99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-40- Billy Possum

Episode Date: November 23, 2011

It’s totally unfair. Hydrox cookies came out four years before the introduction of Oreos, but Hydrox could never shake the image that it was a cheap knock-off, an also-ran. As a consumer product, it’s completely out of your hands if … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It's totally unfair. Hydrox cookies came out in 1908.

Oreos didn't show up until four years later, but it didn't matter. Hydrox could never shake the image of being a knockoff and also ran. Hydrox lovers would champion its 10-year cream filling, but detergents would praise them for being cruelty-free while America's favorite cookie the Oreo contained animal art into the mid-90s. As a consumer product, it's just not up to you. Sometimes you're deemed the mighty transformer. And sometimes you're at the loathsome go bot. One shall stand and one shall fall.

It's capricious who wins. Swiss cake roll versus ho-ho. Swissler versus Redvine. Maybe yours was the first family on the block with the technologically superior beta max player, Swiss cake roll versus Hoho, Twizzler versus Redvine. Maybe yours was the first family on the block with the technologically superior beta max player, only to be overwhelmed by the mediocre VHS tape. Sometimes, it doesn't make any sense at all. But sometimes it does.

I'm John Moellum. John is a writer for the New York Times magazine and a writer at large for pop-up magazine live magazine in San Francisco where this story first appeared. Right, so it's 1902 and Theodore Roosevelt is president and he decides to vacation in a town called Smeads in the Mississippi woods where he can hunt black bear He's a big outdoorsman big hunter and this hunting trip became kind of a famous story Basically, he had spent a few days hunting and I don't think they even saw a single bear. They definitely didn't get to shoot at any.

And then one morning, the dogs get the scent of a bear and they follow it down into this really weedy place where the president's guide says, you know what, don't even bother going in there and troubling yourself. I'll go in and I'll flush the bear out. You just stay here and I'll flush it right to you. So Rhodesvote waits and waits, but then he gets bored and decides to go off and eat lunch. Eventually the dogs do corner the bear and the guy not really knowing what to do leaps off his horse cracks the bear over the head with the butt of his rifle, knocks it unconscious or send me unconscious and ties it to a tree

and then starts blowing away on his bugle trying to call Roosevelt back so that the president can be the one who lies the owner of shooting it. Roosevelt hears the bugle trying to call Roosevelt back so that the president can be the one right the honor of shooting it. Roosevelt hears the bugle and makes his way back to the hunting party. And what he finds is this bearer. It's a female bearer. It weighs about 235 pounds. And it's tied to a tree. It's still semi-conscious.

It's injured. It looks a little mangy. It's actually probably about half as heavy and big as it should be, but there's been a real drought going on in the area. The bear looks pathetic and Roosevelt takes pity on it. He decides that it's unsportsman-like to shoot this thing. You know, he's not gonna do it, and he doesn't want anyone else to do it either. So he lowers his gun, and in this sort of merciful moment is, you know, word of this spreads and a political cartoonist

draws a cartoon of the moment of him, you know, word of this spreads and a political cartoonist draws a cartoon of the of the moment of him, you know, showing the bear this mercy. And the way the cartoonist draws the bear is almost like a little Labrador puppy or a golden retriever puppy. It's on its butt and its hind legs and it's got these big round perked up ears, almost like Mickey Mouse and these big wide eyes and it's staring at the president waiting to see what its fate will be. The cartoon was called Drawing the Line in Mississippi.

And from that basically spawned the teddy bear. This adorable little bear in the cartoon was turned into a three-dimensional plush toy. The very first teddy bear was either made by a German company called Steve or a Brooklyn Toist or owner that, depending on who you ask. And they name it after Theodore Roosevelt. They call it Teddy's Bear. It's a huge sensation. And it's actually more popular than Baby Dolls,

which freaks everyone out a little bit. You know, why should their children be playing with bears and not dolls? It's a little savage. And within a few years, I think Steve is producing close to a million Teddy bears a year and shipping them to the US. But it was considered so bizarre that kids would play with a stuff bear that people just assumed

it was a novelty and as soon as Roosevelt left office, no one would want them anymore. At this time, the whole idea of mass produced toys was also really new, so the toy industry wanted to kind of capitalize on its rally and keep it going. So it was really looking for whatever was going to be the next cuddly play thing that American kids were going to want, although it had no idea what that might be so fast forward in 1909 and Roosevelt's term is about up and the president elect is Roosevelt's handpicked successor William Howard taft and that January January 1909 taft is in Atlanta. He's trying to woo the south

Try to convince him that his administration is going to take them seriously as a constituency. And he's the guest of honor at this banquet. In the Chamber of Commerce in Atlanta, this night, it's going to serve him the truest, most unpretentious southern dish around. It's something that a writer of the time I found this little book about southern food from the time, calls it the Christmas goose of the Epicurean Negro. The meal was possum and taters. And what it was was, an opossum would be roasted on a bed of sweet potatoes and then presented whole on a platter with a tead on, its tail on, and often you'd get a smaller little sweet potato cram between the animal's teeth.

Fifty teeth. By the way, fifty teeth is apparently the most teeth of any North American mammal, which is fascinating. In the end, the one that they brought to Taff's table weighed 18 pounds. All of a sudden, the orchestra strikes up and the guests burst into song. Suddenly Taff is presented with a surprise gift, and it's a small, stuffed, a possum toy. And this is a brand new invention that some local Taff supporters are trying to position as William Taff's presidencies answer to the teddy bear.

They're calling it the Billy Possum. Already, there was a company set up called the Georgia Billy Possum Company. According to one account, within 24 hours of that banquet, there are already deals being brokered for Billy Possums with distributors across the country. In covering the banquet, the LA Times announced that the teddy bear has been relegated to a seat in the rear, and for four years, possibly eight, the children of the United States will play with Billy Possums.

So from then on, a bit of Possum Mania started. There were Billy Possum Postcards, Billy Possum Pins, Billy Possum Pictures for your cream when you had coffee. There was a ragtime tune called Possum, the latest craze, and as Taft traveled around the south, some people actually started giving him live oppossums and cages when he would make public appearances, sort of handing them over like they were floral bouquets. Soon Billy Possums were in toy stores from New York to San Francisco. Because real oppossums weren't actually that common in cities then and no one really knew what they were.

A toy store in Brooklyn ran an in-store promotion with a live captive apostle that they could show off to kids so the kids could familiarize themselves with what this new animal they were going to be best friends with was. I found an advertisement for the store that read, do not let it be said that any man, woman, or child in Brooklyn has not seen the cute little animal whose name is mentioned more in all parts of the world today than any other. Previously, there had been poems and newspapers sort of mourning the passing of the dolls and how sad it was that these teddy bears were coming

into nurseries and vanquishing them. And now there are poems in newspapers about Billy Possum's displacing teddy bears. But since you probably never heard of a Billy Possum, you can guess what comes next. It was a total flop and the Billy Possum was forgotten and almost entirely out of stores within a couple of months. So in other words, the Billy Possum never even made it to see Christmas time, which is a special kind of tragedy for a toy. There are several possible explanations as to why the Billy Possum never took off. The first, and probably what you're thinking right now, is this, O Possums are ugly, and nobody likes them. But it was also the dawn of the mechanical toy,

and even some teddy bears that evolved into wind up animatrons. There was a French-made teddy bear that, quote, winds up and is calculated to indulge in a number of ludicrous summer salts. How could a limp stuffed Billy Possum compete with that? But John Moilum argues that, at its heart, the acceptance of teddy bear and the rejection of Billy Possum comes down to their origin stories. In the story that was told about Roosevelt and his bear, it was a very kind of tender moment where

Roosevelt was showing the bear mercy, and when you looked at that cartoon in the way the bear was drawn, it looked like something that you would want to just sweep up into your arms and take care of and that was vulnerable and that needed your help. It looked like a teddy bear as we know it, although no one knew it at the time. The story with Taft, it didn't give it anything else. Taft ate his apostin for supper, and he ate a lot of it, and he ate so much that after his first several helping, as a doctor seated nearby apparently passed him a note, suggesting that it might be a good idea if he slowed down a little. Taft even bragged to reporters the next day about how much possum he consumed. Well, I like a possum and I ate very hardily of it last night

and it did not disturb in the slightest my digestion or my sleep. The possum was vulnerable, I guess, played out on a bed of taters, but you're not exactly rooting for it. I started feeling really bad for Taft, who, you know, the more I read a little bit about him, he was this totally colorless politician and he didn't actually even want to be president by some accounts.

He was sort of strong armed into it by Roosevelt, and he never really measured up to Roosevelt's charisma and charm. I mean, Roosevelt was the kind of guy who, you know, no matter what he did, history seemed eager to glorify him for it. Case in point. The messed up thing about the famous story of Teddy's bear on that hunting trip in Mississippi, is it isn't even the whole truth. You have to remember that Roosevelt was a hunter, he was there to hunt bears, he wasn't a

peda activist or something like this. While he did show the bear mercy, it was a very particular kind of mercy. After he refused to shoot it, he said, put it out of its misery. And then one of his hunting buddies came in and slipped the bear's neck open with a knife. They carried the bear's body back to camp over the back of a horse,

and they basically ate off it for the next several days. And on the last night of their trip, they finished it off, they roasted its paws, and I could you not, they ate the paws with a side of possumentators. So that's why you will never cuddle up with a billy possum. Just like you will never watch a beta max tape, or travel to gobitron with leader 1, and you will never again dunk a hydroxcookie. one and you will never again dunk a hydrox cookie. Manimus hydrox cookies. They were really tasty.

99% Invisible was produced this week by John Moellum and me Roman Mars based off a piece that John did at Papa Magazine number 5 in San Francisco. This program is made possible with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW, 91.7 local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. This program is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange making public radio more public, find out more at PRX.org. The new Kid in town is Sam Greenspan, the first 99% visible intern, and since he called me Boss at the end of our first meeting, it will be back next week. You can find out more about this program or just say hi at 99% Invisible. you can't believe that you can't believe that you can't believe that

you can't believe that you can't believe that you can't believe that