Hitty: Sundstrom’s doll-making talents celebrated at BCL Friends Tea
March 04, 2011
By Peggy Kelly
Santa Paula News
“Hitty, Her First Hundred Years” was a novel published in 1929, but due to artists such as Santa Paula resident Mary Lee Sundstrom, the title character will soon be working on her second 100 years of adventures.
Hitty, a hand carved wooden doll, was featured in the novel written by Rachel Field, who won the Newberry Medal for excellence in American children’s literature in 1930.
Insight into creating Hitty dolls was offered last month at the last BCL Centennial Celebration event staged by the Friends of the Library. Those in attendance at the February 14 “Dolls and Tea” celebration included Jean Corrin Morris, the granddaughter-in-law of Cora Boosey whose doll collection is a treasured library attraction, and members of “Attic BeBe” including Georgette Palmer of Simi Valley, president of the International Doll Federation’s local chapter.
The original Hitty, the narrator of her fictionalized tale, was a wooden doll carved in the early 19th century for a young girl from Maine. The novel details Hitty’s adventures as she travels from owner to owner over the course of a century, living in locations as far-flung as Boston, New Orleans, India, and a South Pacific island.
Hitty adventures include being lost at sea, under sofa cushions and abandoned in a barn hayloft. Traveling with a snake charmer and appearing in his act was just another of the adventures Hitty experienced in her first 100 years.
Sundstrom noted those fans and collectors of Hitty are almost akin “to a cult, it’s crazy what’s been going on” with the Hitty craze over the years, including websites, custom made clothing and furniture and other items related to the famous traveling doll.
Sundstrom and her partner, Sandy Reinke, a former city resident who made the doll’s clothing, created hundreds of Hitty dolls as well as a collection of storybook and character dolls such as a flapper, Alice in Wonderland and Red Riding Hood, among others. There was even a streetwalker doll that Sundstrom said she made for her son, and a “fainting couch I am very proud of!”
Although now as she winds down her doll-making career she only has two dolls in various stages of completion, Sundstrom, who started making dolls in her teens, said the rewards have been multi-faceted: “I got paid three ways... doing work that I loved, then people writing to me saying how much they loved their dolls, and then money. But I got tired of it.”
Sundstrom said Hitty dolls can be found for sale, but usually only because “someone died.... People don’t like to sell their dolls.”
The Hitty doll that inspired Rachel Field’s novel currently resides at the Stockbridge Library Association in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. And as a reflection of the enduring popularity of the doll of many adventures, the Hitty story was rewritten and updated by Susan Jeffers and Rosemary Wells in 1999.
