A: This graph shows the percentage of votes for candidates for Mayor and City Council in one chart. I got 15% running for Mayor; I was not elected. Mr. Schmidt got 12% running for City Council and was elected. This data strongly suggests that I would have been elected if I had run for City Council in 2007. It is impossible to say for sure but it is likely I would have got even more votes if I had run for City Council. This data also strongly suggests that it is likely I will be elected as a City Council Member in 2009.

Q: What was Kingdom of the Dolls at 66071 Pierson Blvd. in Desert Hot Springs?

A: It was an internationally famous doll museum and my grandparent’s house.

Picture of 66071 Pierson Blvd. June 2008

Betty Hamilton is my grandmother. Robert Hamilton was my grandfather. At one time, other than Cabot’s Pueblo, the spas, the natural beauty, our pristine air and water, there was not much for visitors to Desert Hot Springs to see or do. My amazing grandmother is an artist who created a doll museum, from 1976 to 1990, called Kingdom of the Dolls at 66071 Pierson Blvd. She was an artist who put Desert Hot Springs on the map internationally. People would show up by the busload from all around the world. They had a deal with Cabot’s Pueblo, because the crowds were too large to handle at either location all at once, to split the groups between the two attractions and when their tours were done to switch them to the other location. She grew up in Nazi occupied Denmark during WWII. Her father was posthumously awarded a medal for resisting the Nazis. The natural beauty and energy of Desert Hot Springs has been an inspiration to artists for generations. The history of the future is ours to carve and to sculpt. Please enjoy the newspaper articles below that tell about my grandmother, an important part of Desert Hot Springs history.

Robert M. Bentley

Picture of 66071 Pierson Blvd. June 2008

Lifetime hobby keeps her young

HI-DESERT STAR – Wednesday, April 13, 1994
By SUSAN CHANEY
Hi-Desert Star Staff Writer

Is it hard for you to picture what clothing looked like during the Renaissance or even during the '20s in the United States? It's a cinch for Betty Hamilton, who, since the 1950s, has been studying the clothing of the world and making miniature replicas. Though her collection is now down to about 20 dolls and their authentic costumes, she has a sample of each period from early Egyptian to the 1920s. There was a time when she had about 400 dolls, plus castles, mansions, carriages and all the other trappings of life, in miniature, since Neanderthal Man at her Kingdom of Dolls museum in Desert Hot Springs. "I spent years in the library, reading up," explained the native of Denmark. One of her references is "Costumes and Styles" by Henry Hansen. She can still flip it open right to the page where Renaissance styles are featured -in color.

DOLLED UP - Betty Hamilton displays her handiwork. Hamilton designed and made this doll's clothing for a friend. (Star photo by Tim Bulone)

Hamilton's costuming began in 1958 when she entered a "Dress-A-Doll" contest, sponsored by the National Doll Dressing Institute. There was a $2,000 first prize and Hamilton "really needed the money." Though she didn't take first, she did get a $250 prize for her Marie Antoinette and escort from the same time period. "I had fun doing it," Hamilton recalled. It sent her on what is now an almost 40-year odyssey. She still makes clothes for a doll shop in Palm Springs and for her friends' dolls. After Hamilton and her husband moved to Desert Hot Springs in 1972- for her husband's health and the quiet -her collection of costumes (on dolls, of course) got so large it was crowding the couple from their home. They bought a piece of property on Pierson Avenue with a house in the back and built a business in the front. After completing 20 scenes with miniature buildings and costumed characters (including a replica of her own wedding), Hamilton thought the 900-square-foot museum was full. But she still had a lot of other periods and countries she wanted to do, so the resourceful costumer started a second level below the first.

TIMELESS FASHIONS - One of Hamilton's collections includes these dolls with fashions from different ages of human history. Her collection begins with the fashions of ancient Greece and ends with the Roaring Twenties. (Star photo by Tim Bulone)

Hamilton was a writer until she moved to the United States in her 30s. After getting into miniature costume-making, she realized she had needed something to satisfy her creative side. Her historic scenes were a way of storytelling, she explained. Research, sewing and painting were all required. "I combined my talents into this," she said. When she closed her museum in 1990, subsequent to a move to Yucca Valley, India was the only major country not represented. "I wanted to do the Taj Mahal," she said, but closed the Kingdom before she got the chance. Her Neanderthal Man scene included a cave, a mammoth and a sabre-toothed tiger. The man was formed of clay. Hamilton's scenes were not kits or made from models with just the right materials. "I made it all out of junk," she explained. An entire castle was made out of various kinds of styrofoam. Coat hangers, paper towel tubes and champagne corks were frequent materials. Strawberry baskets, painted of course, formed the balcony on one structure. Thread spools were stacked to form the banisters of another. She used paint to make the buildings look authentic. "It had to look like the real thing," Hamilton said. People came from around the world to the museum, having heard of it from friends who had visited the desert. A French TV show filmed a segment about Hamilton's kingdom as well. "I had mail from everywhere," said the 72-year-old. Many who had visited, knowing her use of castoffs for her scenery, would send things she could use. When Hamilton closed the museum in 1990, she donated the scenes and dolls to a charitable cause. It has since disappeared she knows not where. Though she still does sew doll outfits ("I can sew for me much quicker," she points out), Hamilton also loves to play bridge, a game she learned from her parents in Denmark. In some ways, Hamilton's "lifetime hobby," as she called it, kept her young. When she got a new washing machine several years ago, she was I more excited about the box, just imagining what it would become in her Kingdom of Dolls.


Wanted: One very large doll house, donation preferred

DESERT SENTINEL – Wednesday, February 26, 1992
By CARIS DAVIS
Sentinel Staff Writer

What's the connection between the most celebrated dolls house in the Coachella Valley and poor families afflicted with AIDS? Sometime Desert Hot Springs resident Leonard Simms. On June 13, 1990 Simms, who lives in San Dimas, persuaded soft-spoken local doll enthusiast Betty Hamilton, 68, to deed her collection of some 300 hand-made figurines to him. "He was a very charming young man," Hamilton says. "He said he was working with babies who had AIDS. He said he lived on donations... he told me Elizabeth Taylor had given him $1 million for this charity. I thought it was a very noble cause." Simms says that isn't quite the case. "I said I volunteered for charities as a solicitor -but that I was not salaried by any organization," is the way Simms calls it. "Look, this woman is 75 (years old)." Whatever the truth of the matter, there's one thing both Simms and Hamilton agree on: three hundred hand-made dolls –unique miniature figures meticulously crafted by Hamilton since 1958, and set in custom-built, historically-authentic sets constructed from scraps she salvaged and scavenged over a 24-year period -lie abandoned in a San Dimas garage. "It belongs to my sister," Simms says. "I don't know what to do with them," the itinerant AIDS activist says. "They're packed up in (more than 70) boxes." "I think he's telling the truth," says Hamilton. Hamilton had displayed the collection since spring 1976 in a 30-foot-by-30-foot timber building on Pierson Boulevard she called The Kingdom of the Dolls. "My purpose was to depict history," Hamilton says. "I made the dolls to illustrate the way people dressed, how they lived." Four years after she opened the building's doors Betty's husband Robert, with whom she moved here in 1966, died. For the next 10 years the fair, Scandinavian-born widow used to give two-hour tours of her collection for local children, seniors, fellow enthusiasts, curiosity seekers -anyone, in fact, with time to kill who might drop a dollar to help her defray the costs of maintaining the curious little museum with its 38 custom-built tableaus and dioramas. From the time she opened the Kingdom's doors in 1976, her collection-cum-museum was a landmark to many desertoids - and an endearing eccentricity reassuring local snowbirds they'd found their way back to their place in the sun. The Kingdom of Dolls featured fearsome Maori hunters scarfing up a hapless missionary, and elegant courtiers bowing at the feet of King Louis XVI's glittering consort Marie Antoinette. Where else could you find Anne Boylene facing her black-hooded, axe-wielding executioner, and Old West gunfighters dealing off the bottom of the deck as they rubbed shoulders with rock 'n roll musicians less than two feet tall? One of the most interesting aspects of her project is Hamilton's pioneering use of recycled materials. Over the years she scavenged margarine containers, smashed insulin syringes, champagne corks and spools of string to transform cardboard sheets into the palaces, temples and homes that housed her displays. Hamilton stitched scraps of material into authentic costumes; she bought dolls' heads and hands from thrift shops, and worked wire, wood and clay together so her marionettes' bodies would be perfectly scaled in the backdrop of their miniature universes.

DOLLKEEPER AND DAUGHTER – Betty Hamilton and her daughter Bonnie look through a scrapbook about The Kingdom of the Dolls at the Sentinel offices last week.

Two years ago Hamilton met a man named Mason. "I got married again," Hamilton says. "He lived up in Joshua Tree. It (the Kingdom of the Dolls) took my whole time. I had to choose between my new husband and the Dolls." In May 1990, a daily newspaper ran an item in which Hamilton appealed for someone to house and curate her extraordinary collection-cum-museum. Once the story ran, Hamilton's phone began to ring. "I had about 10 calls from different people," she says. "Most were antique dealers." But their big money couldn't buy the small worlds this widow of 10 years had painstakingly pieced together since she dressed her first doll in 1958. "I wanted to keep the collection together," Hamilton explains. "I decided within a few days to give it to Leonard Simms." Hamilton describes Simms as a chubby, blue-eyed blond male. "I met him four or five times," she says. Simms's Palm Springs attorney John Trevino drew up paperwork to legitimize Hamilton's gift to Simms. "I even put in a special clause to make sure she'd always have access to her collection," Simms says. Sure enough, his statement is indeed reflected in the copy of the deed that Hamilton signed on June 13, 1990. Hamilton remembers Simms introducing her to a Latino family who visited her museum shortly before she used her key to the Kingdom, in September 1990, for the last time. "He (Simms) had me understand that he was pretty well off. He said he lived at Mary Ann Manor off Hacienda by Mountain View," Hamilton says. When the Latino family dropped into The Kingdom of the Dolls one hot afternoon, she says, "(Simms) whispered to me that they had AIDS." "All the children seemed quite healthy to me," Hamilton remembers. As indeed they were concedes Simms. Except one. “The baby had tested HIV positive,” he said. “The parents were both HIV positive too. The family was living with me. Eighteen months after the baby's test, they re-tested him and he re-tested negative. We had a party that night, a celebration." Simms, who had taken over Mary Ann Manor during the summer of 1990, says he was moved by the plight of families with young children with AIDS and lodged the Latino family of 10 through a HUD grant. "They (the family) were from El Centro," he says. "It took me half an hour to drive down there. I had spoken to a caseworker about them. I met them." Simms, who used to run a hotel/motel booking service known to the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce, says the family then came and saw the property on Hacienda he was then running, and decided that they wanted to move in. "The man was very intelligent," he says. "But when he'd been diagnosed by the clinic in El Centro, all they'd given him was aspirin." "ATZ (the drug most commonly used to relieve symptoms) was too expensive for these people," he says. Simms says he has no paperwork from HUD. He says he cannot remember the name of the caseworker who put him in touch with the family. ("She wasn't a caseworker," he said Monday, reversing earlier statements, "she was a receptionist. I just drove down there and she took us into a side room at the clinic.") Which clinic? Simms cannot name it despite living under the same roof as the family he lodged "for a few months, less than six" during 1990. "It might not be in El Centro," he said on Monday. "I'm not sure." And despite his sterling work on behalf of the mystery Latino family for whom he did so much -including acquiring Hamilton's collection as a fundraising device -Simms says he does not know how the couple acquired the disease. The volunteer definitely did try and promote The Kingdom of The Dolls as a money-raising attraction for AIDS-stricken families. "He mentioned the doll house issue, and that he was going to use it as a fundraising concept," says Executive Director of the Desert AIDS Project Bill Smith. "He said it would be nice in the lobby of Palm Springs Mall. I was never clear how that would translate into donations," Smith says. Smith says he also visited Mary Ann Manor, where Simms was lodging the Latino family, during July or August 1990 - about the time Simms acquired the Kingdom of the Dolls, according to Hamilton. "The place looked like it was on its last legs," Smith says. "It was struggling. There was supposedly one family living there -I never saw them," he said Feb. 21. Smith says he decided not to engage the Desert AIDS Project in any of Simms's plans "because I couldn't see a need there. I thought he was perhaps a little ahead of his time." Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce staffer Pat Elsharei says Simms also tried to interest Rancho Mirage's Children's Museum in the idea of taking on Hamilton's collection as a fundraiser for families suffering from AIDS. "He was very enthusiastic about it," Elsharei says. "But (the Childrens' Museum) is a very hands-on place". Where the fragile dolls, she says, might well have come to grief. "The interesting thing is that people were willing to do a deal on them (the dolls)," Elsharei remembers. "But they weren't interested in doing it for charity." And Simms -true to the terms of the deed Hamilton had signed -wasn't interested in exploiting the collection for his own financial gain, EIsharei says. Simms says his intentions have been honorable throughout, even if his methods have not (to date) been completely successful in placing the collection with a sponsor to raise money to help AIDS-stricken families. Simms says he is "not doing anything." And, for the time being at least, a one-time unique DHS roadside attraction seems doomed to the darkness of more than 70 packing crates. There are many things you might call Coachella Valley. But The Valley of the Dolls would not be one of them.