Each year John Schulte, A.B. ’54, and his longtime friend Frank Herbert set out on a bear hunt—a teddy bear hunt that is. The mission is to gather as many teddy bears as they can squeeze into their spare bedrooms and then, after carefully clipping off all the tags and labels so they are safe for small hands, they stuff them into bags and distribute them across the Miller School of Medicine campus. This year they delivered more than 1,000 teddy bears.

But delivering teddy bears is no picnic. It takes careful handling and planning.

“The longest part of the job is cutting off all those little plastic Ts,” jokes Schulte. “It’s not just a matter of cutting off the outside tags, you have to get the inside piece out, so that you don’t hurt a child.”

And then there is the matter of convincing the sales clerk that you do indeed want to purchase all the teddy bears they have in stock.

“Frank and I were in a department store, and we had the teddy bears piled up so high on the counter that I could not see the clerk and she could not see me. It took several minutes to convince her that we were serious.”

Schulte and Herbert don’t personally give them to the children, but deliver them to multiple locations across campus, hauling bags of bears up stairs and down corridors. The children who receive the bears never meet their benefactors. “We don’t get to see the children,” says Schulte. “But I remember one time I was visiting the Diabetes Research Institute. As I was going in, I saw a boy coming out with his father and he was clutching a teddy bear, and I knew that was one of ours. And that made it all worthwhile.”

“The teddy bears are a wonderful addition to our clinic,” says Janine Sanchez, M.D., assistant professor of pediatric endocrinology. “It is great for the children to have something cuddly to hold when they are getting blood drawn or other procedures. The children’s faces light up when they are given them. Their visits with us are long, and so it is wonderful to give them a reward at the end.”

And so each year the quest begins again—teddy bears must be gathered, groomed, and given away to such places as the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Mailman Center for Child Development, Holtz Children’s Hospital at Jackson Memorial, Batchelor Children’s Research Institute, the Ear Institute, Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, the Diabetes Research Institute, and the Debbie School, to name a few. From there the teddy bears are given out on an as-needed basis.

So the next time you see a child with a teddy bear in tow, it just might be one that came from John and Frank.