There’s a sweet picture of Duane Brown at the age of two or three, holding onto a little stuffed panda by both its ears. Looking at it made me wonder who else, when we were very small, had a treasured blankie, teddy bear or other “stuffie” as Susan Bergin calls them. Or maybe just a convenient thumb when a little comfort was called for. So I posed the question to the Class of ’65 Facebook group.
It turns out that there was quite a menagerie out there. Duane wasn’t the only one with a panda. Cindy Robbins Elder had one, too, and both were named…..wait for it…..Pandy. There was a kangaroo (Barbara DeHart Eadie), a skunk named Stinky (Laurie McFall Leinbach), two dogs (Kathy Kress Sudweeks’ Nicki and Dave Richardson’s, which was rubber but still comfortingly squeezy), as well as a small elephant. Some beloved bears, of course: Barbara Kendall Souza’s Bobo, and Diane Ellis Racano’s big Brown Bear. And there was an unfortunate pint-sized bear that lost its tail when Monique Scanio Doherty’s brothers got carried away teasing their little sister.
Monique also had a blanket, but it got tossed out a porthole into the English Channel—those brothers again! And Frank Hughes had an absolute classic: a clean diaper.
Baby dolls got a couple of mentions (Shaya Gardner-Hayam, Sara Stubbins) and if there was one theme that ran throughout the stories of dolls, bears, and other snugglies, it was that they got loved to death. But a few survived, stored away for years and years by sentimental mothers, notably Stinky now in Laurie Leinbach’s Hope chest and Brown Bear at home in a child-sized wicker chair in Diane Racano’s bedroom.
Thumbs, ever-present and ever-reassuring, were the go-to for Mary Martin Covell, Joe Steinbock, and Cherie Olsen Major, as well as Cindy Elder and Laurie Leinbach, whose stuffies alone apparently weren’t enough. Some of us, including Sharon Ralph Gingras, even added hair twirling to the thumb routine. And if there was ever a time when a thumb sounded inviting, this might be it.
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