BoomerGirl Diary

Charlotte, N.C. — Seven-year-old Terry wasn't expecting Christmas in 1950 to be different from any other.

"We lived in a family where gifts were not the norm."

But when she opened the big white box under the Christmas tree, unwrapped the blue cellophane and saw a bridesmaid doll with light brown hair, nothing else mattered - not the father who struggled with alcoholism, not the cold winters in the drafty mill house on Bethel Street in Clover, S.C., with no indoor plumbing.

Terry was one of five children and shy. She named the doll Peggy.

"I talked to Peggy as if she were alive," Terry Dancy, now 64, remembers. "I was extremely thin, sickly and frail. Peggy had beautiful features."

With her "perfect red mouth" and thick dark eyelashes that fluttered, "Peggy seemed to be all that I could not be."

The little girl grew up and left the doll behind to gather dust in a forgotten corner of her childhood home.

She went to nursing school, met and married a young Army lieutenant in 1966, and three years later welcomed a baby boy, Gary. Their life changed when her husband, Glenn Rhodes, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Gary was about 5. Within a year, Glenn was in a wheelchair. Terry went back to school for her master's in nursing.

Amid tensions, in life and in the marriage, Terry found herself back on Bethel Street in the mid-1980s, reminiscing with her mother. The subject turned to her doll.

Maybe, her mother thought, it was in the attic.

Gary, by then a teenager, climbed through an opening not much larger than he was, pushed past the cobwebs and came down with Peggy. The rubber bands that held her together had rotted and she was in pieces. Mold covered half her face.

She "looked pretty rough," Gary remembers.

But Terry wouldn't give up on the doll that had meant everything to her. "It was an important part of my life, and it was almost destroyed." A Charlotte doll maker took just six weeks to transform her.

She was told, she says, that Peggy was a rare version of a Madame Alexander doll. Would she sell, she was asked then. Absolutely not.

"Holding the doll was like holding a star," Terry says.

The transformation was the beginning of a new start, an inspiration that encouraged her.

"Sometimes we get tossed about, hurt by life, even physically and emotionally injured," she wrote when she volunteered to tell her story. "But someone comes along to help us get back on our feet, dust ourselves off and move on."

While Peggy - still elegant - has found a permanent home on a stand in her bedroom, Terry enjoys her two "real, live dolls," granddaughters Morgan, 16, and Kristen, 18.

Their father, Gary, 38, still remembers the moment he emerged from the attic, holding Peggy. "I found all the parts; it mattered a lot to Mom."

In 1992, Terry remarried. (She and Glenn divorced in 1990.)

She settled into a job teaching health occupations at Providence High School. Then, in 2001, Terry developed symptoms of spasmodic dysphonia, a voice disorder. Three years ago, she stopped teaching, so she found a new way to make her voice heard.

She took a creative writing class.

One of her first stories:

"The Doll."