THE VAN WIJHE family goes far back in time, to the middle ages when they were nobility and carried the title of Lord of Echteld, but in reality they were from Wijhe in Overijssel, near Olst. Having a name like that is like asking for problems once you start emigrating to America. If you weren’t Dutch, you could hardly pronounce Wijhe, much less spell it. It eventually became Van Whye.
They settled between Albany and New York, they earned their keep by baking clay marbles, in Dutch: knikkers, and selling them. This became the surname by which they became known: Knickerbacker, soon spelled Knickerbocker, eventually a collective name for all Dutch people in New York. The New York Knicks are named after them.
Question, then: What do they and Winnie de Pooh have to do with a bear that ate a dog?
Answer: lots.
WINNIE the Pooh was originally a toy teddy bear, owned by A. A. Milne’s son Chris, one that in turn was based on a real bear. It wasn’t brown, but black, and it lived on the Louisiana and Mississippi border. The states were fighting about how to draw that border. The president came down from White House to arbitrate. The parties took him out to hunt. They caught a big black bear for him, but not until after it had mauled one of their hunting dogs. They clubbed the bear half to pulp and then offered President Roosevelt to kill it off.
Roosevelt refused. Shooting a half-dead bear, held by a rope, had nothing to do with hunting, he said. He asked the gentlemen to euthanize their bear themselves, turned, and walked away.
A reporter from the Washington Post was there. He knew how to draw. He made a cartoon of the scene, changed the bear into a cub, left out the slaughter part, and soon enough the image went viral, reprinted from coast to coast. It became known as Teddy’s bear, the bear saved by President Theodore Roosevelt from Oud Vossemeer and Haarlem.
HE HATED his own nickname Teddy, but his older sister had called him Teedy since he was a child, so he let it go. The Teddy bear, forever a brown cubby and not the big black beast that had fiercely resisted its hunters. It became a lesson from parents to their children: be kind to animals, because the president is, too. They gave their kids fluffy toy bears to play with.
The Knickerbocker family from Olst and Wijhe owned a toy factory by that time, one that still exists. They made the prettiest teddy bears in the country. They were sold worldwide, and Milne’s son in England got one too. That became Winnie.
Winnie the Pooh is still popular. But so is the teddy bear. Each year, 1.5 billion dollars is spent on teddy bear sales. Teddy’s bear is the longest-running most popular toy.
