The Teddy Bear

In 1902 US President Teddy Roosevelt went bear hunting in Mississippi, which was an extremely Teddy Roosevelt thing to do. Morris and Rose Meechtum, Russian immigrants living in Brooklyn, created a stuffed version of the cartoon cub they called Teddy's Bear. The standard contemporary teddy bear looks approximately like the 1902 ones did. They're soft and squeezable. When I was a kid, a talking teddy bear named Teddy Ruxpin became very popular, but what I loved about teddy bears as a child was their silence. One of my only vivid childhood memories is of my 10th birthday, cuddling with a teddy bear and thinking that it didn't really work anymore.