Trip to Loveland, Denver Temple Visit and Theodore Roosevelt and the Teddy Bear-The Colorado Hotel in Glenwood Springs

Paul and I just returned from a long weekend in Loveland. This last week was my spring break from school and we left on Thursday and came home on Sunday. We drove to Colorado by way of I-80—miles and miles of barren land. We left at about 3:00 p.m. and once we got out on the road, Paul began to feel the food poisoning effects of a shrimp salad he had eaten for lunch. By the time we got to Laramie, he could go no further and we got a hotel room where he spent the night in various degrees of digestive distress. We arrived on Friday morning and Paul did begin to feel a little better as we spent time there, but was still pretty queasy most of the time we were there. I had wanted to try and do a session in the Denver Temple, but Paul didn't feel up to the drive, the session and the drive home—I looked up to find that the Denver Temple very conveniently had sessions every half hour on Saturday, and so I determined to leave at 6:30 am and try to make an early morning session. My googlemaps directions told me that I could make it in 1 hour and 17 minutes. It actually took 1 hour and 20 minutes. I arrived without incident and without any serious traffic issues and was at the recommend desk at 7:55. The temple worker told me that I was too late to make the 8:00 session, but gave me a tile for the 8:30 session. I headed to the locker room, got changed, got a new name and went to the chapel. It was about 8:02 and the 8:00 session was just leaving the chapel, so I was able to make the 8:00 session after all. I finished, headed home and arrived back in Loveland at 11:30 a.m. I was very pleased that everything had gone so smoothly. Paul’s mother doesn't effuse over the Denver Temple and says the traffic to go there is terrible, but I found the temple to be very beautiful, and this weekend the grounds were fabulous with a profusion of tulips in every bed. I found my experience there positive in every way. When I got back to Loveland, Richard had arrived and he and Paul had a nice visit, we all had lunch together, and we got a full report on the comings and goings of all of Richard’s family. A lot going on with nine children. Not having very happy memories of the trip across Wyoming to come to Loveland, we decided to travel home by I-70 which is an hour longer, but better scenery. This was the first time that I have traveled on this road and it was very picturesque compared to I-80. It was interesting to drive through Breckenridge and Vail and compare them to Park City. We were surprised by how many hotels were right along the freeway rather than the ski-in/ski-out hotels which are so popular in Park City—like the Marriot where Holly has stayed or Westgate where we stay. They were pretty areas though and there was still skiing going on. The lifts were running and we could see skiers on the slopes. Colorado seems to have gotten more snow than Utah from what we could see. We also stopped at Glenwood Springs. We have talked off and on over the past few years about taking a get-away in Glenwood Springs and we wanted to stop for a few minutes and take a look at what there was to see and what it offered. We went into the Colorado Hotel—which Paul’s mother had told us about and where they have that delightful gift shop full of stuffed bears. (She has a bear in their Loveland home which they purchased there.) There is a display case with a teddy bear tea party in progress, which was very cute and tasteful—and a placard of the story about the origin of the “teddy bear”. This is that story which was on a placard in the display case and also in the hotel brochure: PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT In 1905, Hotel Colorado became the temporary home for the President of the United States and his assistants during a three-week bear hunting expedition. Already a fan of the state of Colorado, Roosevelt stayed at the Hotel Colorado on multiple occasions. On a three-week trip in January 1901, the Vice-President hunted mountain lion on the Keystone Ranch near Meeker. It was reported by his guide that Colonel Roosevelt hung over a cliff to shoot a wounded lion between the eyes. Roosevelt’s first trip to Glenwood Springs delighted him so much that he returned year after year. According to legend, the world's most irresistible toy, the teddy bear, received its birth at Hotel Colorado. To cheer Theodore Roosevelt after an unsuccessful day of hunting, Hotel Colorado maids presented him with a stuffed bear pieced together with scraps of fine material. Later, when he did bag a bear, his daughter Alice admired it saying, "I will call it Teddy." The term caught on and became the name for the world's most popular toy, the Teddy Bear. I was interested in this version of the story because I had just read a long and very comprehensive history of Theodore Roosevelt and his successor William Howard Taft and that was not the version that was covered in this very thorough study of his life. So I thought that I would do a little research and see if I could find any other references to the Colorado Hotel and the hotel maids that made him a “teddy bear.” First I searched on the internet and found this history of the Teddy bear. History: A 1902 political cartoon in The Washington Post spawned the Teddy bear name. The name Teddy Bear comes from former United States President Theodore Roosevelt, who was commonly known as "Teddy" (though he loathed being referred to as such). The name originated from an incident on a bear hunting trip in Mississippi in November 1902, to which Roosevelt was invited by Mississippi Governor Andrew H. Longino. There were several other hunters competing, and most of them had already killed an animal. A suite of Roosevelt's attendants, led by Holt Collier, cornered, clubbed, and tied an American Black Bear to a willow tree after a long exhausting chase with hounds. They called Roosevelt to the site and suggested that he should shoot it. He refused to shoot the bear himself, deeming this unsportsmanlike, but instructed that the bear be killed to put it out of its misery, and it became the topic of a political cartoon by Clifford Berryman in The Washington Post on November 16, 1902. While the initial cartoon of an adult black bear lassoed by a handler and a disgusted Roosevelt had symbolic overtones, later issues of that and other Berryman cartoons made the bear smaller and cuter. Morris Michtom saw the drawing of Roosevelt and was inspired to create a new toy. He created a little stuffed bear cub and put it in his shop window with a sign that read "Teddy's bear," after sending a bear to Roosevelt and receiving permission to use his name. The toys were an immediate success and Michtom founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Co. At the same time in Germany, the Steiff firm, unaware of Michtom's bear, produced a stuffed bear from Richard Steiff's designs. Steiff exhibited the toy at the Leipzig Toy Fair in March 1903, where it was seen by Hermann Berg, a buyer for George Borgfeldt & Company in New York. He ordered 3000 to be sent to the United States. Although Steiff's records show that the bears were produced, they are not recorded as arriving in the U.S., and no example of the type, "55 PB", has ever been seen, leading to the story that the bears were shipwrecked. However, the story is disputed - Gunther Pfieffer notes that it was only recorded in 1953 and says it is more likely that the 55 PB was not sufficiently durable to survive until the present day. Although Steiff and Michtom were both making teddy bears at around the same time, neither would have known of the other's creation due to poor transatlantic communication. By 1906 manufacturers other than Michtom and Steiff had joined in and the craze for "Roosevelt Bears" was such that ladies carried them everywhere, children were photographed with them, and Roosevelt used one as a mascot in his bid for re-election. North American educator Seymour Eaton wrote the children's book series The Roosevelt Bears, while composer John Walter Bratton wrote an instrumental "The Teddy Bears' Picnic", a "characteristic two-step", in 1907, which later had words written to it by lyricist Jimmy Kennedy in 1932. Early teddy bears were made to look like real bears, with extended snouts and beady eyes. Modern teddy bears tend to have larger eyes and foreheads and smaller noses, baby-like features that enhance the toy's cuteness. Early teddy bears were covered in tawny mohair fur. So that is the version that is the explanation on the internet when I searched for the origin of the Teddy Bear. This is also the version, more or less that is found in The Bully Pulpit, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. Doris Kearns Goodwin. Chapter 10 “That Damned Cowboy is President” page 320. Here is the quote in that book about the coming of the “Teddy Bear.” With each passing month, the president’s hold on the American people grew stronger. “It is very curious,” Roosevelt told his newspaper friend Joseph Bucklin Bishop, “ever since I have been in the Presidency I have been pictured constantly as a huge creature with enormous clenched teeth, a big spiked club and a belt full of pistols—a blustering, roaring, swashbuckler type of ruffian, and yet all the time I have been growing in popularity. I don’t understand it at all.” To Bishop, the reason was perfectly clear: “All the cartoonists at heart liked him, and there was seldom or never anything bitter or really unfriendly in their portrayals of him; they were uniformly good natured.” Caricatures even transformed his failure during a mid-November bear hunt into a triumph, conjuring an image of the president steadfastly refusing to shoot a small bear furnished for the occasion. As renditions of the original Clifford Berryman cartoon proliferated, the bear dwindled in size until he appeared as a tiny cub, prompting toy store owners to market stuffed bears in honor of Teddy Roosevelt. Soon the Teddy bear became one of the most cherished toys of all time. Except in the brochure from the Colorado Hotel, I could find no reference to the Teddy bear coming from the hunt in Colorado or the hotel maids or anything else associated with that visit. I don’t know what the real history is, the hunt in Mississippi predates his hunting trip in Colorado—so maybe the “teddy bear” was already on the radar when he visited there and the maids just continued the legacy. In this day of information and internet access, it is harder to preserve legends that are not based in fact. There are always people like me who are checking and rechecking the truth of a story—kind of like what happened to Brian Williams. But the Colorado Hotel story is a good one. Paul and I think that we would like to make a quick trip to Glenwood Springs and stay overnight in that jewel of a hotel. There is also an involved set of stories that the hotel is haunted. Even though it may be haunted, Paul and I think it would be great to spend a night in the hotel and go to the hot springs/pools during the stay. On Saturdays—a woman from the historical society comes to the hotel and gives a 40 minute tour of the building with lots of its history. (She charges $8.00 a person, but I think it would be worth it.) It would be a fun little weekend get-away. We thought we would try to do something this summer maybe. We looked into taking the train, but the train would take twice as long as driving and it would leave Salt Lake at 3:30 in the morning. That kind of takes the fun out of taking the train. But even without the train ride it would be a good time.