Teddy Bear Parade Marches On in S.D.

It’s astonishing, Judy Peterson says, how attached human beings can become to a teddy bear.

Peterson, who designed a bear that she says almost anybody can make in six hours, gives as an example a woman she met at a recent Bear Fair, at the Scottish Rite Temple in Mission Valley.

“She was a dignified-looking lady, about 70. She was pushing a baby stroller along, forcing it through the crowded aisles.” In the stroller sat an enormous bear, wearing a necktie.

“I asked her if she’d just bought it. ‘Oh, no dear,’ she said. ‘Alexander and I have been together since I was 7. I never go anywhere without him.’ ”

“Alexander,” Peterson concedes, is perhaps an extreme example of the way teddies are cherished. “But not much! And once you start making bears it’s like eating peanuts. I’ve never met anybody who could stop with just one.”

In the past three years, Peterson, who teaches bear-in-a-day workshops in Big Bear, has made hundreds of bears. So many, in fact, that she has lost track of the number.

More Fun to Make Them

“It’s a lot more fun to make a bear than it is to buy one,” she said, speaking in her living room, in which dozens of bears are propped up against various pieces of furniture. (“They lose their personalities if you squash them in boxes,” she explained.)

Manufactured bears, she said, look alike because they have their stuffing blown in. “But when you put it in by hand--I use an old wooden spoon--there’s no way to predict what kind of personality your bear is going to have.

“I made two the other day out of an old mink coat I found in a thrift shop. I made them exactly the same way. But one looks like a carefree, happy bear, and the other one looks sad and serious.”

Since 1902, when the first teddy bear was made and named after President Teddy Roosevelt (who couldn’t bring himself to shoot a baby bear while on a Mississippi hunting trip) it has been the world’s most enduringly popular toy.

Popular for Collectors

Last Christmas season, Bloomingdale’s in New York sold 200,000 teddies. Bear-lovers have their own magazine, the Teddy Bear Review. And, according to Peterson, if you are a bear-maker and a photograph of your bear appears in the annual Teddy Bear Calendar, it’s an honor practically akin to winning the Miss America crown.

“They’re also the most popular collector’s item,” she said. (A German Stieff teddy--blonde mohair with shoe button eyes--recently fetched $2,300 at a Christie’s auction.)

So how did Peterson, who holds the copyright on four sewing patterns, get into the wonderful world of bears? Did she wake up one sunny morning with a cry of “Aha! Today I’ll create a new bear”?

Actually, she says, it all started because of her friend, Eleanor Burns, owner of the Quilt-in-a-Day Center in San Marcos.

Their friendship goes back nine years, to the days when they were young mothers so hard up for cash that they would raid dumpsters to find material for Burns’ quilt-making classes. (“Usually in the dark,” Burns remembers. “One of our favorites was the one behind the Ocean Pacific factory, in Oceanside, because they threw out all the waste pieces from their corduroy shorts.”)

Method for Modern Women

Burns, who uses a speed-sewing technique adapted from assembly-line sewing, eventually became very successful. The quilt-making videos she films in her showroom are based on the premise that modern women can’t, as their grandmothers once did, spend months sewing on a patchwork quilt.

“But when I was working for Eleanor, early in 1984, she was still getting her business on its feet,” Peterson said. “She had only one camera then and filmed before a live audience. So, one of us had to keep the audience entertained while the camera moved to another position.”

When Burns decided to film the making of a bear-paw quilt-in-a-day, she thought the perfect “alternate entertainment” would be Peterson demonstrating how to put together a bear-in-a-day. It was a jointed bear that they could place on the quilt.

“I’d no idea how to put together any kind of a bear,” Peterson said, laughing.

Family Affair

Her entire family, she remembers, rallied around her as she struggled to produce a bear that looked like a bear.

Her husband, Henry, cut the arm and leg joints for her, worked out the best way to bolt them in, and wrote the pattern directions. Her daughter, Cyndie, 15, drew the pattern graphics. Her son, John, 10, owner of a Paddington Bear, contributed ideas.

“The first four bears looked pretty miserable,” she said. “One came out looking like a wolf.”

Finally, a bear emerged. A lovable, traditional-looking bear, like the ones she remembered from her childhood in Illinois, in the 1940s.

She named it “My Honey’s Bear” and cut the pattern in three sizes: a 21-inch mother and father, and a 12-inch baby bear. (The parent bears can be dressed in the clothes of a 1-year-old child.)

At that point, she says, she still had no idea that bears inspired so much affection in so many people.

Her first inkling of their incredible popularity came in August, 1985, when she drove her children across several states to be at her parents’ golden wedding anniversary celebration in Illinois.

Took Bears on Road

“Eleanor had a list of owners of sewing centers whom she’d met at the Quilt Market--a big trade show in Houston,” she said. “So I wrote to 14 of the ones along my route, and offered to give free bear-making and quilt-making demonstrations as long as I could bring along some of Eleanor’s books.” (Burns has written nine books on quilting.)

Her husband, she remembers, paled a little when she asked him to make 2,000 joints to take with her--a package of joints, eyes, nose and upholstery thread goes along with each pattern--but all 14 stores responded with enthusiasm.

“I left home feeling extremely nervous. What if nobody showed up?”

Her first demonstration was in Midland, Tex., “on a scorching hot August afternoon. I was sure no one was going to show up.” In fact, 75 enthusiastic, would-be bear-makers arrived before she had finished unpacking her supplies. “Some of them had driven 80 or 90 miles. It was wonderful!”

After “My Honey’s Bear,” Peterson produced “My Honey’s Bunny” and a panda that looks so realistic he seems to have wandered straight out of a National Geographic documentary.

“But the Scottie dog I tried just didn’t work out,” she recalled, indicating a small black dog perched on her piano, among several bears. “For some reason, hardly anybody wanted to make him.”

It was while Peterson was teaching a bear-making class at the Quilt-in-a-Day Center that she met a woman named Chris Basham. Basham owns a sewing center named Bearly Stitching in Big Bear, on Big Bear Boulevard. What could be more appropriate, Basham thought, than a bear-making class there?

She Loves to Teach

“I love teaching,” said Peterson, who holds six-hour workshops in Big Bear every six weeks. “I’m a much better teacher than I am a businesswoman. At bear fairs I never like to push my bears. I just hover behind them. But I’ll go anywhere to teach!”

Her students have ranged in age from 11 to 83. There is, she says, a lot of interesting human drama in a bear-making class.

“I remember one young woman who was desperately missing her husband. He was in the Air Force, stationed in Greece,” she said. “She earned enough from making bears to fly herself and her two children out to see him.”

One man told her he was taking the class in the hope of meeting a nice woman. “He figured the sort of woman who would be in a bear-making class would have all the virtues he was looking for in a wife!” Peterson says she’s sure that would work in reverse.

“And then there was the woman who had been struggling to give up smoking. She took the class, she said, because she wanted something to occupy her hands. It worked. She became so engrossed in her bear--people fall in love with their bears by the time they’ve put the arms and legs on--that she didn’t give smoking a thought.”

Peterson says she prefers to keep her bears simple. At a Bear Fair, however, browsers are likely to see everything from Bag Lady Bears to Yubbies--young, upwardly mobile bears--and Albert Einstein bears--”they have a lot of wild, white hair”--to bears with belly buttons.

Good Spot for Bears

San Diego County is a particularly good spot for those who make, collect or just enjoy looking at what’s new in teddy bears, because of the annual bear fairs held at the Del Mar Fairgrounds and the Scottish Rite Temple.

“In fact, there are now two bear fairs a year at the Scottish Rite,” Peterson said. “A Carlsbad author of a book on the history of teddy bears--Linda Mullins--organizes a fair there every February and November.”

When her daughter, Cyndie, now 19, left home for college, Peterson took a job as a secretary at Encinitas Family Services, a counseling service.

She still teaches at the Quilt-in-a-Day Center. She juggles job, housework, bear-making and quilt-making classes, with work on her latest pattern.

“A six-jointed squirrel,” she said cheerfully. “Henry is figuring out the best way to put joints in the tail.”

When asked if her husband ever objects to all the hours he spends in their garage, cutting joints, Peterson says he has actually been the beneficiary of her speed-sew instructions. He recently made himself a pin-striped suit.

“A lot of men like to sew now, particularly since the invention of computerized sewing machines. Once, at Bearly Stitching, a 6-7 Marine put a teddy bear together so fast he had the whole bear together before I had time to get over and show him what to do.”

Even with all her varied experiences, though, Peterson says she continues to be amazed by the way some people respond to bears.

“The National Enquirer held a ‘Biggest Teddy Bear Collection’ contest recently,” she said. “The winner was a woman named Carol Dorries. Do you know how many bears she owns? 1,763!”