ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, January 8, 1997 TAG: 9701080018
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LENEXA, KAN.
THE PLUSH BODIES of the 12-inch Shadow Buddies mirror the injuries of the children undergoing treatment.
Miles Postlethwait, born with heart, kidney and intestinal defects, wanted a friend who was just like him. So he and his mom, Marty, created one.
That friend, a muslin ``buddy'' with a plastic tube protruding from its abdomen and a row of scars across its heart, has helped the 9-year-old through more than 30 major surgeries.
Three years since its creation, that single buddy has grown into Shadow Buddies, the Postlethwaits' year-old company that makes 12 different disease-or disability-specific dolls.
The 12-inch rag dolls have been stitched, fitted for casts, anesthetized, hooked up to chemotherapy lines, given shots and loved by about 12,000 children across the United States.
Some buddies have even traveled to the former Soviet Union. In October, Shadow Buddies donated 100 buddies to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's International Trust for Children's Health Care. Marty Postlethwait, the company president, gave the dolls to Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, at a National Children's Cancer Society news conference in St. Louis.
Miles, whose thumbprint is on the left hand of each buddy, designed the prototype when he was 6.
When Marty Postlethwait asked her son how the buddies should look, he said, ``We need to put heart eyes on them for love, so that the kids know that they're loved, and they all should smile so that when the kids look at the buddies, they are happy.''
The name comes from the song ``Me and My Shadow.'' The buddies are not called dolls, because of the possible stigma for boys, Marty Postlethwait said.
The buddies come in light or dark ``skin,'' with knotted yarn hair in different colors, and each wears a printed hospital gown.
Under their gowns, each shows the unique physical characteristics of its human buddy's disease or disability.
``Even little kids who have Down syndrome and some of the ones that are a little more severely handicapped all say, `me, me,' when they get them and look underneath the gowns,'' Marty Postlethwait said.
The buddies were test-marketed for children ages 6 months through 16 years. But comfort has no age, she said.
``I have many requests from adults and people in their 60s and 70s - grandparents who know someone their age that's going through a form of cancer, and they would like a buddy sent to their friend in the hospital or purchase one to give to them,'' she said.
The oldest Shadow Buddy owner is an 88-year-old woman who needed a pacemaker and heart valve replacement. She still has her buddy one year after the surgery.
The youngest is newborn Cheyenne Pyle - also the nation's youngest heart transplant recipient.
Marty Postlethwait left her job as an accounting assistant to start Shadow Buddies. Her husband, Eric, had worked as a jeweler until he recently joined the company.
The Postlethwaits sell the dolls wholesale to corporations, who may then distribute the dolls or ask the Postlethwaits to distribute them. They cost about $10 each.
``Retailing would drive up the cost and would take buddies out of the hands of children who would be given the dolls at a hospital through corporate sponsorship,'' Marty Postlethwait said.
In her suburban Kansas City office, she keeps a large notebook of letters from parents, children and health care workers. A letter from a pediatric AIDS foundation in Puerto Rico said that 3-year-old twin girls had received Shadow Buddies in the hospital.
``Both girls died,'' the letter said. ``But their buddies were with them to the end. They even shared their medicine with them.''
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP/File 1996. Miles Postlethwait, 9, and his mom Martyby CNBcreated the Shadow Buddies with heart eyes on them so the kids would
know that they're loved. color.
MELINDA ABLARD DIAZ ASSOCIATED PRESS