Legacies: Ocean City doll doctors shop was an operation of love

By MARTIN DeANGELIS Staff Writer, 609-272-7237

Published: Saturday, September 27, 2008

  An occasional series about southern New Jersey residents who recently died, leaving lasting marks on their community, their neighborhood, their friends or families.

OCEAN CITY - Kay Jay Nichols wasn't a doctor. But she played one on Asbury Avenue.

She wore a doctor's coat to work almost every day for years, a white coat professionally monogrammed with her name and title: Kay Jay Nichols - Doll Doctor.

She was the chief surgeon and senior partner in Kay Jay's Doll Shoppe, a fixture in downtown Ocean City since she and her daughter, Katy Himes, opened it in 1985.

But Himes, who figures she spent seven days per week with her mom for most of the years they were in business together, says Kay Jay was getting ready to run her own doll shop since she was a girl.

Kay Jay came by her profession honestly: Her grandfather, Milton Hershey Emmert - a relative of Milton Hershey, the Hershey Bar baron - ran a toy and doll store in West Philadelphia early in the 1900s. Then Kay Jay's father, Milton G. Emmert, opened his own greeting-card store and doll hospital in Center City Philadelphia from the 1940s until 1960 or so.

His assistant for most of those years, the girl in charge of the doll end of the business, was a talented young doll surgeon named Kathryn Jayne Emmert.

Now Katy Himes' four daughters - Kay Jay's granddaughters, who range from 9 to 30 years old - all work in the shop in one way or another, and all have been at least partly raised in it. So that makes five generations of this family involved in the doll business.

But Kay Jay - who was 79 when she died on Sept. 15 - hardly saw dolls, and doll-doctoring, as just a business.

Katy and her two brothers grew up in a home stuffed with their mom's dolls, dolls of all ages and sizes and styles and states of repair. Their father, Bill Nichols Sr., was in the insurance business, and he got transferred frequently when Katy, Billy and Chip were growing up. By Katy's count, the family lived in seven places between Philadelphia and Chicago, and Kay Jay's dolls were a major logistical part of every one of their moves to a new house.

The kids were grown when Bill and Kay Jay settled down by the bay in Ocean City about 1983. Bill died in 1999, at 69, and Katy finally talked his "princess" - her mom - into moving away from the bay and over to a rancher in Egg Harbor Township about three years ago. One of the key selling points of the move, Katy knows, was that the new home had more room for her mom to show off and store a collection of dolls that had grown well beyond her control.

"Everywhere you looked, there were dolls," Katy says. "Every chair had a doll in it. If you were in the bathroom, there was one sitting in there, looking at you. ... There's no fathoming the amount of dolls she had. Hundreds of them. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And there were dolls this big" - holding her fingers an inch apart - "and then there were dolls 4 feet tall."

And if she could have sneaked in a word of advice to anyone Kay Jay invited to her latest home, Katy says it would have been simple:

"Don't bring any clothes - there will be no unpacking. Because the drawers are all filled with dolls," she says, laughing at the memory of the place.

But Kay Jay's true love in the doll world was her surgery specialty.

"She did all the repairs herself. Sometimes, I'd say, 'Kay Jay, look, you can't. It's terminal,'" Katy remembered the other day, on her first day back in the store after her mom's funeral. "She'd say, 'No, I can.' And she'd take hours just to make somebody smile."

Still, any dedicated doll doctor - and Katy says there aren't many around anymore in "a dying art" - knows that one of the keys to the art is having lots of doll parts on hand to fix what ails the patient.

"She has hundreds of heads - I didn't know you could have so many doll heads," Katy goes on, waving toward the back of the shop, Kay Jay's operating room. "There are drawers full of eyeballs back there. Just eyeballs."

And there are doll arms and doll legs and doll wigs and more. Katy can trace some of it back to Kay Jay's grandfather's store, meaning the stuff could be 100 years old, maybe more.

Looking back, the doctor's daughter suspects Kay Jay made about "a penny an hour" for some of her jobs, but the work that put smiles on customers' faces made her happy, too.

In fact, Katy has always run the business end of the store, paying the bills and otherwise watching out for the dollars at the doll shop.

So that brings up a question from a visitor: How much of Kay Jay's work was really play to her? How much was she in the doll business, and in doll doctoring, because it still let her play with dolls - even with her 80th birthday approaching next March?

"Oh, I think all of it," Katy answers instantly, smiling again as she recalls how her mom was also in charge of decorating and arranging the store. "She'd say, 'Oh, I think they'll like it here'" - meaning a certain group of dolls would prefer a new home in the shop. "The dolls came first with her."

Of course, there was a lot more to Kay Jay Nichols' life than dolls. She loved her husband, her three children and eight grandchildren - and just lately, her two great-grandchildren. She was a trained dancer when she was young, and she was a member for more than 50 years of the Old Academy Players, a theater company in Philadelphia.

Her other great love was her Catholic religion and specifically her church, St. Frances Cabrini, in Ocean City. Kay Jay went to Mass every day, was a eucharistic minister and a member of St. Frances' choir. She loved her faith and she lived it, Katy says.

Still, what Kay Jay was really known for was dolls. And a whole lot of what she left behind is all her dolls - along with a few of her doll-doctoring skills that she passed along not to Katy, but to two of Katy's girls.

"She knew what she was doing, and I trust what she taught my daughters to do," Kay Jay's own daughter says.

So the fifth generation of the family has some of the secrets to let a dying art live a while longer, maybe into more generations. Because they got the best training around, at the teaching hospital of Kay Jay Nichols, the doll doctor herself.