Sparkle Plenty

Life Magazine -- 1947
"The doll is 14 inches high. Her long hair can be brushed and braided. She is "warm and snuggly" because her  "Magic Skin" will stand washing.
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Layette includes sacque* and diaper."

*sack

"Sparkle Plenty" is the daughter of B.O. Plenty and Gravel Gertie.

Once she becomes a doll, she starts to set sales records.

In his comic strip Dick Tracy,  Chester Gould created a repulsive gallery of characters which includes such figures as Flattop, The Brow and the Mole.

Last year Gould married off two of his unseemly personalities, B. O. Plenty, an unkempt, smelly old criminal and Gravel Gertie, a banjo-playing dervish who lived in a gravel pit.

Oh, I get it! My mother would call any one of us Gravel Gertie if we came in dirty after hours of play.

Didn’t mean anything to me...I didn’t know how to read yet!

Two months ago this grotesque couple amazed Gould's public by producing a beautiful child named Sparkly.

Her dazzling eyes and hip-length blond hair immediately won the hearts of Dick Tracy's 26 million readers.

Among them was an ex-all American football player named William M. McDuffee, manager of the toy department of Gimbels, one of the largest department stores in the U.S.

McDuffee reasoned that because of the popular comic strip a Baby Sparkle Plenty doll would need little advertising or promotion.

McDuffee took his idea to the Ideal Toy and Novelty Co. Forty eight days later, the production of Baby Sparkle Plenty dolls began.

On July 28 they went on sale.

At a stiff $5.98 apiece, 10,000 sold in the first five days.

Sales in the next two weeks zoomed to 22,000.

At this rate more Baby Sparkle Plentys will be sold in the last five months of this year than all other types of doll put together.

McDuffee, who knows a good thing when he has it, is getting ready to bring out Baby Sparkle Plenty cradle and a Gravel Gertie banjo."