The Doll Doctor is on duty at his Parkland doll museum
Apr 4, 2017, 3:48 PM | Updated: Apr 5, 2017, 9:53 am
Floyd Blake winds up a doll, twisting the key in her back, until a twinkly, old melody plays from inside of her. I visited Blake, the Doll Doctor, at his museum in Parkland, Washington. It’s a small, cramped space, connected to his house, absolutely stuffed with dolls. Home shopping network porcelain dolls with curly auburn locks and southern belle dresses sit next to cloth Raggedy Anns and vintage baby dolls with glassy, blinking eyes.
Blake has thousands of dolls.
“I have dolls that are stored in my house, in a 10 x 10 room, in boxes,” Blake said. “I have other dolls stored at my family’s place.”
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Blake wears blue doctor’s scrubs with his job title written on the breast in black Sharpie: “I’m a doll doctor.”
The Doll Doctor
People send Blake their dolls and he fixes them. Sometimes they’re precious childhood relics or 100 year old treasures plucked from an estate sale. Blake can tell if a doll was already worked on, and if the repairer did sloppy work.
“It takes time and patience to work on one,” he said. “Being a doctor you never give your secrets out because people come in here and want to take advantage of the doctor.”
Blake wasn’t always a doll doctor.
“I was a tow truck operator for 26 years,” he said. “I had health problems, high blood pressure, my cholesterol. I was told that I can’t do it no more.”
So he transitioned into doll doctoring.
“I was with a person for over 15 years,” he said. “She passed away in my arms. She had colon cancer. She was a doctor of dolls. She taught me how to repair dolls. When she passed away, I brought 350 boxes of dolls here and then I kind of figured that I would build this museum by hand. More or less to continue on what she was doing.”
In the back of the museum, where Blake’s workshop is, there are more shelves filled with dolls. Dolls he moved out of the museum.
“Some of the kids cry and I don’t want them to cry, but they don’t like dolls staring at you at all,” Blake said. “I was having complaints at one time that a lot of these people don’t like clowns. So what I did was I went through the doll museum and tried to remove all the clowns. I put them away. They don’t like clowns, I don’t know why. I have a freezer that I have candy. I try and calm them down.”
Children are often the reason that dolls end up in Blake’s doctor’s office in the first place.
“There’s a lot of people out there who actually abuse dolls,” he said. “They grab them by their hair, they cut their hairs, they draw on them. They leave them outside. They get damp, moisture inside the doll which comes to mildew. And I repair them.”
It feels a bit lonely in the doll museum, not a lot of people come through. There are rows and rows of tiny doll eyes staring at you, but it’s totally silent. Some of that loneliness might come from the doll doctor.
“Hey, I can fix the dolls, but I can’t fix myself,” he said.
