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Wallace says he is still amazed that Susan refuses to allow any obstacle, however great, to keep her from her goals. "After she had barely sculpted her first head, making her own molds, learning everything by trial and error, she heard there was show for portrait dolls in two weeks. She said, 'I can do that.' In two weeks!" he says. "She refuses to be sidetracked, to be defeated by obstacles. I can't believe the problems of doll making she has solved herself. When she is confronted by a problem, she says, 'I can figure that out.' And she always does."

Back at their house, guests typically enter through the garage, into the kitchen that is currently under construction. For the moment, the kitchen is also the living quarters for two beagles and two miniature dachshunds (their names: Rocky, Barbie, Lucky, Dotty) The dogs, after the introductory sniffs and leaps into one's lap, adopt you and attempt to stir up a party.

Off the living rooms, which are decorated with striking and interesting antiques, most of them handed down on the Wallace side of the family, is Wakeen's home studio. The studio is a warm room, with a wooden floor, brick wall, fireplace, and windows that open to the expansive backyard. Photographs and magazine advertisements featuring children are posted seemingly everywhere.

A corner cabinet is crowded with old toys, doll heads, and a couple of dolls she helped design when she worked for two years at Hasbro. One of the heads was a project-a course on forensic sculpture-she completed at the Scottsdale Artist School in Arizona, where she studies each year to "recharge her creative batteries."

On one work table are a clay head and body, and other parts, all wrapped in plastic bags so they don't dry out. Wakeen pulls the pieces out of the bags and fits them together. A miniature human being forms before your eyes. All that is missing is color and breath. Based on an illustration of an old Swedish children's book, the figure is one of a group of young girls that is being pulled together by Wakeen, Robert Tonner, and Jean Singer.

"We've been at it a year," laughs Wakeen. "But it was so much fun when they came over and we worked on the project, all in the same room. We have to get back together and finish it. We've just all been so busy."

The Susan Wakeen Doll Company plant is where Wakeen and Wallace are so busy. It sits back from the main road, just outside Litchfield. The doors open in on the company showroom. Dolls-some of which have not yet arrived in stores-decorate several open, airy rooms. Accessories, such as tea sets, complement the dolls. The showroom eases into an alcove arranged for adventurous customers who want to make their own dolls. A crowd of heads and body parts and wigs line a wall. A work bench stocked with tools sits in the center of the area.

The showroom and the work space were the center of activities a couple of months ago when the company hosted its second annual tea party. Eight hundred attended. The affair must have spilled out of the doors, the windows, onto the parking lot.

Past the dressed-up dolls and pink bows, in the factory, about 24 employees, full-time and part-time, take care of the business of supplying collectors. It's not so much a factory in the sense of manufacture-Lloyd Middleton makes the porcelain-perfect vinyl-as an assembly plant and distribution center. The atmosphere seems low-key, comfortably structured. It's as if a score of craftspeople (all women) casually came together to wig, apply lashes, stuff bodies, etc. and box up award-winning dolls. Wakeen and Wallace move about the facility, discussing design, photography, business points. Checking on everything.

In one room, which looks like an eccentric aunt's sewing room, rolls of fabric are stacked here, racks of children's clothes stand there, and pictures of children in outfits are everywhere. Wakeen explains the tricks of the time-consuming detail-crazy process of dressing the dolls.

"You have to have wide-open eyes," Wakeen says. "You have to pull ideas from all kinds of sources, from everything you see -old magazines (she points out a box of turn-of-the-century women's magazines) to what you see on children when you're out walking around."

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This article was written by Scott Wood and originally published in Doll Reader magazine in September, 1996.

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