The Quest for the Telephone Teddy Bear (Part 1 of 2)

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The imagination & creativity of kids today is so fascinating. The constant querying of anything & everything, followed by "but why" and another "but why". Receiving word recently that my nephew  was the winner of the all Ireland Community Games Art competition got me thinking. 

Like many kids, I liked teddy bears. But there was one teddy bear in all the world I would have loved to have got.... the Telephone Teddy featured on the unforgettable complimentary Callcard in 1990. It was time to make up for lost time so we set out on the quest for the Telephone Teddy Bear.

I set about searching to see if I could find one of the Telephone Bears. I Made a few phone calls & sent a few emails to Eircom but no one could tell me where I could find it or who created it. We knew at at stage that we were going to have a difficult time finding out anything about the Telephone Teddy Bear. This wasn't going to be as straight forward as we have initially thought. So we decided at callcards.ie ..."why don't we just make our own?!"

So I started a forum topic post here at teddybearsforum.com. We got a few replies back that it looked like a "Petsy" bear (whatever that was). It has similarities but it just didn't look like the exact one. I then contacted a lovely lady called Glenys at http://www.tedseclecticlot.com (based in Trim, Co. Meath). She confirmed it was a Petsy from German teddy manufacturer Steiff... only problem now was which one, out of the many many variations of Petsy's produced, was the right one.

Looking through the Steiff catalog and various other websites, I was having no joy. I was beginning to think I wouldn't find it until a random eBay search led me closer. It was the exact bear (minus the telephone buttons of course).

We now knew it was a Steiff Petsy Teddy Bear (Model 0233/28) produced from 1984 - 1990. Now we needed to identify the Telephone buttons for the Teddy Bear's chest.. Lucky for me, my parents once owned this Telephone, I knew exactly what it looked like. The only problem was I had no idea of the manufacturer or model (even though I knew we had this telephone at home when I was growing up). I presumed that the phone would have been available in the UK as well as Ireland, so I searched britishtelephones.com excellent website and found that the telephone was a Viscount telephone. After a bit of searching I eventually found the exact model.

Now all that's left it to source the Teddy Bear and phone.... and let the transformation begin! Stay tuned for when we create the bear in a future blog... (See Part 2 Here)