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"It takes a long time...months and months to create and then finally decide on the right combination of material, borders, collars, everything," Wallace says. "This process of perfection is true for every doll Susan makes. That's how she works and the collectors and customers expect and deserve that."

Wakeen and Wallace, after more than a decade in the business, are still astonished by the large and often vital roles the dolls play in the lives of collectors. They receive a stream of letters-of thanks, of personal testaments, of memories, and suggestions.

The couple decide who's going to carry most of the narration, then one of them-actually, both of them taking various parts of the story-unwinds with several stories.

There was the man whose wife was slowly recovering from a dire and protracted illness. His wife's spirits were low. Nothing seemed to bring her out. So the man stopped by a doll shop, for the first time in his life, and simply picked out the prettiest doll there. One of Sue's. And gave it to his wife. It was like medicine, what the doctor should have ordered. The woman's outlook and health fully recovered.

They received a letter from an elderly woman who had recently lost her husband and whose children were grown. The woman wrote that, since she had bought her Jason doll (a DOTY winner in 1988), she was able to look forward again to getting up in the morning. She sat Jason at the breakfast table with her everyday, and she no longer felt alone.

Then there's the ballerina story. A shop owner told them it. A blind woman came into the shop and ran her hands over one of Wakeen's ballerinas. The doll was "on point," posed on its toes. The blind woman told the shop owner that she had always wondered what "on point" meant and that now she knew.

"It was almost like giving this woman sight, for a brief moment," says Waken. "That was very touching. It makes you very humble and inspires you to work harder when you learn how much your dolls can mean to people."

"Stories like those and just knowing that you have helped make people happy, that's what makes all the work worthwhile. It's what keeps you going."

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

For more great articles be sure to pick up your copy of Doll Reader.

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