The "Little Miss No Name" doll was launched by Hasbro in 1965 and discontinued soon after.  You will notice that her native garb is a brown burlap dress with two patches.  A large plastic removable tear streams from her left eye.  Her right hand stretches out plaintively, begging for -- what?  A coin?  A sandwich?  Begging for the Mom who went away after saying, “Stay right here in the candy aisle, honey, Mommy’s getting into this big black van and will be right back”?

That is the mystery of Little Miss No Name.

On eBay a “mint” Little Miss No Name, new in her box, with “original tear” and burlap dress, can fetch several Ben Franklins.  Those "mint condition" dolls are the Little Miss No Name equivalent of sorority girls waiting for graduation, when they can start collecting their nice big trust fund.

I can’t feel sorry for them.  But my heart melts for the Little Miss No Names who’ve Been Through It. 

I can imagine shallow little girls in 1965, expecting a Barbie or other glamorous toy, opening their “downer” gift from Santa.  Hasbro did not release a Dream Roadster for Little Miss No Name.  They did not mold her feet en pointe to fit, Cinderella-like, a variety of high heeled shoes. 

Miss No Name stands on her own two bare feet, alone, at about fifteen inches.

So what was a little girl to do back then?  EBay features several Little Miss No Names who have suffered hideous disfigurement in the name of beautification, their hair whacked and tortured in an unseemly manner.  Most of them are missing their tears, probably removed by little girls who imagined she’d feel better, when really she was thinking, “Gosh, now I don’t even have that.”

(Sometimes the eBay sellers will style Little Miss No Name’s hair, giving her Shirley Temple-like curls and such.  But Little Miss No Name is not mollified by such shallow, surface improvements.  Her problems run much deeper than that.)

Fun-loving Barbies pile into their roadsters and flee from Little Miss No Name.  And I imagine that any little girl who brought Little Miss No Name to a tea party wasn’t invited back. 

But you know what?  I’d wager anything that if a university ran a big study, say, they’d discover that girls who got Little Miss No Name for Christmas are now much better people than the ones who got Malibu Barbie.

Which brings me back to Bixby.