Today in 1959, Mattel brought a new toy to the North American International Toy Fair in New York City.
The Barbie doll has become one of the most popular toys in the world; you can find her in every state in the US and innumerable countries.
But few places have more of a connection to Barbie than my own home state of Wisconsin.
That’s not because she was invented here; Ruth Handler said she came up with the idea for the doll on vacation in Switzerland, after seeing, shall we say, shapely German doll known as Lilli.
And Barbie’s first outfit, a swimsuit, was right at home where Handler lived, southern California.
(That’s also where designer Jack Ryan, who later filed a lawsuit saying he was the actual creator of Barbie, lived and worked.)
But just as the toy has a backstory, so does the Barbie character, whose full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.
The day the Barbie doll premiered at the toy fair in New York City became her birthdate.
And she grew up in the fictional town of Willows, Wisconsin, named for the preponderance of willow trees in the area.
Depending on which animated Barbie adventures you watch or read, she either lived there until she graduated high school, or the Roberts family moved to Malibu when Barbie was about grade school age.
Either way, she returned from time to time to see her grandparents, and in one of the animated stories, she and her sisters stumbled upon a giant secret.
Apparently the town founders had hidden a treasure somewhere in Willows to be used when the town needed it most… which was right then and there, because the downtown district was in rough shape.
Fortunately the four sisters and their four dog friends solved a mystery involving historic plaques, caves and an underground lake?
And Willows became one of those Midwestern success stories that everyone loves talking about.
One other fact worth noting: Barbie’s had six siblings introduced over the years, including twin siblings Todd and Tutti.
Their dolls first showed up in the 1970s; in the early 90s Mattel released a new Todd doll without a new Tutti doll.
So what the heck happened there? Is she stuck near the underground lake?
Speaking of getting stuck: today in 1965, a story in The News-Star newspaper with the headline “Clumsy Burglars.”
In San Pablo, California, two individuals who were trying to break into a drugstore managed to set off the alarm.
Their luck got worse when the authorities arrived; one of them got stuck in a ventilation shaft, and the other fell off the drugstore’s roof.
Don’t you hate it when you have a day where nothing goes right?
5 things we know about Willows, the fictional Wisconsin city where Barbie was born (Milwaukee Record)
Inept Criminals #3 (Weird Universe)
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