A Blast From The Past...

     I don't know about you but I really miss my Barbie Doll. She looked just like this one. I had a dress similar to the one shown below; it's the one I remember above all the others. The case was a single one and had the cute lil' pink cardboard drawer to keep the small accessories in, not to mention those adorable plastic hangers.
     My sister and I would spend hours sitting on our beds playing dress up. Sometimes we'd get material scraps from Mom's sewing chest to make ponchos and dresses with ties working only with a small pair of scissors.

A little Barbie history via "Extraordinary Origins Of Everyday Things" by Charles Panati
      Barbie was..." inspired by, and named after, Barbie Handler, daughter of Ruth Handler, a toy manufacturer born in 1917 in Denver, Colorado. American dolls were all of the cherub-faced infant variety.  Mrs. Handler, observing that her daughter preferred to play with the more shapely teenage paper dolls, cutting out their wide variety of fashion clothes, decided to fill a void in toyland, and designed a full-figure adult doll with a wardrobe of modish outfits. 
       The Barbie doll, bowing in 1958, helped turn Mattel into one of the world's largest toy manufacturers. Ken, named after the Handlers' son was made in 1961. In 1976 , the year of the United States bicentennial, Barbie dolls were sealed into time capsules and buried, to be opened a hundred years thence as social memorabilia for the tricentennial."