A retired paramedic and his wife were recently honoured by The Rotary Club in Timmins, for 29 years of providing teddy bears to the paramedic service – first in Timmins, then district-wide – and to the district hospital.
A.J. Zimmerman noticed early in his career that ambulances didn’t have anything to comfort children. So he and his wife Fran had yard sales to collect teddy bears. From ambulances, it spread to the ER and other departments at the hospital.
A.J. estimates that over the 29 years, they gathered and distributed 60,000 bears.
“Because at one point,” he reports, “we were giving out almost five garbage bags a week to Emerge alone. That would probably be a hundred or so teddy bears.”
The Zimmermans’ efforts were supplemented by schools and churches having teddy bear drives, and workers at Service Canada making it an internal competition.
Fran says volunteers would repair any bears, while she was in charge of washing them.
“I think we saw almost every teddy bear going, because we washed thousands and thousands of them here at home. We’d hang them on the clothesline,” she says, laughing at the image in her memory.”
For more on the teddy bears and some great stories of things that made it worthwhile to the Zimmermans listen to the interview.