It's Sabrina here as your hostess this week, and we are featuring teddy bears to mark the fact that Theodore Roosevelt was born on this day in 1858. Bonus points for teddy bears picnicking!
According to Wikipedia the name teddy bear comes from the former United States President Theodore Roosevelt, who was often referred to as "Teddy". The name originated from an incident on a bear hunting trip in Mississippi in November 1902, to which Roosevelt was invited by Mississippi Governor Andrew H. Longino. There were several other hunters competing, and most of them had already killed an animal. Some of Roosevelt's attendants cornered, clubbed, and tied an American black bear to a willow tree after a long exhausting chase with hounds. They called Roosevelt to the site and suggested that he shoot it. He refused to shoot the bear himself, deeming this unsportsmanlike, but instructed that the bear be killed to put it out of its misery, and it became the topic of a political cartoon by Clifford Berryman in The Washington Post on November 16, 1902. While the initial cartoon of an adult black bear lassoed by a handler and a disgusted Roosevelt had symbolic overtones, later issues of that and other Berryman cartoons made the bear smaller and cuter.
Morris Michtom saw the Berryman drawing of Roosevelt and was inspired to create a teddy bear. He created a tiny soft bear cub and put it in his candy shop window at 404 Tompkins Avenue in Brooklyn with a sign "Teddy's bear." The toys were an immediate success and Michtom founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Co.
A little earlier in 1902 in Germany, the Steiff firm produced a stuffed bear from Richard Steiff's designs. Steiff exhibited the toy at the Leipzig Toy Fair in March 1903, where it was seen by Hermann Berg, a buyer for George Borgfeldt & Company in New York, who ordered 3,000 to be sent to the United States.
Picnicking or not, once you've brought your bear along, upload your with the keyword WT920, and it's advisable also to share a link here in case of typos or gallery issues.
Here's a link to our
WT920 Teddy Bears gallery
Here's a link to my sample:
WT920 Picnic Bound by Cook22 at Splitcoaststampers
If you're not sure how to add a link, here's how:
1. Open 2 windows or tabs: one for your card in the gallery, and one for this thread
2. In this thread, click on reply and type anything you want to show before the link.
3. Go to your card window. Highlight the address for your card. (It says www. splitcoaststampers.com/gallery/showphoto..... and so on)
4. Click EDIT. Click COPY
5. Go back to this thread. Click PASTE.
As always, thanks to the team for their beary great creations. If I have time I'll be back with a Santa Bear myself!!
WT920 - Teddy Bears - 10/27/2022
