The ultrasound showed a happy, healthy baby girl. A nurse named Easton gave the mother some "Imagicillin" and TLC, then asked the crowd for help, and a few dozen people yelled, "Push!" The Augusta TV station WRDW reported all of this in June 2023 with a straight face.
The mother is a large cloth cabbage. The building is BabyLand General Hospital, in Cleveland, Georgia, about 15 minutes from Helen, and the newborn went off to the nursery for shots. "I was pretty emotional honestly, seeing a new baby born," a third-time visitor named Isaac Fleischer told the station. "You don't really get to see that every day."
You do here. Nurses told WRDW that Mother Cabbage usually gives birth at least once an hour. The New Georgia Encyclopedia once put it at five an hour, so either the pace has eased or somebody finally talked to her union. That is a brutal schedule for a vegetable.
The doctor will correct you
The script changes from visit to visit. Roadside America, which has been cataloging odd American attractions for decades, heard a nurse call out, "Cabbage dilation, all staff on standby!" In its account, a doctor listened to the cabbage with a stethoscope, injected the Imagicillin, then yanked out a nude doll "in a halo of camera flashes." The baby got turned over to show its Xavier Roberts signature "birthmark," and the crowd took a name suggested by a little girl in the front row. Michelle, as it happened.
The staff don't break. Roadside America's writers made the mistake of calling the Kids dolls and were corrected on the spot by a doctor, who then excused himself to supervise a birth. "They're babies!" he said. We have called them dolls all over this page and we stand ready to answer for it.
A sonogram from the Van Halen people
Mother Cabbage works in better surroundings than she used to. On November 21, 2009, according to the company, BabyLand moved out of its old clinic and into a three-story, 70,000-square-foot Southern-style mansion a few miles north. Candice Dyer of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported 67 columns and 20,000 square feet of wraparound porch on a 100-acre spread, and called it "a sweet crib by any standard."
Inside, Dyer found tiled floors, a fathers' waiting room, mock fireflies, whippoorwill calls and chairs small enough for actual children. At the Magic Crystal Tree she found an IV drip of Imagicillin and a sonogram that glows pink or blue, the work of Atlanta Soundworks, a company with an unusual client list.
"Normally we do special effects for rock events like Van Halen concerts, but when we were asked to design a sonogram to go in the Magic Crystal Tree, we couldn't resist," said Joe Peavy of Atlanta Soundworks.
He made it from a real sonogram video he got off YouTube. The collectors needed a minute. "I was sad at first because I thought I would miss the old hospital," an Atlanta collector named Wilma Arrington told the paper, before deciding the new place was "a vast improvement that beautifully maintains the fantasy." BabyLand also worked with neighbors on travel packages, which produced our favorite sentence in the whole file, from company spokeswoman Margaret McLean: "If you stay at Unicoi Lodge, they'll provide a cradle if you adopt a baby, and Edelweiss restaurant will give a meal to the new parent." That was 2009, so call before you count on the cradle or the meal. It does tell you how seriously everyone around here took the bit.
An art student and an old clinic
Xavier Roberts is a Cleveland native. The company says that in 1976, as a 21-year-old art student, he rediscovered "needle molding," a German fabric sculpture technique from the early 1800s, and combined it with quilting he'd learned from his mother. The New Georgia Encyclopedia dates the concept for the dolls to 1977, when he was studying soft sculpture at Truett-McConnell College in Cleveland. In 1978, by the company's account, a doll named Dexter took a first-place ribbon at the Osceola Art Show, and Roberts began selling hand-signed "Little People" at craft shows for a $40 "adoption fee."
Then he and some friends renovated the L.G. Neal Clinic, a turn-of-the-century medical building in town, and opened it as a hospital. The company and the AJC say 1978. The encyclopedia says 1979. Either way, it's hard not to suspect that the building gave him the theme.
TIME called what happened inside a "syrupy ritual." The dolls were "delivered" and "adopted," never made or sold. Employees wore nurses' whites, and each prospective parent had to raise a right hand and vow undying love. By late 1983 Roberts had sold 250,000 of them at $125 to $1,000 apiece, many to adults who wanted one for themselves. Not everybody loved this. A small Georgia group called Alternatives gave his dolls its "worst gift of the year" award a couple of years before the craze, on the grounds that they were "marketed as a substitute for loving real kids."
Enter the swimming pool people
The Little People became Cabbage Patch Kids in 1982, when, the National Toy Hall of Fame says, a marketer named Roger Schlaifer acquired the licensing rights and renamed them. The company that took them national had an even odder resume than the sonogram guy. Coleco began in Hartford in 1932 as the Connecticut Leather Co., which sold supplies to shoemakers. By TIME's account it moved into plastics and became the world's largest maker of above-ground pools. It bought a snowmobile manufacturer just ahead of a mild winter, and it nearly went bankrupt on video games in the late 1970s. By 1983 it was betting heavily on a home computer called the Adam, which was running late.
Coleco's factory-made dolls sold for about $25, each with a slightly different face chosen by computer. They arrived on shelves in 1983 and Coleco could not make enough. It said it was chartering planes to bring in 200,000 more a week from Hong Kong. New York's Nassau County accused it of "harassing" children by advertising dolls they couldn't buy, and the company suspended its ads for a while. President Arnold Greenberg was unusually frank about the whole enterprise. He liked to say, according to TIME, "We really create the market. We create the demand itself."
"Get back, you're breaking my legs"
What he created, that Christmas, was this. At a Hills Department Store in Charleston, West Virginia, TIME reported that 5,000 people staged a near riot. "They knocked over the display table," said manager Scott Belcher. "People were grabbing at each other, pushing and shoving. It got ugly."
In Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, about 1,000 people waited eight hours to get into a Zayre store and then surged in. The store's 240 dolls were gone in 30 minutes. Departmental manager William Shigo armed himself with a baseball bat and defended his position behind the counter, and TIME preserved what he said, which is one of the great sentences of American retail: "Get back, you're breaking my legs." The Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader, as History.com reports it, counted five people in the hospital, one of them with three cracked ribs and a broken leg. That one had real doctors and no cabbage.
The joke that got out of hand was in Milwaukee. Two disc jockeys cracked that a load of dolls would be dropped from a B-29 bomber to anyone holding up a catcher's mitt and an American Express card. Two dozen people turned up at County Stadium, in a wind chill of 2 below, with their hopes up.
Psychologists were asked to explain all this and did so at length, and TIME doesn't sound convinced by any of them. The magazine gave the last word to a five-year-old in New Jersey named Eileen Napoli, who was asked by a New York Times reporter why she liked her doll. "She has a real belly button," Eileen said.
Martha
While all of that was going on, a woman in Louisville was still fighting Roberts in court. Martha Nelson Thomas, who sold handmade dolls she called Doll Babies, told the Christian Science Monitor in December 1983 that she had been working on the design since 1971. By her account, she met Roberts in 1976 at a fair where she was selling her dolls, and he asked her to supply some for sale at a Georgia state park where he worked. She says that after some had sold there she stopped supplying them, worried he might take the idea. Then she saw his.
"It was my idea," she said. "I started working on the design in 1971 and developed it over the years."
She sued for $1 million. She also said she'd never gotten a copyright, not realizing she would need one. Roberts had one, and in March 1983 a federal judge ruled it valid and found that he hadn't misrepresented himself by not crediting her. The case had a second part still to come, over his use of the word "original" in advertising.
Roberts's own lawyer, Stanley Birch, told the paper that Roberts got the idea for his dolls "partly from her," then added that "his expression of an idea is quite different from hers." The two lawyers couldn't even agree on what judges had said about the dolls. Birch cited a judge in another case who found them "generally dissimilar." Her lawyer, Jack Wheat, said the judge in her case called the differences only "slight."
"I know we're asking for money," she said. "But that's not the reason we're in it. It's not completely honest to sell his dolls, and then, when asked where it originated, to omit my part." She didn't care for the factories either. "There are too many mass-produced things," she said. "You need something personal, something hand-made, with someone who will stand behind it."
The case settled out of court, in 1984 and for an undisclosed amount according to Wikipedia, which cites the Washington Post, so we can't tell you who came out ahead. History.com says flatly that Roberts bought a handful of her dolls first, and the National Toy Hall of Fame says he was "influenced by" them. She went on making art in Louisville and died there in 2013.
That 1983 Monitor story ends a long way from the courtroom. A reporter asked an employee at Roberts's company how many dolls it was producing, and she said she was never sure. "We really don't know how many cabbages go into labor each day."
The Kids sue the garbage
By 1986 the company was back in court over things that looked too much like its dolls. Topps, the baseball card people, had a hit with Garbage Pail Kids, starring a bearded, beer-guzzling biker named Vile Kyle and a character called Doug Plug, who looked so much like a fire hydrant that, as TIME put it, dogs eyed him affectionately. "I like them because they're gross," an eight-year-old named Auronda Barnes told the magazine. Original Appalachian Artworks of Cleveland, Georgia, sued for copyright infringement in March 1986.
Topps argued parody. Original Appalachian Artworks had asked for $30 million, and in February 1987 the two sides settled: Topps kept selling its cards, paid an unspecified amount of cash, and agreed to change characters like Dead Fred and Baby Barfy so they no longer resembled Cabbage Patch Kids. "I could scream I'm so excited," Roberts told UPI. We will leave the question of who gets to borrow a doll face from whom right there on the table.
Still in labor
The New Georgia Encyclopedia says about 65 million dolls had been adopted by 1990. The company's timeline says one of them, "Christopher Xavier," rode a Space Shuttle in 1985. The Great Bend Tribune in Kansas called that "the popular mythology" and couldn't confirm the mission, and neither could we. The timeline also has the Kids going to Barcelona in 1992 as the first official mascot of the US Olympic team. They got a postage stamp out of a public vote in 1999 and made the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2023. Sales fell off after the 1980s, as sales will, but the old clinic alone drew as many as 250,000 visitors a year, according to the AJC.
The money never entirely left the patch either. Dyer reported in 2009 that a Sarah Palin Kid had sold for $19,000, and that the dolls were, in McLean's words, "huge in Australia and South Africa right now." Roadside America saw signs in the Fathers' Waiting Room valuing early hand-stitched Kids, including $37,000 for one named Wade. One called Dexter, the name of the prize winner, was marked at $15,000.
The hospital also handles aftercare. Roadside America reports a Bath Camp, where parents send their Kids to be soaked and scrubbed, and a surgery for repairs. Rips and burns are the usual complaints.
