My mom called last night on her way home from work with some sad news: Stan Berenstain of Bears fame passed away. “What about Jan?” I asked mournfully. Later, I downloaded the NPR clip and listened with a flashback of pages and pages of fur-filled illustrations turned in my mind. Stan and Jan Berenstain met on the first day of art school in 1941 and published more than 200 picture books about the Bear family, Mama, Papa, Sister and Brother (and, much later, Honey Bear) together.
A bookshop owner spoke about the continuing success of the early works in the series, in spite of the fact that, as consumer demand increased, the couple leaned into a pattern of stories that fit into the same mold and usually had an educational message. The shop owner reasoned that stories like The Berenstain Bears and the Truth and The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food were “less entertaining and more of a lesson.”
But Stan and Jan were a pair of artists who based their series on bears because they are fun to draw, and the illustrations always entertained me. When All Things Considered played an audio clip from The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers, the first thing I remembered was the images of Brother and Sister’s perception of strangers: a man with a crooked cane and a snarling lip, a woman in a tattered dress with dead flowers in her hat. A few pages later, after Mama bear has gently pointed out that not all strangers lurk in shadows and hand out poisoned apples, the cubs envision the same characters. This time, the man winks, the flowers in the old woman’s hat have perked up.
In pre-school, I thumbed through those books again and again to follow the pictures, memorizing the story until I thought I could read just because I knew the books so well that I always knew what happened on the next page. I even went through a phase when I called my parents Mama and Papa. Only, my dad never wore a ten gallon hat like Papa Q. Bear.
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