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Show Cabbage Patch craze renews Only three months until Christmas and already there are weary parents willing to sign over the mortgage if they can just get a hold of a Cabbage Patch doll. Store employees across the valley are spending the first two hours of each working day answering the phone, "No, but a truck is expected in two hours, call back then, please." ! It can't be true but it is. A repeat performance of a great hoax. There are no Cabbage Patch dolls to be found despite the wad of bills waiting to be spent pn them. There are plenty of Cabbage Patch clothes, plenty of Cabbage Patch strollers and Cabbage Patch baby beds, but no homely pug-nosed little dolls to fill them. You can buy facsimiles; a Flower Patch kid, a Cabbage Cab-bage Patch sew-it-yourself kit and even a small Cabbage Cab-bage Patch wall doll, but no true-blue real ones. It's a cruel trick to play upon a nation and parents who played the empty-handed Santa last year. I It's an even meaner thing to do to children who believe in stores, catalogs and Christmas magic. Perhaps there should be a law against such practices. Those who cannot supply the demand should not be allowed to keep stepping up the demand with promotions and gimmicky. The law of economics is being fulfilled to its utmost. The fat Cabbage Cat at the top of the doll company is getting fatter still and probably is admired for his skill at pulling off this hoax two years running. Perhaps if a Cabbage Patch doll were upon every store shelf they would not sell for $40 each (as high as $150 on the black market.) Probably mothers could stop camping upon every doorstep as the retail stores received their shipments. And maybe kids wouldn't want one so very much. But the fact is the children do want the dolls. And the parents, for the most part, want to live up to that childish expectation that mom and dad will come through. Everybody wants the story to have a happy ending. It's wrong for it not to be so because somebody wants to make big dollars, and they're- doing itat the children's expense. ' - Deliberately disappointing youngsters is not right. It's despicable. |