Rusty Saber: Ex-presidents' antics, namesakes among recent news

This topic selection business isn't as easy as one might think.

Out there on the potential topic horizon is this tidbit: For-mer President Bill Clinton is scheduled to play his saxophone at the famed Apollo Theatre in Harlem. To further entice you to make your airline reservations for New York, Michael Jackson will appear on the same stage, doing whatever it is that he does.

Granted, Jackson is, for reasons I shall never understand, a major star, but Mr. Clinton actually playing his sax on the stage where the major jazz and blues musicians of our times have performed defies reason. In fact, this is about all I can say about it. No column topic here.

This is being written in the aftermath of the Academy Awards; perhaps it might do for a topic. Truth be told, I watched only pieces of it on television; it was so long that for all I know, it may still be going on. It's OK to watch the awards ... if you like to see a bunch of self-centered multimillionaires telling the world how wonderful they are.

For reasons known only to the movie crowd, they work hard to impress us hicks in the audience by wearing outlandish costumes, any one of which costs enough to feed a family of four until the middle of the century. The men's tuxedos create new definitions of "formal wear"; the women's gowns look like something out of "The Night of the Living Dead." One item of note: Denzel Washington won the Best Actor award, the one he deserved last year for "Hur-ricane." That award instead went to Russell Crowe for "Gladiator." This year, Crowe should have won for "A Beautiful Mind," but Washing-ton won for something called "Training Day."

Hmm, statistically they should be satisfied.

Having nothing else to say about the Academy Awards, good, bad or otherwise, I have opted to write about an event of which you may not be aware.

This is the centennial year of the Teddy Bear. That's right, the first Teddy Bear reportedly came on the market in 1902. I would like to boast of having done extensive research on the subject; however, I cannot tell a lie, my information comes from the book "A Tale of Two Teddies: The First Teddy Bears Tell Their True Stories," by Kathleen Bart, author and illustrator (Portfolio Press).

As the name implies, two different bears can lay claim to being the original, with no conclusive proof as to which was first. Everyone agrees that a stuffed critter was named for President Theodore Roosevelt, whose childhood nickname was Teddy. Apparently, Roosevelt hated the nickname; believing it wasn't a proper adult name. (I love this sort of thing. No doubt about it, if I had my life to live over, I would live it as an historian.)

One of the stuffed bears purported to be the original Teddy was made in 1902 in Brooklyn, N.Y., by a candy store owner named Morris Michtom. He claims the idea came to him after seeing a story about Pres-ident Roosevelt's refusal to shoot a bear during a hunting trip. Michtom then created a stuffed bear to sell in his candy store, which he named Teddy in honor of the president.

Mr. Michtom claimed to have a written note from Roosevelt granting him permission to use the name Teddy; however he lost it. Apparently, a propensity to send personal notes with no copies has often frustrated Roosevelt historians. The note could have been for real. By 1904 the Teddy Bear had be-come a symbol of Roosevelt's re-election campaign. Michtom closed the candy store to establish the Ideal Toy and Novelty Co. and manufactured Teddy bears full time.

The other bear was supposed to have come from Giengen, Germany, toy maker Margarete Steiff, who was inspired by her nephew's drawings of bears at the Stuttgart Zoo to design a stuffed bear toy. The Margarete Steiff Toy Co. (still in existence today, with North American headquarters in Raynham, Mass.) introduced the bear at the 1903 Leipzig Toy Fair.

An American buyer ordered 3,000 of the bears; the name Teddy was apparently added when they landed on American shores. If the Steiff bear was the original, it stands to reason that the 100th birthday won't be celebrated until next year.

We may never know which Teddy deserves a birthday cake aflame with 100 candles; but the mystery lends a certain in-trigue to the saga.

Happy birthday, Teddy Bear, whoever you are.

(Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury Un-iversity.)