“Teddies to the Rescue” is available now through my web site: theclickercenter.com and through Amazon and other booksellers. To learn more about the real story behind “Teddies to the Rescue” read on:

“Teddies to the Rescue” is the first book in the Kenyon Bear series. It was originally a Christmas present for my mother.

I listen to so many interviews in which people talk about their terrible childhoods and their alcoholic, abusive parents. I’m almost embarrassed to say that I had lovely parents. I “chose” them well.

One of the great lessons I learned from both of my parents was you create your own reality. When I was twelve, my mother decided it was time to stop being a stay-at-home mom. College tuitions were looming in the future, and it was time to augment the family budget. Instead of looking around for a “normal” job, my mother created her own job. She decided to make use of her lifelong passion for collecting.

Collectors collect. If my mother were stranded on a desert island, she would have collected shells and interesting pebbles. Since she had more scope than a desert island provides, her collections were much more wide-ranging. There were times when the house resembled a museum more than a place people actually lived.

My mother liked to collect. It was the hunt that appealed to her. She wasn’t a hoarder. She didn’t need to keep everything she found. She was perfectly happy creating a collection, enjoying it for a time, and then selling it on. So the “job” she decided on was opening a herb shop. The shop gave her the perfect excuse to go hunting and the herb shop gave her the perfect setting.

A herb shop is its own self. It is whatever you want it to be. My mother brought all of her interests together to create a shop that was a unique and enchanting experience. It was part antique shop, part specialized garden center, part art gallery, part food boutique, part book store, and most importantly part toy shop. If you wanted something special, something you weren’t going to find in other stores or gift catalogs, you went to The Shuttle Hill Herb Shop.

One Saturday when I was in the shop, an older lady came in and asked us if we would be interested in carrying pears. Pears? That seemed very odd. We weren’t sure what she meant. It was a busy morning. We didn’t really have time to talk to her. My mother excused herself to go help another customer and this lady left the shop. She returned a short time later with a box filled with handmade teddy bears.
Not pears. Bears.

They were enchanting. They were beautifully made. Yes. We would be delighted to sell her bears in the shop.

That was the beginning of a wonderful relationship with Jane Kenyon, the maker of the shop’s bears. We put them up in the front window where everyone going past could see them. It wasn’t long before the bears started to have adventures.

Mrs Kenyon made an extra large bear for the shop. Of course, he was called Kenyon in her honor. In “Teddies to the Rescue” I write:

“Kenyon is the shop’s bear.  He lives in the window all year round. 
At Christmas he dresses up as Santa Bear and hands out gifts to all the other bears.”

  “At Easter he puts on long rabbit ears and pretends he’s the Easter Bunny.”

“In between times he dresses to suit the season, and the other bears join him.  They’re so funny.  In the summer they go swimming with inner tubes and flippers. 

At Halloween they dress up in scary ghost costumes and go Trick or Treating.”

All of that was true.

The bears had many adventures in the window. One of our customers lent us some of his antique toys for the bears. He brought us a metal horse and a big green car. In the winter I let Kenyon have my snow shoes and the bears went camping. In the summer they relaxed in hammocks and beach chairs.

People stopped in just to see the bears. Every Saturday Mrs Kenyon would bring us another box filled with the most beautiful, enchanting, and magical bears. The bears found loving homes, all except for one amber colored bear who was returned to us in the most horrible condition.

He was missing an ear and his stuffing was falling out of large holes in what had once been his beautiful mohair fur.

We sent him back to Mrs Kenyon for repairs. She patched him up as best she could. She made him a sailor suit to cover up the worst of the repairs.

That bear’s name is Amber and he still lives in my house. It is his story that I share in “Teddies to the Rescue”.

Jane Kenyon’s son was a talented artist. In the fall of 1985 I suggested to him that we create a children’s book together to give as a Christmas present to our mothers. I would write the story, and he could illustrate it.

Mark and I pulled out our favorite children’s books to compare what we liked for illustrations. We went against the trend of the day which was strongly influenced by Disney movies. We chose instead black and white, pen and ink illustrations.

The result was “Teddies to the Rescue” which we gave to both our mothers that Christmas.

Of course, they loved the book. That goes without saying. Mothers are biased. They would have loved it no matter what it was like. You can’t go by their opinion. I was biased as well, but that’s okay. I loved what we had created. Mark’s illustrations captured the magic of all my favorite children’s books.

We decided to take the next step and publish the book. I had heard about the difficulties of getting books published, especially books that didn’t fit the accepted norms. We had created a chapter book for young readers. (This was long before the Harry Potter books made it okay again for children’s books to have chapters.) And we had pen and ink drawings instead of the Disney-influenced illustrations that were the norm.

We made the decision to publish the book ourselves. Now remember this was 1986. We are essentially talking the pre-digital age. We were able to use the typesetting equipment at the State University, but the typesetting was done blind. On my very primitive version of a home computer, I would guess at the formatting I wanted, send it the computer at the State University and several days later, I would get back a scroll of typesetting paper.

As I unrolled it, I always felt as though I was back in the days of the ancient Romans.

The text on the scroll had to be cut and pasted onto story boards. A story board is exactly what it sounds like, a stiff piece of cardboard on which a pair of facing pages are laid out.

The scroll of paper was cut up and the appropriate text along with any illustrations were glued to the story board. On quite a few of the pages we wanted the text to wrap around the illustrations. If the indents weren’t quite right, I would guess at the corrections. I could see the coding on the computer screen, but not how the page would actually look.

I would send in the corrections, and a few days later I would get another scroll of typesetting. It was a laborious process because almost right wasn’t good enough. We went through approximation after approximation until both Mark and I were satisfied with the result.

A stack of story boards was finally sent off to the printer. A few weeks later the blues arrived. That’s a photocopy printed from the final plates. The blues are your last chance to spot any typos and make any needed corrections before the book goes to press. Changes are expensive at this point so you have to hope you haven’t made any major errors.

With that last hurdle cleared, the books were printed. We were ambitious. We ordered a print run of 5,000 books. That would have been a respectable printing even for the major presses. It was very ambitious for an unknown author with a self published book.

The books arrived in time for Christmas 1986.

By that time Mark and I were already at work on a second book: “Edgrr The Bear Who Wanted to be Real”. We published that story the following Christmas and the following year we published the third book in the Kenyon Bear series, “Sara’s Story – The Bear Nobody Wanted”. Mark had to bow out of illustrating this third story. His non-artist work life was taking too much of his time to work on a third book, so Sara’s Story was illustrated by another good friend, Jane Isabella. Jane was a professional artist who worked for us from time to time in the shop. Jane brought her own style and sense of whimsy to the pen and ink drawings.

Sara was published just in time for Christmas 1988. By that time we had sold out of Teddies to the Rescue and we were running low on Edgrr. But we didn’t do another print run of either book because my mother had finally decided that after almost 20 years of running the shop she was ready to retire. 1989 was the last full year in the shop. When we closed in January 1990, we had sold out of all three books. That was quite an achievement.

Kenyon, Edgrr, Sara and all the other bears who had been featured in the books went home to live with me. I still have them all. They live in a room very much like that described in the book, an upstairs bedroom that is overseen by the very elderly, and much loved teddy bear my mother had as a child.

I wrote two more Kenyon Bear stories, but I was busy with horses. I never had those stories illustrated, and for many years they lay forgotten in a pile of other papers.

When the tree fell on my house in 2020, the story of the Upstairs Armadillo wasn’t the only manuscript that I found. I unearthed the unpublished Kenyon Bear books plus several other stories I had written.

Covid had shut down all travel. I had time to read. Time to dream. Time to write.

“No book is really worth reading at the age of 10 which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” C.S. Lewis

“Modern Horse Training” was the priority. That book evolved out of the on-line clinics that I developed to take the place of the in-person clinics that the virus shut down. Now that it is successfully launched, I can turn my attention back to the children’s books.

So finally, after all these days of teasing you with information about my newest publishing venture, let me tell you how you can get “Teddies to the Rescue”:

You can order “the new book”Teddies To The Rescue” through my web site:
theclickercenter.com and through Amazon.

Please note: At the moment (meaning August 25, 2023), both the paperback and hard cover editions are available through my web site. Only the hardcover is currently listed on Amazon. The paperback edition should be available on Amazon within the next day or two. The original edition is still listed on Amazon even though it has been out of print for years. You will want to order the new edition.

If you are ordering from outside the United States, I recommend using Amazon to avoid the international shipping charges.

And do please leave a five star review on Amazon. That will help others find the book.