Pirate Bears

In the spring of 1997 my wife came across a cute Teddy Bear that was done up in pirate garb, complete down to the eye patch. She bought one for me as a birthday gift and I brought it to a club meeting where all the "tough guy" pirates immediately fell in love with it! I was commanded to seek out a source for purchasing more bears for our upcoming annual "raid" on Children's Hospital with the goal of giving bears to all the sick kids we would be entertaining. A cuddly version of these fierce pirate visitors was bound to cheer up any youngster.

My research led me to the KayBee Toy Store at Southcenter, where I had the good fortune to meet the manager, Mike Parsons. It turns out that Mike is a long time Seattleite and a big fan of all the activities that the Seattle Seafair Pirates do for the community. Mike contacted his parent company and determined that the particular model of Teddy Bears we wanted were being discontinued. He was then able to secure a large quantity of the pirate bears for us at a greatly discounted price. When I informed the club, the scope of the project quickly grew and our goal became to purchase all the remaining bears in KayBee's inventory and distribute them to all the children we meet in hospitals across town!

Now the challenge became how to pay for the bears so we could proceed with the plan. Fortunately the bears were quite popular with friends and family of the pirates and we sold hundreds at a retail price that covered our costs for three new bears for each one sold. We expanded the program with the assistance of our friends at Service Clubs, like the Lake City Elks Club. When the Cayman Islands Pirates Week office heard of our program, they even got into the act and sold over 50 bears for us in Georgetown, capital city of the Cayman Islands!

As a result of this fine support we were able to clean out the entire inventory and have distributed hundreds of bears to the kids at Children's Hospital, Boyer Clinic, the Ronald McDonald House and as far a field as Madigan Hospital on McCord Air Force Base in Tacoma. We will be using up our remaining supply this summer with more raids of local hospitals during Seafair.

So is this the end of the project? We certainly hope not and are now contacting plush toy manufacturers across Asia trying to line up manufacturing at a fair price for a new version of the Pirate Teddy Bear. We are also looking for a local company to sponsor the program to allow us to carry this campaign on into the future. So if you come across a bunch of wild pirates carrying Teddy Bears - wish them luck as they head out to another raid on local hospitals!

Doug Lindal - Davy Jones XLIV


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