Born two months premature in northern Ontario in 1934, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie Dionne weighed a grand total of just over 13 pounds. My curiosity piqued, I ordered three Dionne books from the library and read them in a single weekend. My mind called up a vague recollection of Grandma excitedly showing me a TV Guide with five dark-haired toddlers on the cover - likely from the debut of a miniseries called Million Dollar Babies in 1994. See, my grandma loved everything you were supposed to love in the 1930s: Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, Bette Davis, and the Dionne Quintuplets. A faint bell of recognition jingled in my head. Prices for full sets ranged from hundreds to thousands of dollars. So I typed “quints dolls” into eBay and found not the three-inch baby dolls with brushable hair and a plethora of times-five accessories that I’d played with in elementary school, but Madame Alexander’s once-coveted Dionne Quintuplets dolls from the 1930s. One day in the fall of 2015, for absolutely no reason I can recall, it occurred to me that I had a set or two of Tyco Quints dolls in the attic. Sarah Miller (Headshot by Chris Martin Chasing Light) Sarah and I had the opportunity to catch up last spring and I took that opportunity to invite her here to tell us about her latest fascinating deep dive into history, The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets Sarah brought out aspects of Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller that were new and fresh to me I also figured out she was as much a research geek as I am.
I confess to not remembering how Sarah Miller and I first met face-to-face, but I knew we would be pals after reading her Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller (Atheneum Books for Young Readers).
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