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Speak Up

The long, hot car trip of summers past is no longer a vacation highlight, the victim of rising gas prices and modern day sophistication.

Nobody today would even consider driving 900 miles to visit grandma in an un-air-conditioned Chevy. Kids all crammed in the back seat. Who got the window? And for how long. The perfect chance to poke and torment your brothers and sisters, to make them wail, "Mommmm! Billy won't leave me alone."

And your sainted mother leaning over from the front seat, saying, "Let's sing a song."

The Bear Went Over the Mountain, a repetitive, nonsense ditty, was a backseat favourite.

It's not surprising that a song about a bear should top the car trip song list. A childhood classic, teddy bears have been on everybody's hit parade ever since 1902 when U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt refused to shoot a tethered bear, Clifford Berryman drew his famous Spare the Bear cartoon for the Washington Post, and Morris Michtom a Brooklyn shopkeeper made and displayed in his window next to the cartoon, a soft bear toy he called Teddy's Bear.

Today nearly every child, and a great many grownups if the truth be told, has or has had a bear, to love, to hug, to clutch in times of distress.

There's the world famous Pooh (more correctly, "Winnie the "¦" of Christopher Robin fame, the Disney films, et al). There's Paddington Bear, the travelling bear from Peru, who arrives one day tagged with a mailing label that says, "Please take care of this bear."

Your library, by the way, has all the Pooh and Paddington books.

Kids can check out books galore with bear protagonists from the library. We have over 1,780 "bear" entries, fiction and non-fiction, for kids, in our catalogue. Aside from Pooh and Paddington, there's Polar, the Titanic Bear; Rupert, England's favourite bear; Little Bear, the hero of the Else Holmelung Minarik series, illustrated by the fabulous Maurice Sendak; and many more, not least of which is the story that's been there from the very start, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Books about bears have been getting a rigorous workout this summer, flying off the shelves as a new cohort of young readers meet some enduring bear favourites.

Adults can get in the act too by reading a very grown up bear story by the very funny William Kotzwinkle, author of E.T. The Extraterrestrial and co-author with Glenn Murray of the Walter the Farting Dog series. It's called, coincidentally The Bear Went Over the Mountain, and is about Hal Jam, a big black bear who finds fame and fortune when the manuscript he finds under a tree in the Maine woods, becomes a bestseller.

Bears in songs? Two come right to mind.

One, Elvis Presley's chart topping hit, Let Me be Your Teddy Bear, which was No. 1 for seven weeks in 1957. It's included in the CD, Elvis, a Canadian Tribute, which we have here at the library.

And two, The Teddy Bears' Picnic by John Bratton and Jimmy Kennedy. It's lilting tune and darling words have made it a long time favourite with youngsters and with adults who remember the song fondly, to wit the long-running Teddy Bears' Picnic (22 years now) in Winnipeg. This is an annual event planned so families and bears can go for a "fun day in the park, all the while getting important, positive messages about health and safety."

Leslie Cockburn is the young adult and adult services co-ordinator at the Fredericton Public Library, the resource library for the York-Sunbury region. Her column appears on the Book Page every Saturday. She can be reached at leslie.cockburn@gnb.ca.