American Doll and Toy Museum: Thank You, Anonymous

American Doll and Toy Museum: Thank You, Anonymous:   I wanted to say thank you to our anonymous donors who gave the museum some real treasures over the past two weeks.   Three or four Mondays...

Thank You, Anonymous

 

I wanted to say thank you to our anonymous donors who gave the museum some real treasures over the past two weeks.  Three or four Mondays ago, I arrived at the museum o find 12 boxes full of dolls outside our door.  These were mainly artist dolls, including one by Titus Tomescu representing Jesus with two children, some Ashton Drake, Boyd’s, all beautifully kept.  There was no note with them, just a mysterious, wonderful gift.

Last week, we received in the mail a small box containing cylinders for a composition phonograph doll.  There was a note describing what they were, but no name.  The return address used was that of the museum.

Then, on Sept. 20^th, I got a call from a very nice woman who wanted to donate her late sister’s doll collection  There were between thirty to forty dolls including Lady Anne Dolls of the former Williamsburg Doll Factory, QVC, Rustie, and similar dolls.  In all these donations, no two were alike, which is miraculous considering the museum’s very large collection of dolls, toys, puppets, books, and models.

We are expanding, and are working to lay the cement foundation for our building.  While we are closed to prepare for this renovation ill at least November 8^th, we encourage everyone to view our collection on Instagram under ellen_tsagaris, on Pinterest under American Doll and Toy Museum, on our website American Doll and Toy Museum.org, on our Facebook pages American Doll and Toy Museum, Dr. R., Dr. E’s Doll Museum and Antique Doll, and on our blogs, American Doll and Toy Museum, Dr. E’s Doll Museum, International Doll Museum Blog, and Dr. E’s Doll Museum in Greek, Japanese, and Spanish.

We are also on X under my name, under Antique Doll, under Dr. E’s Doll Museum, and on Tumblr under Antique doll.

Happy Collecting

From our guest blogger, Dr. Doveed Levy

 

Skyward for September 2025

 

By

 

David H. Levy

 

Aka Doveed.

 

Thirty-two years ago, Carolyn and Gene Shoemaker and I discovered a comet that was eventually named Shoemaker-Levy 9.  It was the ninth periodic comet that we found together, although there were a few other nonperiodic comets that we also located, plus the nine other comets I found on my own since I began my comet search in the fall of 1965. The discovery of this particular comet and its subsequent collision with Jupiter, coincidentally my favorite planet, were the most important parts of my professional life, second only to my meeting Wendee. Sixteen months after our discovery the 21 pieces of this shattered comet collided with Jupiter, in one of the most decisive science stories of the twentieth century.  I may not have been aware of how significant this was until, at this year’s Adirondack Astronomy Retreat, I watched the July 16, 1994 press conference during which Gene, Carolyn, and I tried to express the significance of this event.  I remembered how much smarter I might have been back then, being able to speak in complete sentences, compared to my waning personality now.  What I was not aware of back then is that what we were witnessing might have been an example not only for our own lifetimes but for the vastly larger history of the Earth we live on.

 

            Sixty-six million years ago, the Cretaceous period of Earth’s geologic history ended rather abruptly with the mass extinction of about three quarters of all the species of life on Earth.  The theory proposed by Luis Alvarez and his son Walter was based on the large amount of iridium that was found at exposed rock sites all over the world.  The discovery in the early 1990s of the 200-mile wide impact crater whose center was near the coastal town of Chicxulub Pueblo, in present-day Mexico, began a long stretch of evidence that leads most scientists to conclude that the impact of an asteroid (or less likely a comet) had a lot to do with the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction.

 

            More recently, some evidence has emerged that the impact in the Gulf of Mexico was not the only one that occurred at that time. The 15-mile wide Boltysh crater in Ukraine, and the 12-mile wile Silverpit crater in the North Sea, not far from Great Britain, might have been formed at about the same time.  These structures, and others that have been found or speculated, are all between North latitude 20 and 70 degrees.   

 

Galileo space craft image of Fragment W hitting Jupiter

            Could these structures be impact craters, and if they are, could they have formed in connection with the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction? This suggests the possibility of near-simultaneous multiple impacts.  But the operative word has to be suggests.  The evidence is there, but it is speculative and not strong, that the Chicxulub impactor might have been just one of a series of impacts.  According to a paper by Krisopher Dekan of the University of Gothenburg,  “To conclude that a mass extinction of this sort is not associated with immense extraterrestrial impact is to break the rules of a respected scientist.  There is too much evidence in favor of a least two large impacts and no other factor can explain the (Iridium) anomaly that is globally widespread in both sides of the paleomagnetism of that time, being normal and reverse near the K/Pg boundary.”  

 

 

We will never know what upended the Earth’s biosphere 66 million years ago, because we were not there.  But at this juncture I would like, not to ignore the methods of modern science, but to take science out for a walk in the desert. We will never know, but what if a Shoemaker-Levy 9-style multiple impact is what caused the elimination of most of the species of life on Earth?

Comet Shoemaker-Levy Discovery Films

March 23, 1993

 

What if? I think it is fun to speculate on this question.  From my own perspective, as I take that fictitious walk in the desert, my decision to begin hunting for comets when I was a teenager in 1965 might have led to a personal communion with a major event on the planet that has given me so much pain, and so much more joy.

 

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From our Guest Blogger July/August 2025 Skyward by Dr. David Levy

 

Skyward for July 2025

 

By

 

Doveed.

 

David H. Levy

 

Of Minerva the telescope, Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of   The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám of Naishápúr, and Messier 40

 

Last month I sent some of you a photograph of Eureka, the 12-inch Dobsonian reflector that I claimed I now use for most of my comet hunting.  That statement, I am afraid, is not entirely true. Since May 18, 1967, the day after I very nearly got expelled from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada for arguing with Miss Isabel Williamson, its Director of Observational Activities, I have enjoyed and loved this little 6-inch f/4 reflector for more than 58 years.  Even though I have not found a comet with it, I have used it to sight many known comets, and I must say that I use it for at least half of my comet hunting.  I was using it while I was a student at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, where, in Dr. Roger Lewis’s Victorian Literature class, I was introduced to The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.  Omar was a resident, probably the most famous resident, of Nishapur, a city in northeastern Iran, and there exists a beautiful mausoleum in his memory there.   I concentrated on the first stanza only, and it was well worth my trouble, and I add to it  the penultimate 100^th stanza:

 

Wake! For the Sun, who scatter’d into flight

The stars before him from the Field of Night,

   Drives Night along with them from Heav’n, and strikes

The Sultán’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.

 

Yon rising Moon that looks for us again—

How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;

How oft hereafter will she look for us

Through this same Garden—and for one in vain!

 

At the time this poem’s tranasation appeared, interest in science was at a height, especially with the appearance of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, the same year as the Fitzgerald translation and reinterpretation.  Academically, this poem attracted most of the members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, though the English population of the time thoroughly embraced the poem’s thought and feeling.  Even today, this poem encourages many people to enjoy both the poem and the Sun, Moon, and stars that it embraces.

 

                A few years before I began my time at Acadia, and before my near-expulsion, I was completing my observations of Messier’s 109 object catalogue. “It was Messier’s mistake,” Miss Williamson explained.  “When you locate the rest, we credit you with M40.”

 

                I saw Messier 40 the last three nights.  Messier himself found it in 1764 while searching for a nebula discovered near Megrez, in Ursa Major, by Johannes Hevelius.  Hevelius, who was not using a telescope, noticed a touch of nebulosity.  Messier could not confirm this but he did record two faint stars.  Today most us call M40 Messier’s mistake, but I disagree with this.  He probably understood his friend’s naked eye view of the two stars, which even to him could show some nebulosity, and left the pair in his catalogue.  Could the pair look nebulous to us when viewed without a telescope, just as groups of stars like the Beehive and Pleiades look nebulous to today’s viewers when seen without a telescope?

 

                To find M40, simply locate Megrez and move a little more than one degree to its northeast.  There will be 70 Ursae Majoris.  Continue another quarter degree to the two stars that form Messier 40.  Remember that this is not a double star, but instead two stars at different distances from Earth.

 

Finally, Messier 40 offers a bonus. Close to the east of the two stars lie two very nice spiral galaxies, NGC 4290 and NGC 4284.  You need a very dark sky to catch these, but they are lovely.

 

So what do Minerva, the The Rubáiyát, and Messier 40 have in common?  Nothing, you might say.  Minerva is a pile of metal and glass loosely held together with glue and pressure.  The Fitzgerald is a poem.  Messier 40 is a mistake.

 

    No.  Not at all.  Minerva has given me 58 years of passion and pleasure being under the sky, whose rising Moon only adds to the joy.  And over centuries, people like Charles Messier and Hevelius shared that same incredible craving for the stars, including the tiny pair of distant suns collectively called Messier 40.

 

 

 

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Only two dolls?

 

Recently, a major public figure voiced the opinion that no child need more than one or two dolls.  We won’t get into politics, but I will note that dolls have been made in this man’s image.  In fact, he had his own toy company that made plush animals for Macy’s.

Certainly, we doll collectors would take issue with the two doll limit.  I began collecting dolls at age three, with two dolls that belonged to my grandmother starting the collection.  My whole life I have collected them; today I run a nonprofit, established museum with over five thousand dolls displayed.  Many more await our museum expansion.

True, we don’t play with them, but I didn’t play with them that much as a child. Dolls were artifacts to be studied, cherished, curated and displayed.  Many great doll collections began this way; they still exist in museums and private collections. 

Dolls have also been recognized as educational tools for centuries.  G. Stanley Hall, father of American psychology, writes of the dolls’ importance A Study of Dolls, which is available free on Google books.  In The Doll Book by Laura Starr, 1908, the author notes that even during her time, many cultures had disappeared.  All that was left of many was their dolls.

Dolls, and toys, have survived since antiquity.  Some were ritual objects, some were tomb figures, many were playthings.  Dolls are in many ways portraits of those who made them, and expressions of their beliefs and opinions.

Dolls are among the oldest human artifacts, with tiny goddess figures dating to Neanderthal civilizations .  They are important, and they teach people what life was like in the past.  I could write books on the subject; actually, I have.

As for me, I don’t know anyone who only had one doll, or toy for that matter.  I suggest Mr. Public Figure read Baudelaire’s essay “A Philosophy of Toys.”  This essay’s theme is the importance of toys to children.  Dolls are used today to educate,  study fashion, practice medicine, provide comfort in therapy, and more.  Maybe next time, he should consult a few toy museums, like American Doll and Toy Museum, or even his own children and grandchildren.