Business & Finance: Rubber Dolly

If a child is not given a doll it will make one. But because better dolls can be manufactured than can be fashioned at home from old rags, sticks and twine, more than $25,000,000 worth of dolls are sold each year. The Depression has made small inroads into doll sales. Centre of the U. S. doll industry is Manhattan’s lower West Side where 22.000,000 dolls are made annually. An infant industry (before the War practically all were imported), U. S. dolls are protected by a tariff ranging up to 70%. The business is highly specialized. One of the largest units, Margon Corp., makes only eyes, teeth-&-tongues, voices. Most dolls’ hair is mohair or artificial silk, but eye lashes are real hair, imported from nuns in certain Italian convents at $8 a pound. Though many a doll is sold naked or equipped merely with a diaper and safety pin, complete wardrobes are available. In Cleveland in 1928 a heavy demand was found for dolls’ trousseaux (including evening dresses and ermine wrap) retailing at $200.

All U. S. rubber companies busy themselves developing new uses for rubber. They have branched into everything from dirigibles to syringes, from road paving to toothbrushes. Last week B. F. Goodrich Co.’s subsidiary, Miller Rubber Products, announced that after six years of experimentation it had perfected a new rubber doll. Flesh tints are ingrained, the skin soft, the limbs flexible. There is no interior bracing to make it heavy and cumbersome. James Taylor, head of the doll division, says that it was first manufactured only in an 18-in. size, but that the cry for smaller sizes forced them to supply dolls down to 10 in. Dollman Taylor’s division has been operating on a 24-hour schedule for several weeks tc take care of advance orders for ”My Dolly.”