The Washington Post’s cartoonist gave the teddy bear its start in 1902.
Seventy years before Watergate, Clifford Berryman’s cartoon of November 16, 1902, showed Theodore Roosevelt refusing to shoot a bear tied to a tree on a Mississippi hunt. Morris Michtom, a Brooklyn candy-shop owner, saw it and made a stuffed toy he called Teddy’s Bear. It sold so well that he founded the Ideal Toy Company.
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