The Real Smokey Bear Has A New Biography

The first Smokey Bear poster shows a brown-coated bear wearing jeans. He's peering shyly up from under a campaign hat as he pours a bucket of water over a campfire."SMOKEY SAYS," the poster reads, "Care will prevent 9 out of 10 forest fires!" Albert Staehle, the illustrator, might have chosen a bear (over the suggested raccoon) because he wanted Smokey to look like the father of the forest, as his wife later recalled. But many will forever associate the cartoon with a real bear cub, whose paws and belly were singed in a 1950 spring wildfire. In a new biography—"Smokey Bear: The Cub Who Left His Pawprints on History"—the "real" Smokey is getting a proper tribute, reports the Sun-Sentinel. The book's author, Karen Signell, first met Smokey when he was a cub, living at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. The cub had been rescued by a game warden, Ray Bell, fighting a fire in New Mexico’s Capitan mountains. Don Bell was 15 when his father came home with the five-pound bear. more