Cabbage Patch Kids are 40 years old but remain America’s most sensational toy story.
The pudgy baby dolls ignited a first-of-its-kind consumer craze during the Christmas shopping season of 1983 — including toy store-aisle fist fights that put some people in the hospital and many parents on Santa’s naughty list.
“Stampeding crowds knocked down an elderly man in North Miami Beach, Florida, trampled a pregnant woman in Bergen County, New Jersey, injured five in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,” The Christian Science Monitor reported in Dec. 1983.
Cabbage Patch Kids even inspired the retail phenomenon today known as Black Friday.
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Shoppers stood in line for hours outside malls waiting for doors to open. They chased truck drivers and bribed department store managers when the doll delirium exploded on the day after Thanksgiving.
The credit, or blame, goes to Xavier Roberts. The artisan from Appalachia launched Cabbage Patch Kids.
“Roberts seems to inhabit the character of a mystical figure in the toy industry,” James Zahn, editor-in-chief of The Toy Book, told Fox News Digital.
“Everybody knew his name. [His signature] is right there on the butt of every Cabbage Patch Kid. But nobody really knew who the guy was.”
“Roberts seems to inhabit the character of a mystical figure in the toy industry.” — James Zahn, toy expert
The Cabbage Patch Kids craze represents a triumph of rural American entrepreneurship and the ability of a determined small-town artisan to overcome personal adversity.
Roberts was raised by a widowed mother in the Appalachian foothills of rural Georgia.
Yet he’s rarely appeared in public or granted interviews since 1983, making him both a reclusive hillbilly artisan and living legend.
“Cabbage Patch Kids,” said Zahn, “are the prime example of the lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenon that the toy industry has been looking to recreate every single day…
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