LOSING THE TEDDY BEAR

 

When Whitie, my dad, sold his restaurant and soda fountain in 1969, I found it hard to believe. Actually, though, it shouldn’t have surprised me. He’d grown to hate going in to work, the place where he had most succumbed to his severe and chronic manic depression. But for me, as for many of its customers, the Teddy Bear Restaurant was a mainstay in my life, and an icon in our home town of Wapakoneta. For those of us born after World War II, the Teddy Bear had “always” been there. I was naturally proud that my dad owned and operated the place.

Whitie with Teddy Bear regular "Pudgy" Hepp
at the front table.

I was out of town a lot in 1969. And it was after I’d left that Whitie sold it. I’d graduated high school in June of ’68, and wasted no time in devoting myself full-time to being a nightclub musician, a musical instrument salesman and a percussion instructor. It was a natural progression. I’d been doing all of these same things part-time (meaning any hour of the day or night that I wasn’t in school) since my sophomore year.

But I also had an itch to travel. And since I’d met and fallen in love with an exchange student who came to Wapakoneta from Buenos Aires my senior year, Argentina was the first destination I had in mind. I worked hard, played every gig, taught every student and put in every hour I could at the music store, in order to save enough for the trip and for my first quarter at Ohio State, where I planned to forego starting in the fall and to get there instead for winter quarter 1969.

Dan, aged 18, with Reba Mae at the Teddy Bear

That’s why, at the end of ’68 and the beginning of ’69, I wasn’t around when Whitie and Reba Mae, my mother, were hashing all of this out. When I came home from college in the summer of 1969, the sale of the Teddy Bear was fait accompli.

Whitie had sold it to a guy I knew, a rock band promotor named Mitch Pemberton. Like me, Mitch had started working in local entertainment when he was still a kid. He was considerably older than I was, and, by the time I was playing professionally, he had already organized some great recitals in nearby Lima, Ohio.

But Mitch had also worked in the restaurant business with a guy called Bud Warwick, who owned a local chain of pizza parlors and carry-outs called Pizza Chef. Bud had decided to start a kind of ad hoc franchise and Mitch had bought in. He thought the Teddy Bear location would make a great pizza place and had heard my father might be selling. He made an offer and Whitie—after some intense haggling, I’m sure, since both were astute horse-traders—took it. And that was how the Teddy Bear became a Pizza Chef.

Mitch hadn’t been wrong. He ran the Wapakoneta Pizza Chef for better than a decade, before selling it to another local pizzeria. That one was owned by British former pro footballer Victor Peachy. Vic and his mother had a full-scale pizza parlor called La Grande Pizza in nearby Saint Marys, but in Wapak, he only had a pizza carry-out. He was looking to expand his business and Mitch was willing to negotiate. La Grande—which, incidentally, has really great pizza—still operates out of that building today, more than forty years later.

Newland brothers, Red, Chuck and Whitie

The building in question was erected by Walter Stinebaugh, a very well-known local contractor in those days, whom my grandfather, Murel Newland, hired for the job. My grandfather wasn’t what you would call a real estate developer per se. He was a businessman and a crackerjack salesman. But over the years, he oversaw and participated in the building of a number of houses in town, including two of his own, one for his mother and a few others that he rented out and later sold.

The Teddy Bear was, I think, the first building that Murel was responsible for constructing. This was at the very end of World War II, when, with rather unaccustomed generosity, he decided that his three war veteran sons (one in the Army and the other two in the Navy) should have a business to come home to. The three—Whitie, his older brother Red and his younger brother Chuck—opened the Teddy Bear as a soda fountain and sandwich shop in 1946. Murel sold them the building on a rent-to-buy lease known back then as a “land contract”.

The Teddy Bear would some years later evolve into a mom-and-pop-type restaurant with more complete meals as well as the original fare. Basically, however, it was what is often referred to as “a hamburger joint”, but a really good one.

Uncle Bob "Red" Newland standing out front.

After Whitie sold the place, I couldn’t bring myself to go in. I had nothing against Mitch—and surely nothing against pizza and draft beer. But I couldn’t bear the thought of the Teddy Bear’s no longer being a part of our family. In fact, not even being the Teddy Bear any longer.

My little brother Dennis had no such prejudice. When he was sixteen, he actually took a job with Mitch and stayed at it for a couple of years in which time he managed to become a master pizza chef. Even twenty years later, when he was a retail executive with an Ohio-based chain of record stores called Camelot Music, if he and I got together at his place for an evening of pizza, brews and reminiscence, we didn’t have to order out, because he could still make a helluva pie.

Talking to him about those days on several occasions, he gave me the impression that he’d entertained a fantasy when he started working for the ex-Teddy Bear Pizza Chef. It was at the back of his mind that maybe he could work with Mitch, learn the trade, eventually buy in as a partner, and maybe even buy Mitch out, recovering the Teddy Bear for the family. It was a nice dream, but he realized that unless Mitch got suddenly generous beyond belief, as a pizza chef, no matter how good he was, it would probably take him a hundred years or so to save enough to buy his boss out. So when he got a chance to get into retail, he took it.

The former Teddy Bear after it changed hands.

“I often think, though,” Dennis once said, “that what would have been nice would have been for you and me to take the place over. I know Dad wanted out, but I always wished he’d have hung in a while longer so we’d have been old enough to take over when he retired.” Then he added, from his businessman’s perspective, “What killed Dad was that he never got a beer license and had to compete with all the fast-food chains that came to town with I-75. I think Teddy Bear Pizza, with two Newland brothers in charge might have been a hit.” Then looking at my somewhat dubious expression, he added, “Seriously, Bro, we’d have made a killer team.”

Maybe so, I thought, maybe so. Clearly, in hindsight, pizza has been a hit at that location for half a century. Maybe bringing back the Teddy Bear name and tradition would have been a bigger score still. Who knew? But it wasn’t to be. By the time my brother grew up, went to work for Mitch and graduated high school, I was in the Army for three years. And not long after that, I moved to South America and began my career as a journalist. The timing and destiny weren’t on our side.

Dennis was right, however, about the beer license and having to compete with chain store national ad campaigns. None of the chains could even begin to compete with the quality of the Teddy Bear’s fare. Having a beer license might well have been the ace up the Teddy Bear’s furry sleeve in competition against them.

Whitie knew this. I remember him talking about it. But I don’t think his heart was ever in it. His mother, my Grandma Alice, was a teetotaler Free Methodist, and she had imbued Whitie with an unhealthy level of guilt about drinking. He seldom did it, and whenever he did, it was never without a strong shot of morning-after guilt. So when he went to City Hall to talk to somebody about getting a beer license, he took no for an answer. Actually, not “no” at all, but an unofficial opinion that he would probably never be granted one because the restaurant was “too close to a church.”

Now, this always struck my analytical brain as a strange argument, because the Teddy Bear was a block from the nearest church, while the Elks Club, which had a beer and hard liquor license, was right across the street from that same church, and there were myriad bars on the main drag that were barely a block from several churches. So it seemed clear to me that Whitie wanted to be convinced it was impossible, perhaps because disappointing his mother was more unthinkable than going out of business. At any rate, Mitch clearly had no problem getting a license as soon as he opened his pizzeria.  

The Grand Opening after remodeling

But, as I say, seeing the Teddy Bear leave the family and the Wapakoneta landscape seemed wholly unnatural and disturbing to me. It had been bad enough for me when my Uncle Red left to work at the local People’s National Bank, where he would later serve as its vice president. And then again, just shortly afterward, when my Uncle Chuck decided to get into the life insurance business at the same Western & Southern firm from which my grandfather had retired after a stellar twenty-five-year career. Even though there were sometimes issues among the three brothers, it seemed to me that there was something so unifying about the three of them working together every day in a family business. To me, it just seemed to balance my tiny universe.

And it spilled over to their children as well. I had twelve cousins on that side. Our fathers were four brothers, each with three kids—ten boys and two girls. The youngest brother, Don, was the only one who wasn’t in the Teddy Bear. He’d only been thirteen when the business opened and he later went to college—the first in our family—and seminary school before being ordained as a Methodist pastor. He and his family lived in another part of the state, so we usually only saw them at Thanksgiving, Christmas and the occasional family reunion. But back then, the other nine of us tended to be friends and playmates as well as cousins. More than family, it was the Teddy Bear that united us in those early years of its existence and ours, because it was the glue that held our dads and grandfather together as a family.

So for the eleven years that the old Teddy Bear was a Pizza Chef, I never went in. And even after it became La Grande Pizza, I never set foot inside until I was in my sixties and met a friend there for a beer and a slice. I was just there again a few months ago. This time it was a very intentionally nostalgic visit. My sister Darla, who lives in Cleveland, and I decided it would be fun to go and see what we could still recall of how it had been when it was “our” restaurant. And to make it even more fun, her youngest son Andrew drove down from Cleveland to meet us for supper there. By the time he was born into the family, the Teddy Bear was already a memory from the past. He was curious to hear our take.  

Also with us were my cousin Greg’s widow, my close friend and talented photographer Mary Jo Knoch, my high school friend and wickedly witty classmate Tom Shaw, and my friend and eccentric Wapakoneta icon Jim Bowsher, about whom I’d published a book the year before. In fact, Jim and I had just done a presentation and joint book-signing at the local public library, which had generously ceded its basement meeting room to us for the occasion.

 It was a lively supper group. Before our pizza and beer arrived, Darla and I busily compared notes—this was here, that was there, the other entrance didn’t exist, still only has one bathroom, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, Andrew, Jim and Tom had really hit it off. All three bright conversationalists with a broad range of topics and a lot to say. Jim had already met Andrew earlier in the day. I had taken Andy to visit Jim’s unique Rock Garden with its Temple of Tolerance centerpiece—the central setting for the book, The Rock Garden, that I’d written about him—and Jim had given Andrew the grand tour with typical running Bowsher narrative, while I sat in the shade and went over the reading I planned to do that evening when Jim and I spoke at the library.

Afterward, Jim had said, “I really like your nephew. He’s exactly the kind of young person I like to see. Bright, well-informed, the kind of young person that should be held up as an example.”

“You realize Andrew’s in his late thirties, right?” I said.

“Hey, let’s face it,” he answered, “everybody’s young compared to us ol’ farts.”

I had also given Andrew a sort of walking historical tour of downtown Wapakoneta and the surrounding neighborhoods, including a look at the simple, clapboard house where his great-great grandparents had lived and that someone still inhabits today. I also took him to the Alpha, Wapakoneta’s only remaining bar from the old days, with roots stretching back to well before Prohibition.

La Grande Pizza, as the building now looks

When the food and beer came, I pretty much let Tom and Jim and Andy handle the conversation while I stuffed myself with delicious pizza and washed it down with draft. But the entire time, I was still looking around and trying to recall every detail of how the place had been when the big bear logo was still emblazoned above the entrance. As I did, I got a feeling as if Whitie were there with Darla and me, happy that the two of us had cared enough to revisit the past. And even after we’d finished eating and drinking and chatting and had said our goodbyes, even after I went back to the quiet of the cozy Moonflower Inn where I was staying, visions of Whitie and Reba Mae and all of the wonderful women and teenaged girls who had worked for them over the years came back to me over and over again.

In my mind’s eye, I could see it all clearly and in detail. The entrance and booths in their original red and white palette and in the peach-colored upholstering that would replace it ten years in when the place was remodeled. The Wurlitzer jukebox at the far end of the room and the pull-lever cigarette machine by the entrance. The Formica-topped tables in the middle of the dining room with their chrome-legged upholstered chairs. The tall half-horseshoe counter fashioned in “modern” post-war glass blocks with Formica top and two swiveling stools at one end by the grill. The candy and cigar case at one end of the main self-service counter, and the even more tempting glass pie case at the other. The heavy stainless steel grill that Whitie left impeccable by scrubbing it down with steel wool industrial detergent and carbonated water every single night, so that cooking began each day on a surface that was like brand new. The condiment tray behind the counter that was replenished regularly throughout the day to ensure that the ingredients in the hamburger, tenderloin, ham, cheese, steak and fish sandwiches were always fresh. The fryers, their vegetable oil changed frequently to guarantee the best, tastiest and healthiest deep-fried fried potatoes, fish, chicken and shrimp possible. The beautiful soda fountain and multi-compartment ice-cream deep-freeze, the stainless steel surface of which Whitie was constantly buffing to a high sheen with a linen towel. The narrow kitchen, whose activities always struck me as culinary miracles, since there was barely room for two people to pass each other without turning sideways, let alone prepare salads, soups, blue-plate specials and everything else that couldn’t be grilled or deep-fried. The back room with the long, galvanized work bench, where Whitie butchered, ground and pressed his own grade-A beef to ensure that every burger was top quality.

But most of all, I can still see Whitie in his spotless white t-shirt, military-creased kakis and well-shined Florsheim shoes, a bleached white apron under his arm, his thin blond hair parted and combed to perfection, and trailing the sweet smell of cigarettes and Skin Bracer as he headed off to work. Reba Mae in her starchy white uniform dress and clean, polished white “nurse’s” shoes, a bright-hued kerchief carefully arranged in her breast-pocket to add a note of color, her dark-auburn hair clean and styled. Reba Mae, my mother, stooping to kiss me goodbye and leaving behind her fragrance of Ivory soap, Doublemint and Chanel.

I see the two of them chatting and joking with “the regulars” and I see the all-male “breakfast crowd” seated at the long “front table”, each habitué holding forth, opining and “fixing the world,” with Charlie Siferd, the world’s funniest undertaker and a boundless personaity, presiding at the head. I see my dad lighting his R.G Dunn for the umpteenth time at the burner of the gas range, too impatient to let the pilot catch before drawing near, and once out every four or five times, singing his eyebrows crinkly in the process. I see laughter-filled Christmas parties with the staff after closing, and recall the year that Whitie arrived late to his mother’s house for Christmas Eve dinner with the rest of us because he’d found Frosty, the night watchman, dead of a heart-attack in the snow in the parking lot out back. I see a wide cast of characters for whom the Teddy Bear was their home away from home, well-known figures around town back then, who would regularly have breakfast and lunch at the Teddy Bear, and who have, one by one, faded away in the half century since.

Sitting there in the former Teddy Bear with my sister, Mary Jo, Tom and Jim, I realized that we were the only ones in the room who weren’t seeing the pizzeria we were sitting in but the long-gone restaurant, my father’s restaurant, the Teddy Bear, that now only exists in our minds. And once again I renewed my raison d'être, my mission, to chronicle, for whatever time remains, the people, places and stories that only exist in the living museum of my mind.