Cabbage Patch Fantasyland

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Tucked away in a warehouse in the farming town of Griswold, Iowa, is one extraordinary collection of Cabbage Patch Kids. In 1985, Donna Brown and her family were victims of a house fire. At the time the Cabbage Patch Kids were capturing America’s fancy far and wide.

“I was collecting dolls and I just collected any doll,” Donna says. “And then my daughter wanted to start the collection again, and I told her, ‘I don’t really want to collect all the other dolls again. So let’s just pick one kind.’ And so she got that little one in the striped suit there, so we decided to collect Cabbage Patch.”

Donna built up her collection through flea markets, thrift stores, garage sales, and gifts from family and friends. Her husband would stay up nights searching the Internet and “always managed to get them.” In 2008, they built the warehouse. Unfortunately, her husband passed away only a couple of years later. But Fantasyland was already set up for success.

“I joined a newsletter, and my granddaughter puts it on Facebook and stuff, and then we got the signs on the highway, and the word of mouth really,” Donna remarks. “When we first started this, we went around to all the little towns with flyers.

“When we first started, we had them in the house. Then we wanted to get them out of the house, so we got a trailer house and filled that up. Then we got another trailer house, and then we decided to make this museum. When we was building this I told my husband, ‘This is not going to be big enough,’ and he said ‘This is going to be big enough.’ It wasn’t.”

The donations have come fast and furious.

“We got another car load yesterday,” she says. “Of course I’m known as the Cabbage Patch lady, and anybody that don’t want their Cabbage Patches, they bring them to me.

Cabbage Patch Kids were invented by Xavier Roberts, an art student from Georgia, in 1978. He created soft sculptures using the German technique for fabric sculpture and developed an idea for adoptable dolls he’d call “Little People.” They were made for family and friends and exhibited at art shows. He began selling them and in 1982 he entered into a licensing agreement which allowed for a toy replica of the Little People Originals. Those replicas, which are of smaller size and have vinyl heads, became the Cabbage Patch Kids.

If it’s something to do with Cabbage Patch, Donna probably has it: furniture, toys, accessories, buttons, magazines, lunch boxes, and much more. And she has possibly every edition made, from the rarest to the most common.

She takes me through case by case, display by display. There’s ones made for the March of Dimes (an edition which netted over $130,000 for the organization). Another was made special for Germany. There are Cabbage Patch Dolls with matching animals, ones made larger just for Toys R Us in New York (called “Tru Kids”), and dogs and cats with the Cabbage Patch face. In the Philippines, a company made its own version called “Taro Patch.”

Perhaps most interestingly is the case of the Snack Time Kids. They came out in 1996 and didn’t last long. Designed to eat accompanying plastic food, some of these dolls got mouthfuls of human hair and fingers. Donna shows me how they work, but now she’s hesitant to demonstrate them to kids.

“The other day a little boy came in here and put a finger right in its mouth and said ‘I want to know if it will bite me.’ It shocked him. I said ‘You know little kids like you is why they we don’t have them.’ Scared me to death.”

A Cabbage Patch Kid took a ride in a space shuttle; that doll is in a museum, but Donna has created a loving tribute with descriptions and props. Another display celebrates Cabbage Patch Kids being the mascot of the 1992 and 1996 Olympics. There’s a school, too, complete with Cabbage Patch coloring books and a themed bus.

Certain Cabbage Patch Kids developed dots on their skin, known to collectors as “Pox,” and Donna made a nursery for them which includes incubators. She used to think it the dots were mold, but learned it was an aberration possibly due to manufacturing error or storage environments.

She has the washing machine that really works, potty chairs which sound like a real toilet flush, and high chairs that hook onto tables so the dolls can dine with their owners.

“I say I’d like to have one of everything they made, but I don’t know what all they made,” she says. “Anytime it says Cabbage Patch I get it. So we have a lot of duplicates.”

The dolls are in a variety of conditions, depending on where or from whom she obtained them.

“If I got ‘em in the box I never did take them out of the box,” she says. “Xavier…told everybody that had him in boxes to take them out of the boxes because a baby wasn’t born in a box. I’ll never sell them, but later on you don’t know what somebody else is gonna do with them…you always get more if you have them in the box.”

Nowadays, Donna’s regular companions are the Cabbage Patch Kids and her dog. “I was so lonely, and I got him,” she says about her four-legged friend. “He’s grown so attached to me. I’m the only one he knows. The vet said I’ve never seen a dog so close to anybody. He can be a pain…but at least someone’s there moving around, you know?”

A guest book proves how Fantasyland has touched the hearts and sparked the imaginations of people far and wide. There’s not much else to see in Griswold, after all. She’s expecting a tour bus filled with 40 people soon, and we’re sure they’re not there to see the corn.

Additional Sources:

https://www.babylandgeneral.com/about/our-history/

https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/48734

Carhenge

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In England, they have Stonehenge. In Alliance, Nebraska, they have Carhenge. The settings could hardly be more different. And one was built an estimated 4,000-5,000 years ago. The other in 1987. One attracts some 800,000 visitor per year. The other 60,000. But each is a spectacle to behold, with a circle of monoliths (of one kind or another) standing in fields.

Local resident Jim Reinders lived in England for seven years, and studied Stonehenge. When he returned to Nebraska, he conceived a Stonehenge of his own – only built out of automobiles. And Reinders did not envision it becoming a tourist attraction; instead, it was to be a memorial to his father, who died a few years earlier.

Over the course of that summer 30 years ago, Reinders and a cohort of family members put up 39 classic American cars in the same proportions as Stonehenge. Whether buried partway in the ground, standing alone, or joined with others as part of an arch, the autos are all spray painted gray. They came from local farms and dumps.

“It took a lot of blood, sweat, and beers,” Reinders, who was 89 as of this past August, has said.

On the Summer Solstice in 1987, he and his family dedicated the work with champagne, poetry, songs, and a play written by the family.

Since then, a gift shop and additional metal works of art by local artists have sprouted up beside Carhenge. Four years ago, the site was gifted to the city.

“He was a chemical engineer,” Diane of the gift shop tells me. “He really became enamored with Stonehenge. The more he looked at it, the more he thought ‘You know, I could do that,’ so he came home and got with is siblings and they did it. He says, ‘When I did this I never had a clue what it would be.’”

What it has become is a roadside mecca that has attracted people far and wide to this modest Nebraska town of 8,500 people that is also known for its ties to railroad history (specifically, it’s connection to the coal lines taken from the Powder River Basin).

“Look at this book,” Diane says, pointing out the locations printed in the guest book in just the last three months. “This is bizarre.”

Carhenge has brought traveling enthusiasts in search of roadside lore (like me), but its visitors run the gamut to folks who just happen to drive me—and can’t ignore the towering Cadillacs and other vehicles standing high on the plains.

The recent solar eclipse brought lots of traffic into Alliance. The geography of the area, the lore and fascination with the American automobile, and the rarity of the celestial event made it a draw for star-seekers and car-lovers alike.

Reinders himself came up from his residence in Texas to see the eclipse at Carhenge, but he doesn’t buy into the mania.

“I’d like to say it was all part of the greater plan, but I’d be lying through my teeth,” Reinders said when asked by the Washington Post if he envisioned his work to be connected to an event like the eclipse.

He doesn’t know why Stonehenge was built, but figures “I like to think they’re like people today. They want the universe to know they were here.”

Carhenge was not an immediate success, as many in the community declared it “a vertical junkyard,” as Reinders puts it. But it came to be accepted, and then promoted.

“Some people actually come to Carhenge expecting a mystical, magical experience,” Kevin Howard, head of Alliance’s Visitors Bureau told NPR. “Carhenge is whatever you want it to be to you.”

With the site now in the hands of the city, Carhenge won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Could it last as long as Stonehenge? Probably not, but already achieved a legendary status in its own right.

Additional sources:

http://carhenge.com/history/

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/10/541583064/as-eclipse-madness-sweeps-u-s-a-stonehenge-made-of-cars-prepares

https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2606

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/21/carhenge-builder-has-the-last-laugh/?utm_term=.4a29177b2748

[Note: all quotes by Jim Reinders drawn from the article in The Washington Post]

Wall Drug, a Mother of Roadside Attractions

The Blue Charley Chronicles has moved! Please visit the new site at The Blue Charley Chronicles – Roadside attractions, small towns, museums, and more from the USA

Wall Drug vaulted to a tourist destination by virtue of three little words: free ice water.

Ted and Dorothy Hudstead purchased the drugstore in the little town of Wall, South Dakota in 1931. Economic and weather conditions had taken their toll, and business was slow. Neighbors, a pastor, and acts of goodwill kept it going, but a long-term solution was needed.

On a hot summer afternoon in 1936, with two children at home and no relief in sight, Dorothy had an epiphany. Travelers were driving across miles of prairie in the heat and must be thirsty. Wall Drug had water and ice. The couple could offer free ice water. To get the word out, they’d put up clever signs along the highway encouraging travelers to stop by. Just like that, an idea was born.

Soon signs sprouted up along Route 16A: “Get a soda…Get a root beer…turn next corner…Just as near…To Highway 16 & 14…Free Ice Water…Wall Drug.”

Within hours, they came – for ice water, ice cream, directions. And that was the promising beginning of what has since become a tourist mecca.

Free ice water fueled the business, but it’s the signs that today make Wall Drug known the world over. You can find them on every continent, even Antarctica, with each displaying the corresponding mileage. On this trip I’ve seen Wall Drug bumper stickers on RVs and even on a metal railing guarding an overlook in the Yosemite area.

Wall’s population is a little under a thousand people, and has only grown by about 100 since 1970. But it’s not unreasonable to think that Wall Drug is responsible for keeping it a town. After all, the hamlet had its largest percentage increase in population in the same decade that Dorothy and Ted Hudstead hatched their “Free Ice Water” idea. And while there certainly may not be much more to do in Wall, a hub of surrounding businesses cater to tourists, and without this roadside attraction it’s just hard to say how much of a town there would be.

On the first visit to Wall Drug, you may be confused because it appears to be an indoor shopping mall. A conglomerate of what appears to be separate stores is actually one. Western Wear, a bookstore, a pharmacy, a gift shop, a diner…yep, they’re all a part of Wall Drug. As is the giant rabbit, kiddie rides, and piano-playing and singing gorilla in the courtyard, and the T-Rex straight out of Jurassic Park that comes to life every 10 minutes in a show of steam, roars, and lit-up eyes. There’s also statues of the Wild West saving a seat for you on benches, walls and walls of family and community-related photographs, and a mini-chapel.

In between Rapid City and Wall on Interstate 90, they pop up every quarter-mile or so. They may state the mileage, have simple words like “It’s Cool,” remind you of the exit number, advertise something they sell, or slap the name of an entertainment outlet on which they’ve been featured. Most of the signs have a picture, often creatively combined with the language. For example, the one that reads “Dig It! Wall Drug” features a miner, and “Wall Drug A National Treasure” includes a treasure chest. The mileage ones dwindle as you near, and it’s impossible for the kid not to come out in you just a little bit – 105, 62, 29, 14…

Whether it’s a fun stop to stretch your legs, a dire need for Pepto-Bismol, a Buffalo burger you’re craving, a tacky souvenir, a fine pair of boots, free ice water, or yes, just about anything else under the sun that draws you off the highway, you’re far from alone. Like bees to honey, they come in droves. And if you are one such case, don’t be surprised if you walk away with a Wall Drug bumper sticker – or at the very least a silly grin on your face.

Additional material pulled from the store's website, www.walldrug.com