Doll Talk THESTORY
VELVALEE DICKINSON World War II SPY OF
By Denise Buese
The J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., is the headquarters of the FBI. Purportedly, FBI tours began in the mid-1930s after a group of curious Boy Scouts requested one. Since 1937, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has conducted organized tours to the public. The International Spy Museum, also in Washington D.C., is the only public museum in the United States solely dedicated to espionage. Velvalee Dickinson, The Doll Lady: http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/ famcases/ dickinson/dickinson.htm
elvalee Dickinson V seemed to have it all. She was a prodigious doll
collector, a well-respected authority on dolls, a renowned doll dealer, owner of a high quality doll shop with a prestigious address, and an early member of two of America’s first doll clubs. Why then did she become a notorious World War II spy? She was a nondescript woman, small and birdlike, mediocre in accomplishments, but just the sort of person the Japanese government could use to their advantage without being obvious. Velvalee, for reasons unknown, thought it a good idea to provide an enemy of the United States with information that would be detrimental to her own country, and beneficial to theirs. During this time, the JapaneseAmericans living in the United States were gathered up and interned to concentration camps within our own borders. Whole families were displaced, leaving homes, friends, and belongings, behind because it was feared that there may be enemies working from within our own country. Did Velvalee see photos and newsreels depicting the
plight of fellow Americans? Did she think of the irony of her own situation, that as a middleclass, Caucasian woman she would prove to be more dangerous than any JapaneseAmerican ever was? Velvalee Malvena Blucher was born in Sacramento, California, on A small report of Dickinson’s crime along with an early studio photo appeared in Front Page Detective, April 1944. October 12, 1893, to wellto-do parents Otto Blucher of West Virginia and Elizabeth Bottoms of Kentucky, both of German descent. Petite and barely five feet tall, she graduated from Sacramento High School in June, 1911, and from a private seminary in Berkeley two years later. In 1917 Velvalee had earned enough credits to qualify for a bachelor of arts degree, but The Museums of Washington D.C. z 91