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Lot # 149 -Richard Steiff Designed 1902 Mohair “Teddy” Bear- in original box ~ Like new condition
Paper tag of this special bear reads: My name is Teddy. I am the first bear ever made with movable arms and legs, and the first toy made of mohair.
Margarete Steiff's nephew, Richard Steiff, invented me in 1902. He was a man crazy about animals, and as an art student in Stuttgart he drew them all the time. He fell in love with a family of young brown bears at Nill's Animal Show in 1897, spent weeks studying their antics, and filling his sketchbooks with them.
The family was rather doubtful, but he insisted on making me anyway, knowing full well how lovable and droll I am.
However, it was a year before he could show me to the world. He took me to the Leipzig Fair in 1903. I had a very disappointing start in life.
.. No one liked me except an American toy buyer from the George Borgfeldt Company in New York City. He thought so much of me that he ordered 3,000 of my brothers and sisters.
About that very same year, Teddy Roosevelt travelled into the backwoods of Mississippi on a bear hunt. After several days in which no bears were sighted, the expedition guide chased a little bear cub out of the brush, but Mr. Roosevelt refused to kill it and shooed it back to its mother.
As luck would have it, on this expedition was the Washington Post's famous political cartoonist, Clifford Berryman, who was so moved by the president's gesture that his first cartoon upon returning to his drawing board was one showing the president refusing to shoot the cub. From that time on, in each cartoon Berryman did on the presi-dent, the little bear showed up. Berryman called him "Teddy's bear"
A few years later in 1906 I was invited to the White House to attend the wedding reception for Teddy Roosevelt's daughter.
As the guests came in, they saw Steiff bears adorning the festive tables dressed as hunters and fishermen - a theme chosen because of the president's reputation as an avid outdoorsman. When the illustrious Roosevelt admitted that even as a bear expert he couldn't name the breed, a guest spoke up and said, "why they're Teddy's bears, of course". Ever since I've been called "Teddy" after the president himself.
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