Toys: Little Brother

Gone are the days when small chil dren played contentedly with featureless rag dolls. Today’s vogue is for realism, and toymakers now turn out dolls that can walk, talk, cry and even wet. When Frank Caplan, general manager of Creative Playthings, Inc., spotted a French doll called Petit Frere at Nürnberg’s doll fair last March, he jumped at the opportunity to buy up distribution rights for the U.S. Renamed “Little Brother,” the doll has a sweet angelic face, is, in fact, modeled after a Verrocchio Renaissance cherub in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, and has the normal, diminutive male genitalia of a four-month-old bambino.

His arrival set off a small furor. U.S. Customs, tipped off that an obscene doll was being imported, sent an inspector to investigate. He took one look and brushed the complaint aside. But more determined opposition was building up elsewhere. In Norwood, Ohio, Mrs. Stephen Wetzel, a mother of three, read about the doll in the newspapers, formed a committee that has since mailed off over a thousand letters of protest to Government officials, churches, clubs and department stores, branding the $19.95 doll an “obscene toy.” Southern California is currently being blanketed by other protesters who believe that Little Brother will “complicate existing problems of sex and perversion.”

Wary of controversy, most of the 50 franchised department stores across the country are keeping Little Brother under wraps. Manhattan’s Bloomingdale’s doesn’t stock the doll, will fill mail orders only. Denver’s MayD & F and Cleveland’s Higbee’s have taken the doll off display, although so many customers have come in asking for it that both stores have had to reorder. With various pediatricians and child psychologists coming to the defense of Little Brother as a perfectly natural play doll “unless adult reaction makes it unnatural play,” Creative Playthings is now seriously considering giving Little Brother a “Little Sister.” And she will come equipped with everything that is a perfectly natural part of any four-month-old little sirl.