Imaginary Worlds - The U.S. of Play - Part 1: Wagons, Bears and Dolls

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

In honor of the 250th anniversary of the USA, we are doing a series of mini stories across two episodes that explore American toys and games. This week, we look at early childhood objects that became vehicles of the imagination. I talk with Michelle Parnett-Dwyer, senior curator at the Strong National Museum of Play, about how the origin of the Radio Flyer Wagon. Author Michael Kimmel tells me about his great-grand uncle who invented the teddy bear with a little help from the 26th president. I talk with Sara Broussard, director of the Houston Toy Museum, about the complicated history of Cabbage Patch Kids and my assistant producer Stephanie Billman recounts her obsession with the doll that adults were literally fighting over in the mid-1980s. To support the show, you can donate on Patreon where you get access to the ad-free version and our companion show Between Imaginary Worlds.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Spotify Advertising. You're among fans. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molinsky. I want you to imagine a red wagon. I bet we are thinking of the same one. It might be made of metal, wood, or plastic. It's actually been made of all three at some point in its history.

And it probably has the words Radio Flyer on the side. This red wagon is so simple. and iconic, I didn't know until recently that there was somebody who invented it. Antonio Pascene. He emigrated from Italy to the U.S. in 1914. He was only 16 years old. He moved to Chicago and started doing manual labor. And he eventually saved enough to buy some woodworking equipment and set up his own

sort of a rented room where he was starting to produce little wagons. So he would build these wagons and then he would build these wagons and then he would, would go out and peddle them around town. That is Michelle Parnett Dwyer. She's the senior curator at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. She says when Antonio saved enough money, he founded the Liberty Coaster Company in honor of the Statue of Liberty. And he advertised the wagons as being intended for every little girl and boy, which I really

loved because a lot of toys that were more. maybe active outdoor play toys, who were generally marketed to boys. So it was kind of interesting that he thought, you know, these are universal. They're for everybody. In 1927, he renamed the wagon the radio flyer because he was excited about these newfangled technologies

of radios and airplanes. They were doing very well, but it was also entering into the Depression. He kind of had his sight set on the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, he wanted to have this grand unveiling of his wagons. Even though they had been around, he wanted to really get everybody's attention.

So he took out a loan for $30,000 to build a 45-foot-tall structure of a boy atop a wagon. And he called it coaster boy. Have you seen this? No, and what do you mean by structure? I have to say it's terrifying if you look up. images of it. It is about 45 feet tall. It's almost like an arc structure. And it has this character of a boy and he's sort of hanging over a wagon, a radio fire wagon. So that proved very successful.

He sold about 1,500 a day throughout the Depression. As you were talking, I looked up this picture. it is creepy because I think that also people's idea of what a child looked like in the 1930s is like it looks like a man, like a little man, because children probably weren't dressed in what we would now consider children's clothes. And so he looks almost like a butler or something. It was and the scale of it is totally weird. Yes, agreed. And they called him coaster boy. And they positioned. him in what was called Enchanted Island, which from my understanding was sort of an area within the World's Fair where parents would just drop their kids to free range and do whatever they wanted while the parents went to look at other things going on. It got a ton of attention from people. But the most strange thing about it all to me is that nobody, from my understanding, nobody knows what happened to Coaster Boy. Where did he go?

I think he probably lived on in the nightmares of children who saw him up close. But for the majority of people who are not at the World's Fair, this red wagon became a symbol of childhood. In the comic strip Calvin and Hobbs, Calvin has a wagon that doesn't say radio flyer, but it is red. And he and Hobbs would fly over the hills, imagining that they were in a spaceship or an airplane. And that was one of the things that Antonio emphasized is that a child could make it into a spaceship, a race car, a submarine, any sort of vehicle. And it was this sort of source of freedom and, you know, endless imagination. And it has stayed pretty much the same. You know, they had a couple of different versions.

I read about one version that's stainless steel and it was designed to look more like a modern car or something. a steel diesel powered train. And it had an actual dashboard and lights, which is really cool. In the 70s, they sort of borrowed ideas from muscle cars, so certain types of tires and brighter colors. And they even created an all-terrain version called the Quad Shock Wagon, which was made in the 1990s and was sort of inspired by the modern SUVs of that period. I think it's so interesting. interesting that this idea that the red wagon could be a vehicle for a child's imagination was intentional. Yeah. Yeah, which says so much about how I imagined Antonio was as a person, like, clearly he had this adventurous spirit, you know, to come here at 16 years old and build this

incredible life for yourself and then eventually your family. You really have to have big dreams. And I think it's so beautiful. And the company has stayed in the family. which is also really interesting. This used to be the type of story we celebrated in America to the point where it was a cliche, the immigrant who came here with nothing except the clothes on their back, and they went from rags to riches. Those of us who are descendants of immigrants

heard stories of hardship and how lucky we were to be here because of what happened to the people who stayed behind. But throughout our history, Americans have also gone through collective freakouts where they shut the door on that dream. And I've heard people say that earlier waves of immigrants were the right kind, and now we have the wrong kind of immigrants. Well, at the turn of the century, not a lot of Americans thought that Italians, like Antonio Piscene,

were the right kind of immigrant. This year, the United States is celebrating its 250th anniversary. Now, there are endless fantasy worlds we could talk about that are uniquely American, but we kept thinking about toys and games, because they're often the earliest objects that kids play with. They are the first vehicles of our imaginations. So we're doing a series of mini stories across two episodes about American toys and games that took on a life of their own.

And the next object I want to look at also comes from a community that many, Many Americans believed was the wrong kind of immigrant in the early 20th century. People with last names like Molinsky. Michael Kimmel is the author of Playmakers, the Jewish entrepreneurs who created the toy industry in America. And he has a personal connection to one of the subjects in his book. I'm the great-grand-nephew of Morris Mictum, who invented the teddy bear and started the ideal toy corporation. So did you grow up with this family lore? Did you know your entire life about your great-grand uncle?

No, and yes. There was this picture, a picture of him on my piano with Shirley Temple sitting on his knee. And when I was growing up, I knew who Shirley Temple was, but I didn't exactly know who this guy, Morris Mictum, was. My mom told me that it was her great-uncle and that he had, you know, and he had started the ideal toy company, which left me with a question. Like, how come we weren't rich? And it turned out that Morris and my great-grandfather, Harris, they had a big falling out, and they never spoke to each other again. So I knew of him. I knew about him.

I knew that we were related to him, but we were the part of the family that was the black sheep part. Do you know what the falling out was about? Not a clue. Nobody knows. But they definitely know where they came from. Michael's great grand uncle, Morris Mictum, was born in a Stettel in what used to be Tsarist Russia. And he was studying to be a rabbi, because what little scheddle boy doesn't want to be a rabbi? But his family was worried that Morris would get conscripted into the Russian army. So his family declared that he had died of typhoid, and they buried a coffin filled with rocks,

and he's quietly slipped over the border and ended up in Vilni. The tradition was that if you were a young rabbinical student, a family would take you in and feed and, you know, house you while you were studying. Those families tended to be ones with marriage-eligible daughters. And of course, Morris and the daughter of the family, Rose fell in love and were married. He came first and sent for her a year later. So he settled on in Bedford-Suyvesant, district a part of Brooklyn. And he owned a candy store. And Eric, I have to tell you, one ought not underestimate the centrality of the candy store in the community in 1900. It was the center of activity.

It was the place where all the newspapers were all the candy was. People hung out there. And it was the only place in the neighborhood that had a cell phone. So if you were like to get a phone call, people would like walk up to your apartment, knock on your door, say you have a phone call at the candy store. You'd come back down, take the phone call. call it the candy store. It was also a repository for all of the newspapers in New York at the time and nationally. So one day in 1902, he was reading a newspaper and he saw this cartoon. And the cartoon was of Theodore Roosevelt. And he was standing there and behind him was this like little

bear cub that was being held by a tracker. Roosevelt had been on a hunt in Mississippi and had you know, was really grumpy. Three days. They didn't see any bears. He was really grumpy about this. You know, so they finally grabbed this little bear and scraggly little thing, tied it to a tree and said, here, President of Roswell, you can come shoot this. He said, not a chance. And so the image is of him going like this. No, he won't do it. The story would end there had not Clifford Berryman had been along on the trip. Clifford Berryman was the famous cartoonist for the Washington Post. And Barryman drew a cartoon. Morris saw it in the newspaper and he said to himself, you know,

the czar was never so nice. And he decided, he said, Rose, let's go downstairs into the basement and take some scraps of material and put them and make a little, you know, a little model of this and put it in the candy store window. So they did that. They called it Teddy's Bear.

People came by and they said, oh, that's really, you know, that's wonderful. We want one. And he said, well, okay. So they made a few more and they, you know, gave them away. neighbors. And Grasley, there was so many people who said they wanted

one that he said, okay, this is nice. And he wrote to Theater Roosevelt. Now, this is the part that I have to confess maybe apocryphal because we have never seen this. Nobody has ever seen this note. It may be, you know, lost to history. But he wrote to

Roosevelt and he said, we'd like to make these little models of the bear and call it Teddy's bear. Is that okay with you. And Rosefeld apparently wrote back, and this is in the, you know, in the archives somewhere that this has said, Roseholt said, well, I had no idea that my name could be of any value in the bear business, but you're more than welcome to use it. So they did. They cut off the S and called it the teddy bear. In 1903, Morris and Rose founded the ideal toy company, which produced teddy bears and other toys. The name was eventually shortened to the ideal toy company.

company, and many, many years later, in 1997, it was bought by Mattel. The ideal toy company also manufactured one of my favorite childhood toys, the Rubik's Cube. Now, if you're listening in Europe, you might be thinking, didn't a German company create the first stuffed animal bear? The answer is also yes. In the early 20th century, the toy industry in America was pretty small. A lot of toys were imported from Germany.

And one of those companies was Stife, which is now a huge manufacturer of stuffed animals. The Stife Bear and Morris's Teddy Bear were both designed in 1902. They seem to have been contemporaneous, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that the two of them look very different. The Stife Bear stands, his sort of posed, you know, as if he were marching. He has a very sort of proud, proud look, but the stife bear was amazing and was, you know, makes equal claim to having originated it. And Morris never patented it.

Wait, so if Morris didn't patent it, how did the ideal toy company do in terms of selling this teddy bear that it didn't patent? I mean, in terms of the long run. They did great. They did great. I mean, the teddy bear so took off so fast and everybody wanted one. elegant upper-class ladies were said to be walking around holding their teddy bears. It was such a phenomenon that a Midwestern Fire and Brimstone preacher invade against teddy bears

because he thought that if girls played with teddy bears and knocked dolls, they wouldn't feel the maternal instinct to become mothers. So it was going to go against nature and God's plan. Several newspapers said it was diverting from, You know, one said it was diverting from the struggle of the unions against the owners. Don't ask. But the thing about the teddy bear that it always gets me is really interesting and why I think it's lasted. I kept asking myself these questions. Like, why bears? Like, okay, why not giraffes?

The bear is familiar. People in North America would have seen bears. They wouldn't have seen giraffes unless they had gone to a zoo. But why not dogs and cats? what the bear represents is danger tamed. It's wild nature tamed, and yet they're not so exotic. And I think the other thing that made it so powerful is it is utterly gender neutral. The bear took off, and it has been reinvented dozens of times since, whether it's Paddington

or build a bear or, you know, all of the different iterations of bears, you know, it reinvents itself. It's kind of infinitely reinventable. Well, that's something I find kind of fascinating because we're thinking about all the, so Paddington, Winnie the Pooh, Care Bears, Teddy Ruxpin. It's amazing how it didn't occur to me until now how they're all based on the same basic design because I think of them all being unique. And yet they're not. They're actually just variations of a pretty limited theme.

What is it about the teddy bear that makes it so malleable that you change a little thing and then all of a sudden it's got a whole new personality? It's exactly that. It is so malleable. You can change little bits of it. You can dress it up. You can give it a voice. You can do all kinds of things with it.

The foundation is perfect. It's 18 inches and huggable. And it's perfect for a little kid, just a little bit big, but it's also perfect for a bigger kid. Oh, yeah. I remember when my dad, he needed surgery when he was in his 40s. He fell down a flight of stairs and had horrible knee surgery. And somebody brought him a giant teddy bear, and it meant so much to him. That teddy bear sat in his room for years.

Oh, that's great. That's great. After I talked with Michael, I suddenly started seeing teddy bears everywhere. I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed them, but they're so adaptable for any occasion, whether it's Valentine's Day or graduation. In fact, I realized that my father has two other teddy bears in his office now that people gave him after he had heart surgery seven years ago. And since the 1950s, psychologists have been studying teddy bears as some of the first objects that babies gravitate towards. Teddy bears can be the first not-mey object in a baby's mind, and they can help young children develop their sense of imagination. And, of course, teddy bears have sparked the imaginations of adults who put their own spin on them, from Winnie the Pooh to Care Bears. The next doll we want to look at also uses the power.

of imagination to create a bond with children. But Cabbage Patch kids were not a blank slate or an evergreen toy. They were a fad that blew up and burnt out. They also came with a very specific lore and a little baggage. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old.

You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Every home. In 1976, a 21-year-old former art student named Xavier Roberts was working as the manager of a gift shop in Georgia. He went to a craft fair in Kentucky, and he was smitten with these baby dolls that were designed by Martha Nelson Thomas. Her dolls were soft.

Their hair looked like yarn. They had pudgy faces with puckered mouths and dimmed. Sample's. Xavier asked if he could sell her dolls at his gift shop. And she agreed, but then later found out that he was like marking them up to ridiculous prices that she had not agreed on and she wasn't comfortable with that. Sarah Broussard is the director of the Houston Toy Museum. And he basically said, well, okay, if you don't want me to sell yours, I'm going to figure out a way to make my own. Martha Nelson Thomas had named her dolls doll babies. Xavier Roberts called his dolls little people.

There were some other differences too, but Martha ended up suing him. They settled out of court. Sarah says there's one crucial aspect that both dolls had in common. They were supposedly up for adoption. And this was actually something that Martha had come up with. It came with adoption papers, and when Martha was selling them, she wrote a letter from herself, as well as a letter from the doll. When he started producing them, that was one of the big gimmicks that he brought along. And that was like a big part of the whimsy of it all.

Michelle Parnett Dwyer, the senior curator at the National Museum of Play, has mixed feelings about this premise. And it's a more complicated topic, perhaps. But as someone who has family and who is adopted, I find the idea of selling adoption, very strange. Yeah, that is true because it takes the transactional element of buying a doll and making it part of you having that doll, but you're also buying it at a store. So I see why it may make you a little uncomfortable. Right. It's very odd to me. But it was extremely successful.

I myself still have my prize cabbage patched doll from when I was a little girl. And part of the appeal for me was that. It was the one that had the weighted bottom and it smelled like baby powder. So it kind of combined like the softness of a teddy bear with a doll. Now Xavier Roberts had a talent for marketing. He didn't just sell the dolls at a gift shop. He took an old medical clinic in Georgia and turned it into what he called Babyland General Hospital.

Which is just so odd to me. He had staff that were dressed as doctors and nurses, and they would greet the customers. They always were told, don't call these dolls. These are babies. And they also treated their babies with TLC and a magicillin. In 1982, Roberts made a deal with Colico to mass produce the dolls. But they changed the name, little people.

Not because it is also a term for people with dwarfism, but because Fisher Price already owned the copyright to that name for a different set of toys. So a marketing whiz named Roger Schlaper decided to rename them the Cabbage Patch Kids, and he developed the logo in the packaging, and he really doubled down on this surreal legend that Xavier Roberts had started. There's this whole story of like this whimsical story about a little boy named Xavier,

like went into a magical cabbage patch and found a world where these cabbages where babies were being like born out of these cabbages. Cabbage Patch dolls were such a hot item. there was a frenzy of adults fighting over them in stores. As you can hear from this news report in 1983. Otherwise, dignified, calm, mannerly parents broke into a sprint. Well, I had to take what they gave me, and they gave me a boy, and I wanted a girl. This is my second trip around. My husband works here, and I can't even get what I want.

This is where things got even more complicated. The dolls were not only gendered, but there were black dolls and white dolls. dolls. Sarah says even today at the Houston Toy Museum. We have come across at the museum, we've come across multiple black cabbage patch kid dolls, original ones that are either still in the box or just you can clearly tell have never been played with, never barely been touched. You know, they were in such high demand. You didn't, you got what you got. You didn't always get to choose which one you're getting. And I think that there was, an aspect of probably white kids ending up with the black doll and maybe not wanting it,

which is really sad. When my assistant producer Stephanie Billman was a kid, she was swept up in cabbage patch fever. She begged her mother to get her a doll for Christmas. Her mother said she couldn't give her any guarantees, given what a hot item these dolls were. So Christmas morning, she like, you know, we're all like opening. gifts and I'm like all excited. It got like a bicycle and all the other stuff. I'm like, this is the greatest thing ever. And she sits me down and she goes, okay, I got one more gift for you. And I just want you to know, I had to fight another grown woman to get this for you. Like,

I elbowed her and like in the stomach to get this for you. So you better be happy with it. And then I opened it and it was a cabbage special. I freaked out. Like I thought like I think I blacked out for a second at one point. I don't remember. actually opening the, like opening the box. I just remember having Ken, that was my, my doll's name, Ken in my hands and thinking this is the greatest thing my mother has ever done for me. And she hit somebody for it. That's amazing. I made like a little like, I guess these days they call it like a baby Bjorn, but I made like a little sling that I put him in so that when I went to go out and play, he could come with me because I was like, I don't.

don't want to leave him unattended because he's a baby. Like, I genuinely took this baby, like this doll seriously. I had the adoption papers framed, and I walked around with the birth certificate in my little, like, purse for like months because I wanted to prove that this baby was mine. So, like, it meant so much to me. I think a lot more than any other toy I ever received. her mom even brought her to Babyland General Hospital, which was about an hour away from where Stephanie grew up in Georgia. I can describe it as a child, and then I'll tell you how my mom summed it up for me.

It was the best thing ever, because it was literally you were going into a hospital. Like, they committed to it. They even had, like, you know, like when you're in a hospital, there's, like, people talking over the intercom, like, Dr. Davies, you know, to surgery or something like that. They had that. Like, they had a steady stream of that going through. So you really felt like you were in a hospital. All of the employees were, like, scrubs or, like, doctor's coats and, like, had stethoscopes. Like, it was full on.

And then every time a cabbage patch doll was, quote, unquote, born, they would ring a bell. And you could go see the new cabbage patch, like, coming out of the letters. Wait, how did it look what it was cut? Was it, I'm imagining some animatronic Disneyland thing? I don't know. Like, I don't know. again, this is this is from my child's mind. So for all I know, they could have just like pushed something out from underneath it. You know, for me, it was magical. Like it just

literally looked like it was coming. This doll was coming out of a head of lattice or cabbage. And so she, you know, the, the nurse would like pick it up and like present it to the maternity ward like window so you could like press your face against the window and see the new, the new baby that was born. Like my mom. mom thought that everyone was nuts. Like she's like, grown people looked at this and were like, what the actual hell is going on? She told me it was like a fever dream. And she just looked around like, is this a cult?

Like, have I had my daughter join some sort of weird cult? But the fact that how much they committed to it that much made you like want to like buy into it. Like literally and like metaphorically, like you. I felt connected because like this is where Ken was born. And now Ken is my responsibility. And I need to make sure he's got the best life ever because he came from this magical patch. And it really sounds crazy as an adult. But like I was thinking like, okay, you know, the cabbage thing is weird.

But then I realized, okay, if they didn't do that, it would be, I think the adults, you know, maybe the kids were start wondering, where did these millions of babies come? come from that are up for adoption? Like, I could get into a very dark place. I never thought of that. Yeah, you're right. Like, and I guess it's an interesting way to kind of circumnavigate the birds and the beast discussion because it's like, where do babies come from?

Oh, right. That on top of all the missing parents, the millions of missing parents or what happened to these people. Why they came from the ground is beyond me now that I think about it. Like, logically, like as an adult, it makes no sense. But as a child, it does. And they tapped into that. And then because, you know, you have your kid be like, I want this, I want this, I want this, I want this constantly.

Like, I think I pretty much told my mom that I would do chores for a year and like I would never ask for anything ever. And like, I would like clean everything for like the rest of my life if she could get me this doll. Like I probably would have like, you know, sold like a limb to get this doll. Yeah. Was Ken White the doll? Mm-mm. No. And it's interesting because. my mom fought another woman for it. And it was a black woman she fought her for it. Because she was like,

this is one of the few black dolls. And I'm getting it. So, no, he was black. And he was almost the exact same shade as me, which I found so fascinating. I'm like, he could really be my child. And I was like really thrilled about that. I mean, these things, it's all,

I mean, this is so cliche, but it's love, you know? I mean, that's the thing is that these, I think that it's not just childhood nostalgia and not a sense of, oh, when I was young and innocent, but just sort of like you feel the purity of that love that you felt, you know, at that age. Exactly. Yeah. It's not tainted with like the complicated relationships you have with your parents as an adult.

Like it's just this very pure moment where your parent did something so profound to make sure that you had a very special Christmas. Yeah. It's funny. It reminds me that sense of simplicity you kind of yearn for. I've talked about this for it. But I saw Frank Oz when I was at Cal Arts. He came to Cal Arts and he started, you know, pulling out the Muppets and doing them. And he was doing Cookie Monster. And he said almost wistfully that he kind of wished, he's kind of envious of Cookie Monster that he's only one thing in life that makes him happy. And once he gets it, he's totally happy. But there is something very childlike

about that. That I think you feel a little, you feel a little nostalgia for remember when this could be my whole world. exactly in the next episode we're going to look at toys and games that were supposed to stay in the realm of a child's imagination but they entered the adult world

and took on a whole new meaning that is it for this week thank you for listening special thanks to Michelle Parnett Dwyer Michael Kimmel Sarah Broussard and my assistant producer Stephanie Billman if you like this episode

you should check out my episode Action Figure Land from 2014. It's one of my earliest episodes and also one of my favorites. I talked with a psychologist who was an avid toy collector and I went to see where some very high-end action figures are made. We have another show called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show. It's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I looked at how backrooms went from YouTube videos and Reddit threads to being a Hollywood film

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