Paper Dolls
David Cohen illustration.
The Marion Theatre in McDowell County opened in July 1929, during a time of unrest between cotton mill management and workers. This downtown movie theater, with its brick-and-carved stone façade and imposing marquee, must have been impressive and a refuge for the mill families, who needed an escape from their troubles. My mother, Madeline, living then in Clinchfield cotton mill village with her family, was one of these moviegoers.
“Everybody went to the movies,” she told me and recounted how, as a girl, she often walked from Clinchfield to town, sometimes even “skipping school,” to go to the movies. “I was a movie freak,” she said.
She liked the Westerns, the Our Gang comedies, and the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. But she especially loved the films of “Shirley Temple,” “Curly Top,” “Dimples,” and others. The dancing in these films fascinated her and gave her aspirations of her own. She studied Shirley’s tap dance moves on the screen and practiced them on the wooden floorboards at home. Her mama, Hessie, had her oxford shoes fitted with metal plates, and the taps resounded throughout the rooms in the house.
At the time, her friend and neighbor on the mill hill, Katie Mae, also liked Shirley Temple. After a weekend trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina, Katie Mae brought home a souvenir to show off to everyone at school: a set of Shirley Temple paper dolls.
“I was envious that Katie Mae had been to Spartanburg,” my mother recalled. “And I’d always wanted Shirley Temple paper dolls like that.”
My mother never became a professional tap dancer. She remained for most of her life in McDowell County and worked in various hosiery mills. But during my childhood in the 1960s, she entertained me with a tap dancing routine. She placed her socked hands in a pair of child-sized wooden shoes that my father, a Merchant Marine during World War II, had brought home years earlier from Antwerp, Belgium. She hummed a tune and lifted the shoes to the beat, crossing her arms as if they were legs and tapping the shoe soles on a tabletop. The routine was reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s dinner roll dance in “The Gold Rush.”
My mother never lost her affection for Shirley Temple. Through the years she enjoyed seeing Shirley Temple movies on television, and when the era of videocassettes came along, I bought her all the Shirley Temple movies I could find. When Shirley Temple Black published Child Star in 1988, I bought the book for my mother, thinking she would enjoy reading about Shirley’s life. But her reaction was not what I expected. I think she was sad to acknowledge that the spunky child everyone adored during the Great Depression had grown older. And some of the Hollywood experiences that Black revealed in the book were disillusioning.
For a while my mother and I traveled with Christian Tours. During one of our trips, we were browsing through a country store. My mother found a Dover book of Shirley Temple paper dolls. She leafed through it and said, “These paper dolls look like the ones Katie Mae had!” She held the book as if she’d found a lost treasure. She bought it and kept it safely stored in her bedroom drawer. I was glad she finally got the paper dolls she had always wanted.
One Christmas, I ordered her a Shirley Temple “Baby Take a Bow” porcelain doll from Danbury Mint and registered it in her name. The doll, attired in a white organdy dress and white Mary Jane shoes, had a mass of curly hair and delicate, pretty features and looked strikingly like the child actress. My mother was pleased with the doll and kept it for years displayed on a chest of drawers.
When my mother passed away, my brother asked for the Dover book of paper dolls. He knew how much the book had meant to her. And I have the Shirley Temple doll displayed in a curio cabinet, along with the Belgian shoes. As I pass by the cabinet, I can’t help but think of a Clinchfield mill house and the little girl inside who danced and dreamed.