He received approval from Roosevelt to use his name, the business took off, and in 1907 went on to create The Ideal Toy Company.īut the teddy bear has two simultaneous origin stories. This in turn led to a Brooklyn candy shop owner called Morris Michtom, who also made stuffed animals with his wife, to design a little stuffed bear and dedicate it to the president, calling the toy Teddy’s Bear – you can take a look at it here. A political cartoonist working for the Washington Star called Clifford Berryman depicted Roosevelt’s refusal to shoot the bear in a cartoon. Many of us may have heard about the story of Teddy Roosevelt and his encounter with a bear around 1902 when on a hunting trip in Mississippi, in which he refused to shoot it on account of it being tied to a tree – this clearly being the height of unsportsmanlike behaviour for a hunter like himself. It also inevitably brought to mind Tomi Ungerer’s wonderful Otto - The Autobiography of a Teddy Bear.īut first, given that I have not included any teddy bears or indeed any toys by Steiff among the portraits yet, I will look at the figure of teddies, how they came about, and how they took over the world of soft toys. It has made me think a great deal about innocence, and about how our attitudes toward it are messy bundles of contradictions. Ever since I came across its story – which I am sure is similar to that of a significant number of families throughout history – it’s been in the back of my mind. This teddy bear has been on my list of playthings for months, waiting for the right moment to come.
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