Pooh Bear

For Christmas of 1955, when I was three-years-old, Santa Claus brought me a teddy bear that was as almost as big as I was tall. I was amazed at my good fortune, and smiled with pride when anyone would remark: “My goodness! That bear is about as big as you are!”

But that’s all I remember about “the bear that is big as me” because it was lost when we moved from Oklahoma to Illinois that next June.

When my dad graduated from Oklahoma State’s veterinary school in 1956, he landed a job working for another veterinarian in Pontiac, Illinois. That summer, my family of five set out for new adventures.

We had one car and not much money, so my parents packed up all our belongings in the car and a small trailer. The plan was that my dad would drive the car to Illinois and my mom, my two brothers, and I would follow on the train.

Somewhere en route, my dad had a car accident on Route 66 and was thrown from the car. He was not badly hurt, but the car was wrecked. Dad took all our stuff out of the car before it was hauled off to the junkyard—or so he thought. But when I asked about my bear, it was nowhere to be found. I had placed it in the back seat of the car, and all anyone could imagine was that the impact of the accident had pushed it under the seat out of sight. I couldn’t understand how a “bear that is big as me” could be lost, but there you have it.

I wailed, I cried, I thrust out my lip in a heart-broken pout, and I refused to be consoled—until my older brother, Curt intervened.

“Here, Laura, you can have Pooh,” he said, and handed me the little golden-colored teddy bear that he had received when he was about my age. The A.A. Milne tales of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin were favorites of Curt’s in his early years, and he had aptly named his teddy for the lovable “silly old bear” in the stories.

Maybe Curt thought that a seven-year-old boy was too grown up to have a teddy bear any longer, or maybe he just wanted to coax a wailing sister into quieting down. But whatever the reason, his generosity shocked me into grateful silence.

Pooh became my treasured companion. Thereafter, I slept with Pooh bear every night, and when I occasionally would awake, trembling, with a nightmare and creep into my parents’ bed, Pooh would come along. In the morning, I often would discover that Pooh’s little black nose had fallen out from his snout, and my mother and I would search through the bed sheets and blankets until we found it. No amount of gluing ever seemed to permanently secure Pooh’s nose in place.

Today, Pooh has an honored spot on the bed in our guestroom. He has been to camps and to college; he  has lived in dorms, apartments, and houses in fourteen cities or towns in eight states. 


After more than fifty years, Pooh surely has paid witness to many things, but the sweetest would still be a big brother’s generosity.

Fact Checking Your Personal History/Memoir

Memories and facts are not the same thing, but both are important in your personal history. 


Facts can be checked and verified in some objective source, such as reference materials or people who were on the scene at the time or know about the places and events. 


Memories, on the other hand, encompass all the shades of meaning, the lens of experience, the emotional connections that color and shape a place and experiences. Your personal history can't be "true" without both facts and memory. Together, facts and memory combine detail, emotion, and meaning into a good story. 

RMS Titantic, courtesy Wikipedia

A good reporter knows this. The RMS Titantic sinks, and you can get "just the facts, ma'am":

• On her maiden voyage, the ship scrapes an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. April 14, 1912;
• Five compartments fill with water in ship built to stay afloat with water in four;
• The ship's 20 lifeboats can accommodate only 1,178 persons; more than 2,200 were on board;
• At 2:20 a.m. April 15, 1912, the Titantic sinks;
• 1,514 people are killed. 

Now that's a tragic and compelling story, but don't we want to know more? Don't we want to know who these people were, the heroes and villians, the compassionate and the self-absorbed? And even when the facts are invented (think Rose and Jack in James Cameron's 1997 movie, Titantic), the story has its own truth.

With personal histories, many facts can be verified and checked to bolster your story and to add details for the reader. The Internet, of course, is a treasure trove of information. (I found a picture of the "Jumbo" that I used in my March 12, 2012 post on the Roanoke, Illinois Web site--thank you, Cheryl Wolfe--as well as a Centennial History of the town that I purchased on E-Bay.) And Google Maps lets you zero right in on streets and buildings in places far away, refreshing your memory in a way that's almost as good as time travel. 

Too, if never hurts to check your memory with family members, friends, colleagues, or others who shared your experiences or lived in the same time and place. Their information may adjust your memory or just add to the story.

On a recent trip to see my folks in Oklahoma, my dad and mom "adjusted" my story about the night when my pals, Jim and Chuck, came calling after dark and got the wrong bedroom window (See "Night Visitors," March 20, 2012, below). 

When she was awakened to a flashlight shining into their bedroom window, Mom said her first thought was "carnies!" The carnival that was in town employed a group of rather seedy looking characters whom she thought might easily be capable of mischief, especially in semi-isolated house outside of town. 

She recollected not only screaming, but calling out, "Get the gun!" a demand meant to scare the culprits, because the only gun my dad owned was a shotgun for hunting birds, which was kept--unloaded, of course--in its case way, way back in his closet behind some heavy garment bags. But just the word "gun" surely lit a fire under Jim and Chuck as they made a hasty retreat through the cornfield. 

Although I thought my dad had figured out who the visitors were on his own, he had a slightly different memory. He told me, "When I went into town the next day, the story was already all over town. Jim and Chuck had been bragging about it. Somebody, I don't remember who, asked me about it. So when I saw Jim, I let him know that I knew what they'd been up to."

A-ha! So it wasn't Jim and Chuck's reputations that gave them away. It was just their big mouths! 

Still, I imagine they would have their very own versions of the truth.