Who, Again, Invented the Cabbage Patch Kids?
Re-reading a 1980s toy story
In 2015, an artist who’d died two years prior appeared on the cultural radar. A Vice documentary, “The Secret History of Cabbage Patch Kids,” said the creator of the Cabbage Patch Kids, the #3 selling toy line of all time (after Hot Wheels and Rubik’s Cube), was not Xavier Roberts, as usually said, but a Kentucky folk artist named Martha Nelson Thomas.
As Jennifer Lee reminded in a recent post in History of Yesterday, “Corruption Grew in the Cabbage Patch,” Xavier looked bad. As I poked around period sources, however, it was clear the Vice narrative made mistakes.
It was great to learn more about Martha
Born in 1950, raised in Mayfield, Kentucky, she was a girl who just didn’t like to talk.
She liked to make things. She seemed to have the idea that if someone held the thing she’d made — they’d hear what she was saying.
She attended the Louisville School of Art—“because she was always making things and there seemed nothing else to do,” writes Sarah Lansdell, the art critic for the Louisville newspaper…
