Here’s a phrase you all probably know: "Only you can prevent forest fires."
That’s Smokey Bear. And, if you’ve noticed his image showing up on billboards and in ads again recently — you’re not alone.
Aug. 9 marks his 80th birthday.
The iconic bear has been telling us to put out our campfires and tie up chains behind our cars since 1944, when he appeared on his first forest fire prevention campaign poster drowning a campfire.
But, Smokey Bear is not just one of the most successful and longest running ad campaigns in American history. He also was a real bear.
Mary Lavin is the manager of Smokey Bear Historical Park in Capitan, New Mexico. She spoke with The Show as she was standing about 20 feet from the real Smokey Bear’s gravesite.
Full conversation
MARY LEVIN: A lot of folks are very familiar with the poster of Smokey Bear, but they don't know that there was a real story and a living symbol as well. So the state park was created when Smokey passed away, so he could be laid to rest very near the place where he was found.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. I mean, you can count me among those folks. I did not know that there was a real Smokey Bear. So you have to start there with us, like tell us about the real bear, his story.
LEVIN: OK, so in 1950 a forest fire started, a human-caused forest fire started in the Capitan Mountains, and a little bear cub was seen running around the fire and was badly burned, and eventually got rescued from a wildland firefighter who brought him back to fire camp, and then he was turned over to the custody of a game warden, who's sort of a local hero here, whose name was Ray Bell.
GILGER: And the real Smokey lived in the Washington, D.C., zoo for 26 years, right? He's buried there in the park where you are, as you said.
LEVIN: Right.
GILGER: Bring us back a little bit and talk about the impetus back then in, you know, 1950 or even before that, of creating an ad campaign around preventing forest fires, like what was happening? What were they getting out of control? Were we just realizing this was a problem?
LEVIN: Right. Well, I'll just say there's roots to a much deeper story that goes way back, actually, to not too long after the Civil War, when one of the worst wildfires that claimed human lives in American history happened, believe it or not, in Wisconsin. So that was sort of on the minds of folks still, even though it was in the past.
The Forest Service was created in 1905 another huge catastrophic fire happened in 1910 called the Big Burn. So that's kind of a setup. Then fast forward into World War II. So enemy access powers were actually patrolling our Atlantic and Pacific seaboards with the intent to light incendiary fire bombs and start our force on fire. Because second only to ammunition, the most valuable commodity for the war effort was wood and paper products, so it's tied to this much deeper threat of American history and all kinds of things.
So fast forward, the National War Ad Council at the time got together with the Forest Service and decided to create a very appealing ad campaign for American people to basically be invited into the story, to kind of be watchers in the woods, and then also to be careful with their own campfires and activities that could possibly cause a wildfire. So in 1942, the movie “Bambi” came out, and of course, that had, you know, little Bambi and his mom and all his forest friends you know, running from the wildfire.
BAMBI AUDIO: Get up, Bambi, Get up. You must get up. Get up. Get up. Get up. No, come with me.
LEVIN: So Bambi was actually the first icon used in this campaign, but Disney only loaned him out for a year, so they had to come up with a new icon. So they thought about, you know, a fox and a squirrel. And then finally, somebody's like, hey, we should do a bear. Because a bear is big and strong. You know, you can put a pair of jeans on him, put a ranger hat, … a shovel. And you know, if a bear tells you to do something, you're going to pay attention and do what he says. So that's how Smokey was born.
SMOKEY AD: Smokey the Bear. Smokey the Bear. Hello there, folks. This is Smokey the forest fire preventing bear.
LEVIN: A year after they introduced the Smokey Bear wildfire prevention campaign, human caused wildfires went down by 70%.
GILGER: My goodness.
LEVIN: It was incredibly successful.
GILGER: So let's talk about the ads for a moment, because they're so iconic, like from print ads and posters and billboards and things like that. You know, you know the picture, you know the bear and the jeans, yeah, the hat and you know, only you can prevent forest fires. There were radio ads. There were television ads. Do you have any favorites? Do any stand out to you?
LEVIN: Oh, I was a child of the ‘70s, and so I think, you know, in all honesty, one of my favorites is a television spot of all things, that was done by Ray Charles, where the screen is completely dark and all you hear is sound of footprints walking through, crunching through the leaves.
AD: I like the way the forest sounds, the way the leaves rustle in the wind and fall to the ground and crunch under your feet, the way the birds sing and the chipmunks chatter the way a squirrel scrambles up a tree. That's why I'm asking you to please be careful with fire, because when we lose a forest, we lose a lot more than meets the eye. I ought to know, I'm Ray Charles.
GILGER: OK, so let's talk about his message for a moment. You mentioned how effective it was right off the top, and there's a real like optimism to this, right, like that, we can all do something to help to prevent wildfires, to do something important here, we know most wildfires are still caused by humans today, but I think also, like how we understand wildfires has really changed over the years that Smokey has been around.
Like we now know that it was our suppression of all wildfires that has created more of these catastrophic wildfires, right? That we put out too many, and that some fire is healthy for forests, and we've let them become overgrown, etc. I wonder, like, how that shift in how we think about and what we know about wildfire and fire and forests in general, has changed the message, or has it?
LEVIN: It has. So that's really, really a good question and great observation. Fire has always been on the landscape, specifically in the West and the Southwest. I can speak to that. Being in New Mexico, the forests and the woodlands and the grasslands are actually fire adapted. It's complicated to go back and look and see why fires were suppressed so intently. So looking forward, we have this incredible inheritance of natural resources that are preserved for us in our national forests, our national parks, state parks, state forests, wild places, if you will. So Smokey's message speaks to that, in that we all have a role to play.
How do we go from an unhealthy forest that typically, right now is overstocked, so when that really important piece of wildfire, the right kind of fire, at the right time, is removed from the equation for 100 years plus, how do we manage the forests and the woodlands and the grasslands when you understand the history and the mindset of those people at the time, it made a lot of sense. So if, if we kind of do a throwback to what I mentioned a few minutes ago, of this catastrophic fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, that killed over 2,000 people, that was fresh in people's minds when their response to wildfire is always bad all the time. And of course, that's not true.
GILGER: Yeah, so Smokey is back. We're seeing billboards of him around town today. It's his 80th birthday this year, and I know there are lots of people there and around the country to celebrate him. I wonder, like, has he gotten a makeover? Like, does Smokey look the same now as he used to? He seems a little more muscular to me.
LEVIN: Right. So, I mean, it's really fun to kind of look back at the early days, and he was a little heavier set, maybe a little bit in some of the initial ones, he was a little bit more serious, and now you see him smiling and a little more lively and inviting, and it's really fun to take a look at so how he's changed over time, and the message is the same, only you can prevent wildfires now.
So I think his message is foundational, and maybe his smile has gotten a little brighter, maybe the twinkle in his eye is a little more, how would you say more mature with the times we're in now. But he's still, you know, at the heart of Smokey Bear. Why does this matter now more than ever before, because conditions are, you know, set up for these catastrophic wildfires. The message, I don't need to change. We just need to reach deeper and broader and wider and invite people in to understand.
