires the direction of a traffic policeman, proves, to me at least, that Mrs. Averill's success has been gained by hard work and practical knowledge of human nature. She knew what the children wanted.

       "It's because my doll is pretty and cuddly," she says. "Before my doll was brought out, most of the dolls on the market were stiff-bodied things that no stretch of childish imagination could convert into a real baby. I made a soft-bodied doll that a child could cuddle. That was what made it popular at first. Then I added a voice and taught it to walk. What I had done was to hark back to my own childhood and remember what I would have liked then. Children may grow more sophisticated as the world moves ahead, but the maternal instinct remains the same." Stella Burke May, 1925

• Women and Dolls by Stella Burke May
  
• Rose O'Neill's Elfin Little Kewpie
• See and read about more Averill dolls at the Doll Reference website.
• Georgene Hopf and her dolls achieved national fame
• The Averill doll company produced some of the very first Raggedy Anns in America, Read about the inventor of Raggedy Ann here

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