CHILDREN'S BOOKS 'Berenstain Bears' author and illustrator Stan dies

With his wife and later his sons, he presented moral messages with humor.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Stan Berenstain, who with his wife, Jan, wrote and illustrated the best-selling Berenstain Bears children's books -- soft-sell morality plays that revel in poking fun at and safely solving the everyday travails of family life -- has died. He was 82.
Berenstain died of complications from cancer Saturday in Bucks County, Pa., said his publisher, HarperCollins Children's Books.
The more than 200 books published since 1962 have a Seinfeldian quality, because entire volumes are built around ordinary matters -- messy rooms, a visit to the dentist, fear of the dark -- that constitute high drama for the under-7 set.
"They were able to take the real issues of children's lives and make them entertaining and not preachy," said Ilene Abramson, director of children's services at the Los Angeles Public Library. "The books had messages of basic character-building, but they were always done with humor and with that strong sense of family."
The family of bears -- who wear clothes -- were simply named Mama, Papa, Brother, Sister and, much later, Baby to capitalize on the "Everybear" concept of the stories, Berenstain once said.
Inspired by Dr. Seuss
The idea for the series was born in 1960 after Berenstain read a New Yorker magazine profile on a Random House editor, Theodor Geisel, who was launching a line of books for young readers.
The Berenstains sought out the man better known as Dr. Seuss, taking with them what they called "a bad imitation of Ogden Nash."
Geisel looked at the slim manuscript that would become "The Big Honey Hunt" two years later and said, "This is going to be a great book," Berenstain told the Los Angeles Times in 1995.
Without consulting them, Geisel shortened the authors' names from Stanley and Janice to Stan and Jan to make them rhyme and slapped the phrase "Berenstain Bears" on succeeding covers. The moves were credited with making the books easy to market, and nearly 300 million copies have been sold.
Early days
Stanley Berenstain was born Sept. 29, 1923, into what he described as a gritty, lower-class Philadelphia family that had been "pogrommed out of the Ukraine."
When he was growing up, he and his parents, Harry and Rose, lived above an Army-Navy surplus store.
In 1941, on his first day at what is now the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, Berenstain met his future wife when they admired each other's drawings of classical plaster casts.
Their dating ritual included weekly class visits to the zoo, where they often sketched bears because "no one else wanted to, and we could be alone," Berenstain told the Tampa Tribune in 1999.
Thirteen days after Berenstain was discharged from the Army in 1946, the couple married and promptly embarked on a joint cartooning career. Their first piece of furniture was a drawing table.
Selling cartoons
They didn't sell a single cartoon for a year. But business picked up after they listened to the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, who told them to stop quoting Shakespeare and start riffing on the absurdity of family life -- burnt dinners, empty toothpaste tubes, bleary-eyed parents.
The second year they sold 154 cartoons.
Soon, they were earning the "astronomical" sum of $1,000 for illustrations that ran on the cover of Collier's magazine.
In 1956, they began drawing "It's All in the Family" for McCall's magazine. The full-page monthly feature of captioned cartoons ran until 1970, then appeared in Good Housekeeping magazine for 20 years.
Family fun
In recent years, their sons, Leo and Michael, have helped write and illustrate the Berenstain Bears books and will continue the series with their mother.
The Berenstain empire has expanded to include an animated series on PBS, Game Boy games, stuffed animals, learning videos, compact discs, DVDs, puzzles, coloring books and stage musicals.
The couple often wrote about 10 books a year, mapping out the story line together from their home on three acres about 40 miles from Philadelphia.
In addition to his wife and sons, Berenstain is survived by a sister, Aline Smith, and four grandchildren.