TOY REPAIR Her patients are real dolls, but 'doctor' is out

Illness has forced the owner to close her doll hospital after 58 years.
HUMMELSTOWN, Pa. (AP) -- The odor of turpentine hangs in the air among many signs of work still to be done on the second-floor workshop of the Mary Fox Doll Hospital.
There's a pile of stuffed white cloth bodies, one of them headless, in one corner. On a counter, a ceramic figurine of a willowy woman in a long white dress awaits the reattachment of her lower right arm.
But for the hospital's 88-year-old namesake, the work will have to remain undone. Illness has forced Mary Fox to give up a business that has spanned 58 years of practicing "painless surgery" on broken and battered dolls.
"I wanted to go on until I was 95, but my health prevented it," Fox said in a telephone interview from the home of her son Richard, with whom she moved in about two weeks ago.
Pickup time
The three-story Federal-style brick house where Fox lived and worked just two blocks from the town square in Hummelstown, a few miles east of Harrisburg, will be open periodically over the next several weeks so customers can pick up their dolls.
It all began in 1945 with what Fox thought would be a one-time gesture of kindness for a friend who loved Colonial-era clothing. Fox came across a pattern for a Colonial rag doll in a newspaper and decided to make one for her.
"I made this rag doll for her as a gift and got myself into over 50 years' worth of work," she said. "Unfortunately, her dog chewed it up, and I had to make another one."
Dolls were a precious luxury for Fox during her childhood in Harrisburg because her family was very poor, she said. On occasion, she would benefit from the generosity of one of the affluent families who hired her grandmother to clean their houses. They gave her playthings and other items they wanted to get rid of.
Requests grew
As an adult, her rag-doll gift prompted other friends -- and then friends of friends -- to come forward with requests for handmade doll clothes or first aid for maladies ranging from broken legs to rotted hair, and she was soon surrounded by them.
Working with a handful of helpers over the years, Fox spent at least eight hours a day in the shop, where she also sold dolls on consignment. One of the more intricate tasks she performed was sewing doll wigs made of human hair stitched to muslin cloth, then styling the hair with an old-fashioned curling iron.
"There are so many phases of doll repair ... you can't tell somebody how to do it; you have to try to do it yourself," she said. "I never went to any doll hospital school. I just used my good common sense."
Longtime customers say that no matter how badly disfigured their dolls were, Fox always managed to find a way to make them whole again.
"I just recently brought a doll to her, and I thought for sure there was no hope. She was missing an eye," said Sandy Breckenmaker, 52, who recalled making weekly trips to the shop as a little girl to buy doll clothes. "She had to take the whole head apart and pull the stuffing out. I couldn't believe she did it."
And throughout her career, Fox charged only 20 cents a minute -- $12 an hour -- for her labor.
"My customers always told me, 'You don't charge enough,' so I got a lot of tips. The thing of it is, if we had charged more, I think there would have been fewer customers," she said.
Dwindling numbers
It is unclear how many other "doll doctors" are still practicing around the country, but Barbara Whiteman, founder and executive director of the Philadelphia Doll Museum, believes their numbers are dwindling.
"People are just not repairing dolls the way they used to. Of course, more dolls are vinyl now, and after they're broken, they're easily replaced," Whiteman said.