THE TEDDY BEAR

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 7, 9 January 1937, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE TEDDY BEAR

The Teddy Tiear has so long enjoyed its little sovereignty over nursery affections that we must be careful about the details of its ancestry.

As a matter of fact the Teddy Bear ia named after President Theodore Roosevelt, who was called Teddy for short. An old rancher, he used to hunt bears, and when President McKinley succumbed to an assassin's wound from which he had been expected to recover, Roosevelt was lost in the Adirondack mountains, where he was said to be bear-hunting.

Men sent to find him roamed the wilds and fired their rifles to attract his attention, and in the end they found him late one night in a log shanty, where he was resting with two of his sons, teaching them deer-stalking, though the story went round that he was found hunting bears. He left the hut to hasten in his rough outfit to become President of the United States.

The bear-liunting legend prevailed over the deer-stalking truth, and little bears were manufactured as a toy in his honour. They spread all over the civilised world, named Teddy after him, to become perhaps the most popular playth'ing for little boys and girls ever presented to the nurserv.