Lois K. Puck, who died Feb. 4 at age 85 in Grand Junction, spent the latter half of her life engrossed by dolls, sewing tiny period-authentic clothing for them and positioning them in the sort of idyllic scenes that never occurred to her as a girl.
Born and reared on a farm in Scott County, Iowa, she had no interest in dolls during her childhood. Instead, she threw herself into 4-H homemaking skills, learning to cultivate the fruits and vegetables that she canned in the farm’s kitchen.
She paid little attention to the quantities of fabric and lace that her mother and grandmotherstored in the farmhouse attic.
She married Robert W. Puck, a cabinetmaker, and all three of their children were boys. Dolls failed to pique her interest until the day she and her husband went to an estate sale in Davenport, Iowa, and an antique caught her eye.
It was a Kestner, a fine German-made doll that dated back to the early 1800s.
The doll’s long auburn hair fell to its shoulders. It wore a dotted silk dress with an Empire waist and the tiny tucks characteristic of the period’s fashion. Lace edged the gown’s hem. Underneath, petticoats and crinolines fluffed out the skirt, with pantaloons that reached nearly to the doll’s original shoes.
Amused, Robert Puck saw his wife’s purchase as an impulsive indulgence. He never imagined that soon dolls, doll clothes and doll furniture – furniture that he was conscripted to design and build – would fill the Pucks’ home.
By 1980, when the Pucks moved to Grand Junction, they arrived with hundreds of antique dolls, Lois Puck’s custom- designed doll clothes, and yards of vintage fabric and lace. As an adult, she retrieved the cloth still saved in the farmhouse, with a new appreciation for the history implicit in the textiles.
“She was very, very lucky,” said daughter-in-law Karen Puck, who shares her mother-in- law’s enthusiasm for dolls. “She had all the authentic fabrics and laces, which most of us do not have. I think that’s what really inspired her interest in dolls. She was interested in the clothing, and how she could sew that clothing, and how accurately she could sew the clothing.”
Karen, then single, met Lois and Robert Puck at a golf course shortly after the Pucks moved to Grand Junction. The three became fast friends. The Pucks introduced her to their eldest son, Robert Jr. Soon Karen Puck officially joined the family.
Within a few years, the two women pooled their dolls – Kestners, Armand Marseilles, Gene dolls, Madame Alexanders and others. They traveled every few weeks throughout the Southwest to weekend craft shows, doll conventions, doll competitions and other events focused on antique dolls. They sold or traded some of their dolls. Others were for display only.
“The dolls in competitions are not for sale,” Karen Puck said. “When you’re in competition, the judges are looking at the doll’s age and perfection. Is the doll in its original condition? Does it have the original clothes? Does it wear clothes of the period?”
At doll shows in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado, Karen and Lois Puck filled three good-sized tables with dolls carefully unpacked from the padded boxes that cradled them in the Pucks’ trailer or motor home.
A doll that always excited comment was a Gibson Girl-era blond with a glossy china head and a cloth body Lois Puck sewed from an antique pattern.
Many doll shows offered a competitive scene category that the Pucks relished. Assigned a theme – Christmas or a tea party, for example – Lois Puck enjoyed arranging tableaux that evoked her dolls’ personalities.
Lois Puck took special pleasure in finding little transgressions for Nasty Now, the name she gave a doll with a sly pout. In an otherwise decorous scene of a Victorian Christmas, Nasty Now would be surreptitiously tearing open gifts.
“Nasty Now was always into something,” Karen Puck said, fondly. “She was just a mischievous child.”
Survivors include husband Robert W. Puck of Grand Junction; sons Robert W. Puck Jr. of Dinosaur, Craig Allen Puck of Lakewood and Hawkeye Puck of White Hills Village, Ariz.; a brother, William Meyer of New Liberty, Iowa; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
