COMMANDER ZORRO'S MAGIC TIME PORTAL TO TEDDY BEAR DAY!

Meanwhile, several thousand miles away in the year 1902, the other half
of the Teddy Bear story was about to begin. President Roosevelt,
visiting Mississippi to settle a border dispute, decided to go out hunting
for the day. After several hours, he still hadn't bagged anything, when
one of his aides discovered wandering through the wood an old she-bear.
Catching it, he tied it to a tree, and brought the President to it - here
was his trophy for the day! To Roosevelt's eternal credit, he couldn't
bring himself to shoot the defenseless bear, and ordered it to be set
free. Had he done so, he said, he wouldn�t �be able to look my boys in
the face again". Washington Post staff artist Clifford K. Berryman
(1869-1949) made the incident famous with a front-page cartoon called
'Drawing the Line in Mississippi' in which he transformed the old bear
into a cub. This cartoon was printed in all the papers. Among the many
readers who saw the Berryman cartoon was Russian immigrant Morris
Michtom, a Brooklyn candy store owner. Seeing a potential market,
Morris had his wife make a toy bear, with movable limbs, for sale and
put it into his shop window with a copy of the cartoon and a hand
written notice saying 'Teddy's Bear'. When it sold quickly, the Michtoms
made others. Within a year, Michtom closed his candy store and
founded the Ideal Novely and Toy Company, still one of the biggest toy
firms in the world over 90 years later. After obtaining T.R.�s permission
to use Roosevelt�s name in connection with the new toy, Michtom closed
a deal with a large toy wholesaler to distribute the bears.

In Germany, unaware of what was going on in New York, Richard Steiff
completed the designs for his toy bear, and Margarete quickly ran up a
prototype from scraps of mohair cloth. The bear, christened 'Friend
Petz' first appeared in public at the 1903 Spring Toy Fair at Leipzig,
but - to Richard's disappointment, nobody seemed interested. Legend
has it that it was only as Richard was packing away the stand at the end
of the fair, that an American toy buyer came up to him, seized the bear,
and ordered 3000 on the spot. And so the Teddy Bear was born, and
sent on his way to international success.

Within a few years of their invention,
Teddy Bear-mania had swept the world.
Roosevelt adopted the bear cub as his
mascot for a successful re-election
campaign, and Steiff redesigned their
bears to create a more appealing face
which was to influence all other Teddy Bears for the next fifty years.
While American firms mainly supplied their home market, the German
firms - at first Steiff, and later competitors such as Hermann and
Bing, exported bears across Europe. Only with the First World War did
the Teddy Bear industries of other countries start to make a mark.