Raggedy Ann is the anti-Barbie: downscale, fiercely unconcerned with image, and with a adventure-filled backstory that Barbie could only dream about. Raggedy Ann, along with her beloved brother Andy was the heroine of 25 children’s books written by Johny Gruelle, a newspaper cartoonist around the early decades of the 1900s. Several legends tell of the origins of Raggedy Ann, the most commonly accepted being she was inspired by an accidental find of his daughter Marcella.

On this day, June 28, in 1917, the first Raggedy Ann doll, based on Gruelle’s literary character, came out, to change the lives little girls forever.

According the most commonly held Raggedy Ann origins story, Gruelle got the idea for the doll’s appearance and name when his daughter Marcella brought to him a faceless rag doll from grandmother’s closet. Taking his cartoonist’s pen, he quickly gave the doll a whimsical face, suggesting Grandma could sew onto it the missing button eye. For the name, Gruelle reached for the poetry set behind him, taking out a book of James Whitcomb Riley. Compressing the titles of two of his favorites — “The Raggedy Man” and “Little Orphant Annie,” he came up with Raggedy Ann.