It appears that my son might be taking over this blog as several of the last posts have been inspired by him. Today is no different. He has been asking me for several days to learn something new about bears. His favorite stuffed animal is a bear appropriately named "Bear-bear."This summer we went camping with friends in Northeast Pennsylvania. Several black bears approached the cabin we were staying in and the kids got to see them up close. It was quite an amazing sight -- until I came within five feet of a several hundred pound black bear. I thought I heard a noise in a screened-in porch area of the cabin and when I opened the door - cautiously for some reason - there stood a huge black bear. Luckily (for me) he was probably as scared of me as I was of him and he took off running as I swiftly closed and locked the door.
I was not aware - or did not recall - that the teddy bear got its name from the 26th President of the United States, Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt.
As the story goes, the President was on a bear hunt and, after not getting a bear, was presented a captured bear by others in his hunting party to shoot. The President apparently refused to kill the bear under those circumstances as he deemed it to be unsportsmanlike. A newspaper picked up the story and posted a cartoon picture of the President with a bear. Then a novelty and candy store owner in Brooklyn, NY created a little stuffed bear, which he sent to the President and was granted permission to call it "Teddy's Bear." This supposedly set off a "craze" for teddy bears in the first decade of the 1900s such that ladies carried them around and children were often photographed with them.
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