Posted on 08/24/2002 7:08:21 AM PDT by BigWaveBetty
Tweed Roosevelt, great-grandson of President Teddy Roosevelt, takes part in Teddy Bear Expo, marking the 100th year of the Teddy Bear in Washington Friday, Aug. 23, 2002. Roosevelt holds an original bear made in 1904, right, and a reproduction of the first Teddy Bear, introduced in 1902, at left. The Teddy Bear, with its link to Theodore Roosevelt, is easily the most popular presidential memento ever produced. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook)
Teddy Bear Celebrates Centennial
WASHINGTON (AP) - The teddy bear, inspired by the helpless bear a president refused to shoot, turns 100 this fall, still fuzzy-eared, huggable and loved by millions of children around the world.
Theodore Roosevelt's teddy bear is easily the most popular presidential memento ever produced and the centennial celebrations have already begun.
Appearing on Friday at the Doll and Teddy Bear Expo here, Tweed Roosevelt, the 26th president's great grandson, said teddy bears have long been part of childhood for young members of the Roosevelt family.
Roosevelt, 60, is a Boston investment banker and a spokesman for the teddy bears produced by the Steiff Company, which has been making stuffed bears since 1903.
"I think that the teddy bear has come to represent all that's good about humans," Roosevelt said. "For a child it is a confidant that's entirely on the child's side. It's an honor to the Roosevelt family that we had a part of giving to the world this symbol of joy and solace."
The teddy bear's creation resulted from the accidental combination of a tethered bear in a Mississippi woods, news stories about the president's refusal to shoot it, and a cartoonist's eye for an arresting image.
As the end of 1902 approached, Roosevelt had completed a busy and successful first year in office and Republicans had breezed through the November elections. The president decided he deserved a break and a bear hunt seemed made to order.
Soon Roosevelt was clambering down from a private car on a railway siding in Mississippi in leather leggings, a blue flannel shirt, corduroy jacket and hobnail boots. He had a cartridge belt at his waist, a hunting knife on his hip and a favorite, custom-made rifle under his arm.
The president was clearly ready. But the bears were not.
As biographer Edmund Morris records in Theodore Rex, his account of the Roosevelt presidency, wherever an increasingly frustrated Roosevelt went in the deep woods the bears went elsewhere.
Finally, a pack of hunting dogs gave chase to a bear which lunged exhausted into a pond where a guide roped it and cracked it in the skull with a rifle butt.
The president was sent for. Here, finally, was a bear for him to shoot.
"He was both disappointed and upset, on reaching the pond, to find a stunned, bloody, mud-caked runt tied to a tree," Morris writes. "The bear was not much bigger than he. He refused to shoot. 'Put it out of its misery,' he said. Somebody dispatched it with a knife."
The hunt went on for three more days. Roosevelt never got a shot.
But back in Washington the newspaper stories of the president's sporting refusal to shoot a defenseless bear reached the desk of Clifford Berryman, then a cartoonist for The Washington Post.
Berryman sketched a small, bewildered, tethered bear, with the president turning away in disdain. The cartoon appeared on the front page of the Post on Nov. 16 over the caption, "Drawing the Line in Mississippi."
Readers took to the imagery at once, demanding more bear cartoons. Berryman obliged. Subsequent bears became "smaller, rounder and cuter." Soon Berryman was adding tiny big-eared bear cub mascots to every cartoon he drew.
Berryman, whose cartooning career was to extend into the Truman administration, described the cartoon beast as "a poor measly little cub with most of its fur rubbed off and ears like prickly pears."
"We have all been delighted with the little bear cartoons," Roosevelt wrote Berryman on Dec. 29, 1902.
The president's delight was widely shared. Soon people on both sides of the Atlantic saw commercial possibilities in the little bears.
In New York City, Rose Michtom, the wife of Brooklyn candy store owner Morris Michtom, made two stuffed toy bears. Her husband put them in his window at $1.50 each with a sign calling them "Teddy's Bears." Soon the stuffed bears were selling so briskly that the Michtoms, both Russian immigrants, established the Ideal Toy Company to keep up with demand.
Meanwhile, in Germany, toy manufacturer Margarete Steiff had added plush, stuffed, bear cubs to her line of stuffed elephants and other toy animals. Each had button eyes, long arms, movable joints and a distinctive button in an ear.
In 1903, a New York toy store ordered 3,000 Steiff bears. In 1907, the year teddy bear first appeared in a dictionary, the company sold 974,000. The teddy bear was on its way to becoming an essential of childhood. Steiff still sells more than 800,000 bears a year.
In 1904, the little bear became the mascot of Roosevelt's successful presidential campaign.
All of this had a touch of irony about it. The president disliked the nickname Teddy. Friends called him "Theodore."
But his fellow countrymen were far more informal. To them, the president was Teddy. And the little stuffed bear was "the teddy bear."
TEDDY BEAR REUNION IN THE HEARTLAND
America's Unique Teddy Bear Convention
Clarion, Iowa hosted its first Teddy Bear event, "Teddy Bear Homecoming in the Heartland", in 1990. Through the efforts of the Clarion Chamber of Commerce, local Teddy Bear artist Steve Schutt, and community volunteers this event attracted Teddy Bear artists and collectors from around the United States and many foreign coutries. Held again in 1995 this event has become the largest artist Teddy Bear convention in the world.
Tragically, in '95 we had no knowledge of this earth-shattering event, and went to see the corn grow without reservations - yikes. Never again. ;-)
Thanks for the nice fresh thread BWB - well done.
I would like to tell The Guild about my new electric pressure cooker. This is the greatest thing since sliced bread!
I must thank Hillary's Lovely Legs for convincing me to try one, can't believe I been cooking all these years without one! It's call Cook's Essentials and is available on the QVC website.
I was one of those who was scared to cook with a pressure cooker because, "it might explode." A common reply when asking people about pressure cookers. HLL assures me this one cannot explode. And it's so easy even I could figure it out.
Yesterday I tried it out while preparing food for my father-in-law and I'm as happy as a pig in mud. Finally I got a pot roast to "fall apart", the meat sauce for the lasagna took 15 minutes and the meat with so tender. Fstcwgrl gave me her chili recipe and we cooked up a batch in 50 min. Delicious!!!
Fstcwgrl will be getting one for Christmas. (don't worry she knows already) :-) Run, don't walk to the QVC website to get your own Cook's Essential's pressure cooker!
How delightful to open this thread to see the great grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and to wish a happy birthday to the TEDDY BEAR!
Here's a teddy bear chair to curl up in when cuddling your teddy. :-)
Tell #3 son we wish him well and to study hard. :-)
COULD it be that after losing Kathie Lee Gifford from his syndicated morning show, Regis Philbin actually misses his previous preternaturally perky sidekick? Spies on the set of ABC's "Live with Regis and Kelly" say the animosity between Philbin and his co-host of one year, Kelly Ripa, is so thick, the two won't even talk anymore.
"They weren't speaking to each other at a recent promo shoot" for the popular talk show, one source told msnbc.com's Jeannette Walls. "It was just awful.
"You could cut the tension with a knife. When the camera wasn't rolling, they wouldn't even go through the motions of pretending to like each other. They would barely even look at each other. It was painful." rest of the story from Page Six.
Hoookay, just in time for Christmas. Link
ARE Madonna, Rosanna Arquette, Melissa Etheridge, Cindy Crawford, Courtney Love, David Duchovny and Sherilyn Fenn unwittingly part of a cult? According to the L.A. Times, the stars are all under the influence of yoga teacher Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, who is a devoted follower of Yogi Bhajan, the founder of 3HO, the "Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization." Rick Ross, who runs cultnews.com, says 3HO is a cult. Khalsa, the stars' guru, is said to be "the teacher whom much of prenatal Hollywood has come to trust." But in 1974, Khalsa's own guru, Yogi Bhajan, told his followers: "Your dead bodies will lie on these roads, your children will be orphans, and nobody will kick them, rather, people will eat them alive! There will be tremendous insanity. That is the time we are going to face." Since then, Khalsa has softened Bhajan's message and now tells his devotees that through "special breathing, meditation and chanting" they can "balance the energy centers of the body and harmonize physically, emotionally and spiritually." Love says it's "better than Prozac."
Gee golly, I can't imagine why hollyweird is wacky.
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I love those soft, adorable, cuddly teddies too!!!! |
Speaking of hint and clues, here's one I would like to share with all the parents on this thread. I'm not sure if it shows this morning but I'm so angry I could spit.
My son has a friend who is a really nice kid. He usually goes over to said friend's house Friday's after school and then spends the night. This friend's house is the gathering place for many kids (three children in their family) and the boys and one girl go to one another's houses to hang. I've always been grateful for this particular friend's parents because I thought they were strict like me. I got such a wake up call last night!
My son calls to ask if he can spend the night at Jane's house. That's right, Jane.
No, was my response. I told him his dad would be there in a few minutes to pick him up. Two seconds after we hung up the friend's mother calls me and want to make sure I understand about Jane. They're all very good friends and Jane IS GAY! So of course there will be no hanky-panky going on, she says to me. (sure! a gay teenaged girl with three boys, no.... no trouble brewing there!)
Then when I tried to make her understand that doesn't make a bit of difference to me, that I have no intention of teaching my son it's perfectly ok for 16 year olds to spend the night with the opposite sex, gay or not.
She became so condescending I almost heaved the phone at the wall. You're just a fuddy-duddy or some such nonsense, she says to me. I said, "Yeah, didn't think I was that much older than you." Oh- wait there's more...... When I laughed that how does a sixteen year old girl know she's gay her response was, "Well you know they figure out if they are by the age of 13."
She didn't get my drift, does the girl think she's gay or has she been having sex with other girls so she knows for sure. What if Jane decides on one of these sleep overs she's bi-sexual? None of these things make me comfortable, duh.
I'm surrounded by idiots. This kind of crap has been going on since my daughter was in school.
So parents of young ones, check to make sure the slumber party you're about to send you son or daughter to is NOT a co-ed sleep over. These kinds of stupid parents try this crap with the young one too.
I must go do 40 laps in the pool so my arms will be so tired I won't have the strength to strangle anyone.
END OF RANT
I was wondering how long it would take you, almost 7 hours? You're slipping. :-)
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