How To Be A “Pooh”

A digital recreation of an article published in “Ace Magazine” Vol4 No3 – 1960

Winnie the Pooh has been livening up the children’s hour for twenty years. Now ACE figures it’s about time the adults had some comparable entertainment. So here’s Winnie Graham, even cuter than the original!

ONCE UPON A TIME when kids wanted to grow up to be Boy Scouts and not bagel burglars, an ambitious author named A. A. Milne wrote a series of books for toddlers about a group of unlikely characters, the most memorable of which is Winnie, the Pooh. Winnie was a bear-a Pooh-bear, to be exact. How does a Pooh-bear differ from the ordinary, run-of-the-woods Bruin? Well, for one thing, he talks. He talks to his friends Owl and Kanga (no rue in Milne) and Piglet and these stickily loveable beasties talk back to him. Also he talks to a little boy named Christopher Robin, a curious child whose pronunciation would have John Dewey spinning in his grave. Now, projecting on Mr. Milne’s hypothesis, that there is a special breed of bear, a Pooh, who not only talks, but talks in a peculiarly childish patois, one wonders how an ordinary bear might go about becoming a Pooh. The answer is simple: Listen to Berlitz records while hibernating. That’s what Winnie Graham, who speaks three languages, did.