Trigg County resident Delilah Dawson continues to work for a living at age 84 — currently as a house painter (both indoors and out) — but of all the jobs she’s had in her long life, there is one that she believes everyone ought to experience.
This is the third installment in Hoptown Chronicle’s “Holiday Humor” series highlighting the lighter side of life during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Read other stories here.
“Retail … at least once,” said Dawson, who managed a few shops in Hopkinsville and Cadiz more than 20 years ago. To be blunt, often it’s the public that makes retail work so stressful for store clerks.
That was never more clear to Dawson than it was in December 1983, when she witnessed first-hand the national craze over that year’s most popular Christmas gift for children, the Cabbage Patch Kids.
Heading into Christmas, Dawson was the manager of the new Warehouse of Toys, which had just opened on VFW Lane off Skyline Drive in Hopkinsville.
Cabbage Patch Kids were plush dolls that came in a seemingly endless combination of eye and hair colors, skin tones and head shapes. The manufacturer promised that every doll came with a unique name, plus a “birth certificate” and “adoption papers.” They sold for roughly $21 to $35 at retail in 1983, but prices reportedly soared on the secondary market for parents desperate to snag one of the dolls to put under the Christmas tree.
A documentary that came out in 2023 — “Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids” — says the manufacturer, Coleco, did not predict its own success and initially couldn’t keep up with demand for the dolls.
Dawson remembers the Hopkinsville store received shipments of just 20 or so dolls at a time. Sometimes word of a new supply — possibly from a truck driver who dropped boxes of the dolls at Warehouse of Toys and then mentioned as much at several other stops around town — spread like wildfire. Suddenly there was a rush at the store before Dawson and her employees were prepared for it.
“We had people in line at 6 in the morning waiting for the store to open at 9,” said Dawson.
Customers were clever and tried their best to be the first in the store. One woman, apparently 8 months pregnant, begged the store to let her in just to use the restroom. Dawson relented but told the woman she had to go “straight back outside” as soon as she left the restroom.
Across the country, there were plenty of news stories in 1983 recounting the Cabbage Patch Kids hysteria in stores. One shop manager in Pennsylvania reportedly used a baseball bat to “defend his store” from crazed shoppers.
“It was absolutely wild. Someone knocked me down in the floor to get to those dolls,” said Dawson. “People went nuts over those things.”
When brute strength didn’t work, other shoppers tried to entice store employees with extra cash.
“I had people offer me all kinds of money,” said Dawson.
Now more than 40 years after the fact, Dawson can admit that she had her price, although not in hard cash, and did accept one family’s enticement for a doll.
“It was for University of Kentucky [basketball] tickets,” she said. “I couldn’t turn down UK tickets.”
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
