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

Eric Molinsky’s Imaginary Worlds opens a two‑part mini‑series on quintessentially American toys by following three origin stories that combine immigrant entrepreneurship, marketing mythmaking, and cultural consequences. The episode begins with the simple red Radio Flyer wagon. Michelle Parnett Dwyer (senior curator, Strong National Museum of Play) tells the story of Antonio Pascene, who emigrated to Chicago in 1914 at 16, founded the Liberty Coaster Company, renamed his wagons Radio Flyer in 1927, and famously invested $30,000 in a 45‑foot Coaster Boy at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair — a stunt that, Dwyer says, helped the company sell roughly 1,500 wagons a day during the Depression. Guests and Molinsky agreed on the wagon’s enduring power: its basic design intentionally invited imaginative play (spaceship, car, submarine) and stayed resilient through small design tweaks across decades.

The conversation then moves to the teddy bear and the Cabbage Patch phenomenon, with author Michael Kimmel recounting Morris Mictum’s (Morris Michtom in other accounts) immigrant arc from a shtetl in Tsarist Russia to a Brooklyn candy store. Inspired by Clifford Berryman’s 1902 cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt and a captured bear cub, Mictum and his wife made a “Teddy’s Bear” that sparked a craze and led to the 1903 founding of the Ideal Toy Company (later acquired by Mattel in 1997). Kimmel and Molinsky emphasize that Mictum didn’t patent the toy and that German firms such as Stife produced contemporary stuffed bears, but the American bear’s symbolism — “danger tamed” and gender neutral — made it endlessly reimaginable. Sarah Broussard (Houston Toy Museum) and producer Stephanie Billman bring the episode to the Cabbage Patch Kids: Xavier Roberts’s 1976 reworking of Martha Nelson Thomas’s soft dolls, the adoption paperwork gimmick, Roberts’s Babyland General Hospital, the 1982 Colico mass‑production deal, Roger Schlaper’s rebranding, and the 1983 buying frenzy. Guests agreed the dolls created deep emotional bonds for children but also raised ethical and racial issues — notably that many original Black Cabbage Patch Kids were reported still boxed or passed over — and that the marketing of “adoption” is complicated. Molinsky frames these stories as emblematic American fables: immigrant invention, commercial amplification, and toys that shape both private feelings and public debates. The host previews Part 2, which will examine toys that moved from children’s play into adult cultural arenas.