by Liisa Berg

Babies are fascinated by them, toddlers tote them, pre-schoolers and school children won't leave home without them, teenagers tarry in toy stores where they are sold, sweethearts give them to each other as tokens of affection, elderly ladies collect them . . . and now they are on the new US 37-cent stamp!

Few toys can thank a United States president for their very existence and fame. But this cuddly creature can. The stuffed joy we call "teddy bear" can trace his roots to Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th American president. Though not sitting snugly on the Roosevelt family tree, this bear has claimed a definite presence in the family folklore.

The story goes that in November of 1902 the President was taking a four-day break from politics and went bear-hunting in Mississippi. The President was unlucky in the hunt, and his only chance of bringing home a trophy was a bear cub, tied to a tree. The President refused to shoot the poor creature. The word of this incident reached the press in Washington, and immediately a caricature was drawn by political cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman for the Washington Post. Through this cartoon, the little bear, depicted with big round ears and a long muzzle, came to symbolize the President, a popular family man, and within a year, the character was transformed into a stuffed toy for children bearing the President's name—the teddy bear.

From these presidential beginnings, the teddy bear has sprung into popularity unsurpassed by any other toy in the industry. The teddy simply is irresistible. It is considered one of the few "cradle to grave" toys: babies are fascinated by them, toddlers tote them around, preschoolers and school children won't leave home without them, teenagers (especially girls) tarry in toy stores where they are sold, sweethearts give them to each other as tokens of their affection one to another, elderly ladies collect them—did we leave anyone out? But to top the list, police use them to help traumatized children talk about their experiences, and hospitals, particularly mental institutions, stock them for solace and comfort for their patients, and the teddy seems to always deliver.

A year after Berryman's bear cartoon made its debut, two Russian emigrants, Morris and Rose Michtom, transformed the cartoon teddy into a plush, jointed cuddly toy bear, and thus became the founders of the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company. Incredibly, though, after a highly successful period of bear production and a name change in 1938 to Ideal Toy Corporation, the company no longer makes teddies, leaving the highly lucrative business to a host of other toy manufactures all over the world.

The Roosevelt teddy is not the oldest stuffed bear. In fact, its prototype may be as alien as the Russian couple who fashioned it. The first known inceptions of stuffed toy bears come from the nineteenth-century Europe. In the 1880s in France there was a burgeoning toy industry that used the bear as a subject for automatons. These clockwork bears could dance, drink or smoke. In Germany, the bear was used a bit more realistically. These toys were four feet tall, stood on all fours and sometimes moved on wheels.

Early this century, jointed furry bears were being manufactured in Germany by Margarete Steiff. Margarete was confined to a wheelchair after a childhood bout with polio, and developed her skills at sewing to the point where she started a mail-order business of stuffed toys and other items. Her bears can also thank the United States president for their success. Ms. Steiff exhibited her work in the Leipzig Fair in March 1903, where Hermann Berg, the toy buyer for a New York department store, inspired by the President's humanitarian act, bought 3,000 of Margarete's bears. Eventually a patent was received and the bear's design was legally protected by the "button-in-ear" trademark.

Steiff's business took off at such a speed that she had to enlarge operations several times during the so-called "Bear Years" (Bärenjahre) between 1903 and 1908: the number of teddy bears produced rose from 12,000 to 975,000. Steiff bears are regarded in the highest rank of teddies to this day.

Children's instinct to treat their teddies as humans led the toy industry to produce bears who wore various kinds of outfits as early as 1906. The first bears that did not bare it all wore sailor suits or knitted double-breasted suits. Soon the best-dressed bears were wearing high fashion items. The dressing frenzy was perhaps in part due to one family's creative children: the Cattley family of London created beautiful fashions for their teddies from broderie anglaise, velvet and lace. These well-dressed bears can be seen in London's Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood and they date from about 1906.

These days teddies can wear just about anything, and often it seems that the outfit speaks louder than the bear—one might say that the clothes do make the bear. In most cases, they do prompt the personality to come to life at any rate. And with closets full of clothes, the bear has a choice of outfits—and identities.

One such clothed bear is the famous Paddington Bear from Darkest Peru, best known for his penchant for marmalade, his duffel coat, wellington boots and a fisherman's hat. Paddington first appeared in Michael Bond's illustrated book A Bear Called Paddington published in 1958 in England. The fame soon circumnavigated the globe and the bear appeared on radio, television, and wallpaper. But Paddington was already fourteen years old when the first stuffed toy was manufactured. Hundreds of other products followed to the extend that Bond created a company to watch out for Paddington's name. Symbolically, to watch out for his name, the bear stands on the concourse of his namesake Paddington Station in London.

But perhaps the best-known fictional bear in the world is Winnie-the-Pooh, another British creation. The story of Winnie started as a real teddy bear purchased at Harrods in 1921 by Dorothy Milne, the wife of the author Alan Alexander Milne, for their son Christopher Robin's first birthday. In 1924 Winnie made his first appearance in the annals of world literature, in Milne's collection of childhood poems called When We Were Very Young. Many of the adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh took place in the Milnes' neighborhood in Sussex, near Ashdown Forest, where devotees visit on a regular basis.

From the pages of Milne's poems, Winnie-the-Pooh found his embodiment through Ernest Howard Shepard, a famous British illustrator who based Pooh on his son's Steiff bear "Growler." But the most significant contribution to Pooh's popularity was made by none other than Walt Disney who in 1966 launched a twenty-minute musical cartoon called "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree." This was followed by two other cartoons in rapid succession, and in 1975 the three were combined to make a full-length feature film that proved very popular. Disney subsequently bought the rights to the character and licensed various companies to reproduce Winnie-the-Pooh as a stuffed animal.

In 1988, the first annual Walt Disney World Teddy Bear Convention was held in Florida. Aside from teddy bear conventions, there are teddy bear societies, monthly magazines, newsletters, and buyers' guides that will help steer the uninitiated to the correct choice. But be ready to dole out some money for your choice: there are bears that bear hefty prices—up to US$ 3,000. In 1989, one bear was auctioned at Sotheby's for an extraordinary price of US$ 86,000.

Such pricey bears are a sign of a new phenomenon: arctophily, or bear collecting. Such popularity does not go unnoticed by manufacturers. In response, they have loosed their imaginations to come up with the most fascinating and sometimes most outrageous creations for adults who look for rare novelty items: There are sophisticated personality bears that are meant exclusively for adult collectors rather than children. The ultimate examples might be the expensive mink teddy bear sold at London's Fortnum and Mason in 1980, or the 1987 creation "Mr. Bills" who was made of clear plastic and stuffed with US$ 250,000 worth of shredded banknotes. These bears undoubtedly wore a tag saying "Keep away from children."

But the good old teddy can hardly be kept from children or teeny-boppers. The teddy is simply irresistible!

LINKS TO TEDDY BEAR SITES:

The title teddy is from (used by permission):
Teddy Bears' Den

The Teddy Roosevelt teddy is from (used by permission):
Bear Hollow

Steiff 1904 replica is from:
Teddy Bears to Go

Winnie-the-Poo is from (used by permission):
Winnie the Poo

Paddington is from:
Copyrights Group: Paddington

The wedded teddies are from (used by permission):
Vermont Teddy Bear

A plethora of links to teddy bear sites can be found at:
Anna Made Links

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This page was created on September 15, 2002
Most recent revision: February 25, 2007