Raggedy Ann & Beloved Belindy

Main Street in Arcola, Illinois, has one distinction that no main street anywhere else has, namely the Johnny Gruelle Raggedy Ann and Andy Museum. I'd probably read about the place sometime before we got to Arcola, but Raggedy Ann and Andy had made such a slight impression on me throughout my 45+ years that I anything I knew previously about the museum must have evaporated. So I was surprised to see it.



Not only that, I went in with some trepidation. Here's another rinky-dink museum that wants to gouge me for admission. I was fully expecting them to ask $5 or more -- museum admission inflation has gotten pretty bad in recent years. If it had been that much, I would have sent Yuriko and the kids in to look around, while I took a walk around Arcola.

Admission was only $1 each -- and nothing for Ann. At that price, I decided to look around. It turned out to be a small, thoughtfully designed museum not only about the dolls, but about their creator, the cartoonist John Gruelle, who grew up in Arcola. Previously I knew nothing about him and his creations, and now I know something. I'd say the museum did its job.

As you'd expect, it had a large collection of Raggedy Anns, but it had other, more interesting (to me) items, including an astonishing array of Raggedy Ann merchandise from across the decades. Gruelle drew political cartoons, and there were some of those; he illustrated children's books not his own, and there were some of those as well; and there were other characters he'd created, both as drawings and dolls that never achieved the level of fame that Raggedy Ann did. The most intriguing of these was Beloved Belindy, Raggedy Ann and Andy's mammy. I figure most people wouldn't know there was ever such a character. I certainly didn't.

Then again, as a former boy, Raggedy and her kin had little appeal for me. But wall of a magazine covers and various illustrations from the 1920s to the 2000s showed just how enduring the doll's appeal is -- hanging there were dozens of uses of Raggedy Ann in illustrations and photographs, mainly using the doll as a shorthand for the innocence of childhood or girlhood. In one, a Christmastime 1961 or '62 magazine cover by Norman Rockwell, a traditional Santa -- as you'd imagine he'd be in a Rockwell painting -- is wearing a Mercury astronaut space helmet. One of the toys he's carrying is a Raggedy Ann.