Famous Teddy Bear

Ode to Winnie the Pooh

On Oct. 14, 1926, "Winnie-the-Pooh" was first published, a day that is by and large considered to be Pooh's official birthday. The chubby and earnest bear was a hit from the beginning, and his status hasn't faded a bit; today A.A. Milne's books are a vital part of the children's literature canon--and thanks to Disney and Sears, Pooh and his friends are among the most recognized, most beloved children's characters in the world.

So Pooh is over 75 years old; however, the Bear of Very Little Brain has aged remarkably well, perhaps due to his steady diet of honey and affection for doing Nothing.

Today and always, let's celebrate Pooh with a crumb of history and  a smattering of trivia.

A.A. Milne, who created Winnie-the-Pooh, was a writer in England in the 1920s. He wasn't strictly a children's writer--in fact, he got his start writing for the British humor magazine "Punch."

     He thought up Pooh's adventures as he contemplated his son, Christopher Robin Milne, playing with his Teddy bear, Edward Bear, in the nursery. The bear was given to Christopher on his first birthday in 1921.

     Winnie-the-Pooh didn't leap up all at once, though--he changed and evolved. The first hint of the Pooh to come appeared in 1924, when A.A. Milne's book of children's verse, "When We Were Very Young," mentioned a Teddy bear who "however hard he tries grows tubby without exercise." Sound like someone familiar?

     On Christmas Eve the next year, London's "Evening News" published a bedtime story by Milne about a bear named Winnie-the-Pooh. This story became the first chapter of the first Pooh book, "Winnie-the-Pooh," published in 1926.

     If Christopher's Teddy bear was named Edward, where did "Winnie-the-Pooh" come from? The fictional bear was named by the real Christopher Robin back in 1925. The boy combined the names of two real animals: "Winnie" was the name of a black bear he enjoyed visiting at the London Zoo, and "Pooh" was the name he had given a swan he fed at the lake in Sussex.  "This is a very fine name for a swan," Milne said, "because if you call him and he doesn't come...then you can pretend that you were just saying 'Pooh!' to show how little you wanted him."

     "Winnie-the-Pooh" was a success from the very beginning, and Milne and his son began to gain notoriety.  Even many years later, when Christopher Robin Milne was grown and owned a bookshop, customers would bring their children into the store to shake hands with "the original Christopher Robin."

     After writing another book of children's poems, Milne published "The House at Pooh Corner" in 1928 and announced that it would be his last book about Pooh and Christopher Robin. Though he left Pooh behind, Milne didn't stop writing; in fact, he wrote more than 20 plays in his career, but he is now known as a rule for his children's poetry--and, of course, for bringing Pooh to life.

Pooh Trivia:

     • A.A. Milne didn't write the Pooh stories for children. Instead, he said they were proposed for the child within us all--which may explain why adults love Pooh just as much as children do.

     • Milne borrowed heavily from real life when he created Pooh's world. Just like Pooh himself, pals Piglet, Roo, Kanga, Eeyore and Tigger were based on Christopher Robin's stuffed animals. And the Hundred Acre Wood?- It is patterned after Ashdown Forest in England, a place not far from Milne's home.

     • Milne asked E.H. Shepard, an artist he had worked with at "Punch" magazine, to illustrate "Winnie-the-Pooh." But Shepard didn't use Christopher Robin's stuffed bear as a model; instead, he modeled Pooh after Growler, a bear that belonged to his own son, Graham.

     • Christopher Robin Milne's stuffed animals began a 10-year tour of the United States in 1947. When the tour finished, the toys ended up in the offices of E.P. Dutton and Co., the books' publisher--until 1987, when they were offered to the New York Public Library. Pooh, Piglet and the others have been on display at the library ever since.

     • In 1998, a member of Britain's Parliament saw the toys on a trip to New York and launched a campaign to get Pooh and his friends back on British soil.  She said "I saw them recently and they look very unhappy indeed. I am not surprised, considering they have been incarcerated in a glass case in a foreign country for all these years."  The library didn't surrender the treasured toys easily, and the two countries soon agreed that Pooh and his pals should remain in New York.

     • Oddly enough, A.A. Milne didn't read the Pooh stories to his son. Instead, he usually elected to read to his son the works of P.G. Wodehouse, one of his own favorite authors.

     • The Pooh books have been translated into at least 25 languages--including Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Croatian, Serbian, Latvian, Icelandic and Esperanto.

     • Walt Disney Productions acquired film and merchandising rights in 1964, and the short film "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree" was released in 1966. Two more short films were released soon after, and in 1977, the three shorts were combined and released as "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh."

     •  Disney has also produced the ABC show "The New Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh," a slew of home videos and a couple of recent feature films, including "The Tigger Movie" in 2000.