Smokey Bear Through the Years

This is a fun new website featuring 80+ years of artifacts & memorabilia related to Smokey Bear, the famous spokesbear for the US Forest Service.

In 1944, the USDA Forest Service, National Association of State Foresters, and Ad Council launched the first poster featuring Smokey Bear, asking Americans to recognize their personal responsibility in preventing unwanted wildfires.

Over eight decades, Smokey and his tagline, “Only You Can Prevent Wildfires,” have become a pillar in the protection of our nation’s wildlands and an American icon. He’s thrown out first pitches at baseball games, met presidents, been to space, and become a part of our lives and homes on games, hats, toys, and apparel.

During the course of writing this post, I visited Wikipedia and found out that there was an actual bear named Smokey:

The living symbol of Smokey Bear was a five-pound, three-month-old American black bear cub who was found in the spring of 1950 after the Capitan Gap fire, a wildfire that burned in the Capitan Mountains of New Mexico. Smokey had climbed a tree to escape the blaze, yet his paws and hind legs had been burned.

At first he was called Hotfoot Teddy, but he was later renamed Smokey, after the character created a few years prior.

This Smokey lived at the National Zoo in Washington DC, where he had his own zip code for the massive amounts of mail he got, died in 1976, and had obituaries published in many newspapers, including the Washington Post, the WSJ, and the NY Times.

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