DEERFIELD — The Memorial Hall Museum lawn looked pretty in pink on Friday afternoon as the Deerfield Post Office and Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA) joined forces to celebrate the new Barbie stamps on sale.
Attendees sat at tables with pink tablecloths, snacked on cupcakes with pink frosting, sipped pink lemonade, and learned about the new stamp and the Barbie exhibit upstairs at the Memorial Hall Museum.
“Stamps are a dying art,” said Robin Driscoll, postmaster of the United States Postal Service (USPS) branch in Old Deerfield. “Obviously, the Postal Service is in financial trouble and most people are not buying stamps to send letters or cards because everything’s online. … It’s a good way to publicize the Post Office, what we have to offer and the art.”
Helena Alves dressed as a Barbie for the reveal of the new set of Barbie stamps put out by the U.S. Postal Service. Credit: PAUL FRANZ / Staff Photo 
Old Deerfield Postmaster Robin Driscoll and Tim Neumann, executive director of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, at the reveal of the new set of Barbie stamps put out by the U.S. Postal Service. Credit: PAUL FRANZ / Staff Photo
Plus, she added, “It’s another chance to get dressed up.”
With only one piece of pink clothing in her closet, Driscoll ordered a hot pink dress to celebrate the stamps that first filled the Post Office’s shelves on July 11.
Helena Alves, a museum educator at the Memorial Hall Museum, embodied Barbie with an all-pink outfit and a bright blonde wig.
While Alves’ outfit resembled the casual clothes in Barbie’s wardrobe, the new set of 10 stamps show Barbie on the clock. According to Driscoll, the stamps serve as a timeline, featuring the dolls in “era-appropriate” professions, as the USPS describes, including a registered nurse for 1961, a surgeon for 1973, an astronaut for 1986, a firefighter for 1995, a paleontologist who studies fossils for 1996, a sign language teacher for 2000, a robotics engineer for 2018, a judge for 2019, a soccer player for 2022 — Driscoll’s favorite — and a music star for 2025.
“Barbie’s a little bit of everything. That’s what I love about her,” Alves said after describing her own Susan B. Anthony Barbie.
PVMA Executive Director Tim Neumann told attendees that Barbie started in 1959 as a miniature fashion model for dressmakers to showcase their designs to noble young women who stayed in the home and could not easily stop by the shops. Now, nearly seven decades later, Neumann said he often sees a daughter, mother and grandmother walk through the exhibit together to see a fixture of their childhood memories on display.
“They all have a story,” Neumann said of the exhibit’s visitors with a smile.
Alves shared a story of her and her neighbor coupling Barbie up with Ken and stuffing their Barbies’ dresses to show the dolls were pregnant. Chuckling, she recalled her neighbor’s mother witnessing their play and puffing, “Girls, that’s so vulgar!”
“It makes everyone nostalgic for their childhood,” Alves said of the exhibit.
Museum Manager Tom Mershon’s Barbie story involved a hot air balloon ride. While babysitting his cousins in high school, Mershon came up with the idea of tying his cousin’s Barbie to a balloon. While designing the exhibit, decades after he and his cousins watched the Barbie fly away, he wrote his cousin a letter from Barbie describing her countless careers, Hollywood fame, dream car and penthouse. To finish it off, he wrote, “None of that would’ve been possible if you hadn’t set this bird free,” Mershon recalled, beaming.
“[The exhibit] speaks to everyone, every strata of society,” Alves said. “There’s the people who played with hand-me-down Barbies like I did, and the people who collected them, like this exhibit.”
The exhibit features a collection from Gardner resident Nancy Damour, who was downsizing her home and brought the dolls to Nancy Sadoski, who serves on the museum’s board of directors. Sadoski thought of PVMA, and the 58 dolls are now on display in the exhibit’s glass shelves, wearing detailed dresses from designers like Bob Mackie, Giorgio Armani, Oscar de la Renta and brands like “the classic Dior,” as Mershon described his favorite Barbie, wearing the signature Dior silhouette complete with a tilted wide-brim hat. Visitors can spot familiar outfits like Audrey Hepburn’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” black ensemble and Cher’s colorful costumes.
To create the backdrop for the exhibit cases, Mershon said he used at least 72 yards of pink silk.
“People ask, ‘What is a Barbie doing in a history museum?’ A doll, like any other thing that humans own, is an artifact of their culture,” Neumann said. “If you look at what people provide their children for entertainment or education, you can follow different trends in history.”
When asked why Barbie deserved an exhibit of its own, Mershon’s answer was simple: “Why not Barbie?”
