Former mayor turns love of dolls into unique volunteer job

Her hands-on involvement with dolls, though, was sparked about 10 years ago when she and a friend visited the doll room at the Goodwill in Dayton, where they continue to volunteer.

On Tuesdays, the women get donated dolls from across the region. They repair those who need it, clean them and their clothes and comb their hair before the refreshed dolls are shipped out to Goodwill stores, on their way to new homes.

Beyond the volunteering, Cook belongs to a doll club that meets monthly, and a doll doctors’ association. With her listing on the association website, she gets calls from people “all over” with dolls in need of attention.

A former member of the city council and one-time mayor of Tipp City, Cook began learning how to restore dolls in 2001 from a woman in Virginia. She’s also attended classes during national doll conventions and honed her skills by tackling dolls made of everything from cloth to vinyl to porcelain and plastic.

She’s not afraid of trial and error.

“I’ll sit and look at one and say, ‘How am I going to fix that?’ ” Inevitably, she comes up with a plan. “You develop your own technique,” she said.

Sometimes the plan of attack might involve a Styrofoam ball filling in part of a missing head or using one of the “little tricks” she’s picked up such as using acne medication to remove magic marker.

Sometimes, a doll just needs put back together with new elastic for proper positioning of its arms, legs or hands, Cook said, adding there’s special elastic for use in dolls.

She finds newer dolls and action figures more difficult to fix, and said she would love to learn how to repair the voice box in dolls such as Chatty Cathy.

Dolls remain popular with people of all ages, Cook said. One Mother’s Day while her mother was living at Springmeade, Cook took more than 100 dolls to the senior living center and gave them to the women living there. They were thrilled.

“It’s a sentimental thing, like men with trains,” she said. “It’s funny how people get attached. There are a lot of fond memories with a doll.”