I’d like to report that the stolen Berkeley bear is chained to the Vaillancourt fountain in San Francisco.
It was 4 a.m. on the Monday after Big Game 1988. I was standing at a pay phone in the predawn hush of Wilbur Hall, a pile of dimes stacked in front of me. After that first call to the San Francisco Chronicle, I dialed other newspapers and then TV and radio stations, repeating the same statement in the same fake British accent.
It was over. The calls ended my involvement with the 6-foot stuffed bear that had been, uh, liberated two years earlier from the Cal student union. The funny thing is, even though I was returning the big guy, I didn’t steal him. So who did? I had no idea then, and I still don’t know. The mystery has haunted me for a decade.
The story begins two years earlier, on August 5, 1986, when “Oski” the bear “walked” out of his display case in the middle of the night. Two witnesses reported a large bearlike figure in the back of a dark pickup heading north from Berkeley. The Chronicle headlined, “Stanford Suspected in Grizzly UC Crime.” The Daily wrote, “Berkeley Stuffed Bear Bagged out of Season.” A local radio station offered a $500 reward for his return.
Then the bear went into hibernation for a year. His silence ended in September 1987, when Oski sent a letter to the UC Rally Committee, which was also published in the Stanford Observer. He’d been on vacation long enough and wanted to return to Cal -- in exchange for immunity from prosecution for his “hosts.”
The UC Rally Committee agreed not to press charges -- with three provisos: 1) “the bear be returned in very good condition, 2) the offenders inform Cal how they got into the student union, and 3) that they promise not to do it again.”
The bearnappers did not respond. Two months later, on the night before Big Game 1987, I received an anonymous call. As chair of the Axe Committee, I was instructed to retrieve a “package” that had been left at the back door of the Band Shak. A friend and I drove to the Shak, where we found a large lumpy figure shrouded in green plastic bags, leaning in a dark corner.
We crammed the stolen bear into the car, covered it with a blanket and sped off to a safe hiding place in San Francisco. When we finally pulled off the plastic, we confronted a grizzly, mounted in a menacing pose, wearing a Stanford tank-top and nursing a badly broken left paw.
We were giddy at finding this stolen treasure, but now what would we do? We wanted to concoct a memorable way to return the bear. Parachute it into the stadium? Mail it from an exotic locale? But Big Game was only hours away! We finally resolved to hold off for a year and target Big Game week 1988 for Oski’s triumphant return.
Over the next 12 months, my fellow grizzly guardians and I clandestinely moved our furry friend from one safe house to another -- whenever people wanted their closet space back. These ursine missions were always late-night affairs fraught with anxiety. Between moves, we repaired Oski’s arm and cleaned him up, all the time acting as if we knew nothing.
Late at night on the Sunday after the 1988 Big Game, a group drove to Justin Herman Plaza and chained Oski to the fountain, while I sped over to Wilbur, imagining all the San Francisco office workers staring at him during Monday lunch. At 4 a.m., I began pumping those dimes into the payphone. KGO-TV, the official Cal Athletics station, arrived first on the scene. Sadly, the crew ripped Oski from two kryptonite locks around his ankles -- damaging both feet -- and brought him to the studio for their morning show. We missed out on the lunch crowd, but KGO drove the bear in a stretch limousine to a makeshift rally in Berkeley, where the Cal band and cheerleaders came out to celebrate.
This autumn marks the 10th anniversary of Oski’s return. But the question remains: who took him in the first place? If you have any information, stop by the Cal student union at noon before Big Game. I want to know how the story begins.
Tom Smegal, ’89, is a regulatory analyst for the California Water Service Company in San Jose.
