Please meet Huckleberry, a OOAK Artist Teddy bear by Dee Thorpe

Please meet Hucklebeary, a OOAK Artist Teddy bear by Dee Thorpe.  I believe she was created in the late 1980s.  She has all her original hang tags, and her mohair is a lovely hand-dyed bright raspberry color.  She's an impressive 18 inches tall and weighs well over one pound.  She was in a lot of other bears I purchased on ebay, and she's always stood out.

Hucklebeary was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana on the banks of the Mississippi River.  She loved the water and at every opportunity launched herself from the dock onto her big inner tube and whiled away the afternoon, soaking up the sunshine with her little toes dipped in the water.  Hucklebeary on occasion took other Teddy friends out on her little jon boat and would pretend she was a river captain, pointing out the muskrats and beavers that lived along the shore.  She took care to avoid the  Louisiana black bears who lived in the Atchafalaya Basin though.   They were a much different breed of bear than a Teddy bear.    

Of course, everyone knew that Hucklebeary was the youngest bear cub in a very large extended family.   She had 127 cousins, and more aunts and uncles than she could count on her little bear claws.   It was fun being the youngest, but sometimes she would get lost in the crowd.   She was easy to miss in a sea of Teddy bears at the family picnic every summer.  She put on a very tall hat one year, but no one really noticed.   She learned how to walk on stilts, but on the way to the table laden with fresh-baked goodies, she tripped and ended up face-down in a mud puddle.   One time she wore outlandish clothes, but frankly, so did a lot of her other cousins.   She even tried running around buck naked, but she just ended up blending in with all the other bare Teddy bears.  

Then one day, on a very hot evening the night before yet another family reunion, Hucklebeary was filling her picnic basket with her contributions for the food table.  There was crisp polenta with roasted cherry tomatoes, cranberry, ginger and apple chutney, and roasted red pepper involtini and brioche French toast with a fresh berry compote.  She even had strawberry-almond smoothies to share.   But she was most excited about her Linzer cookies.  She had spent the previous weekend making her own raspberry jam which she then sandwiched between two pieces of shortbread.   She proudly placed these on the very top of her basket.   And then she felt something sticky on her paws.   Oh, no!!  The jam was all over her!  The heat had turned the filling into liquid!!  She ran right over to the sink to wash, but the water spread the stains right up to her elbows!  Then she noticed the crimson spots on her tummy.  She glanced in the mirror, and to her horror, she had two bright red spots above her left eye.   Hucklebeary didn't know what to do.  She thought and thought, and then in the middle of the night, when all Teddy bears get their best ideas, she came to a decision.   She would just have to be herself now -- a very red Teddy bear.  Because that's exactly what she was.  

There's still a huge Teddy bear picnic in  New Orleans every year.   The local newspaper, The Teddy Bear Gazette, publishes photographs of the event in the Bears About Town section.   There you'll find a group picture of well over 200 brown bears, and one very red bear who is never lost in the crowd.