The Owl
One Strange Thing
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Strangers,
America has a long history with cartoon mascots. And not just Tony the Tiger and the rabbit who peddles cereal: cartoons, and particularly talking animals, have taught us lessons, too.
Whether paid for by the feds or by nonprofits, scores of animals have been printed on t-shirts, in educational coloring books, or turned into costumes worn to elementary school assemblies: Smokey the Bear, McGruff the Crime Dog, and lesser-known characters like Milkshake the Cow and Franklin the Fair Housing Fox. We didn’t make that last one up.
And then there’s Woodsy—a friendly owl in a Peter Pan-style cap who reminds us:
Give a Hoot! Don’t Pollute!
Woodsy is a mascot of the United States Forest Service, and was created in 1970 to solve a problem. You see, before Woodsy the Owl, there was someone you’ve probably heard of: Smokey the Bear.
Smokey debuted in 1940s public service announcements from the forest service. Back then, he was a grim-faced grizzly with a less-than-stellar catchphrase: "Smokey Says – Care Will Prevent 9 out of 10 Forest Fires.”
Alterations were made. He kept the drab campaign hat—the one issued to all rangers—but the lines of his bear face were softened, and he was given an easier pitch, too.
By 1950, every American child would have been familiar with Smokey the Bear’s call to action:
"Remember... Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires.”
For a government mascot, he had quite the reach. He’d appear between Saturday morning shows, printed on fire-safety week materials handed out at elementary schools, and could be seen on posters all over the United States. But there was a problem: the US Forestry Service wanted to tackle more than fire.
They were facing ongoing pollution problems in national parks and along roads—trash and other piling up as the US highway system expanded. It would have been convenient to have Smokey toss out an admonition or two regarding litter. . . but according to author Jamie Lewis, there were strict federal regulations regarding Smokey’s use: the bear could talk fire, but that was it.
So, in 1970, the Forestry Service was in the market for a new mascot—and a Los Angeles-based team got to work.
The New York Times wrote that the plans for the new mascot were drawn on location: that is, on the tv-set of Lassie, a long-running TV show filming in California. Lassie—which, of course, followed a heroic dog who was forever retrieving children from wells— often had forest rangers on set.
In the show, the father of the child protagonist was a ranger, and there were plenty of action scenes surrounding his occupation—so the rangers were there to help as consultants.
It was a perfect—if rare—situation: a room full of creatives, marketers, and forestry employees, gathered together just when the federal government was looking for an exciting new idea. The Lassie team was happy to oblige. In fact, a marketing agent named Harold Bell—often on set himself—was an amauteur cartoonist.
According to author Jamie Lewis, it was Bell who helped three forestry employees—Chuck Williams, Glenn Kovar, and Betty Hite— design the prototype for the spokesowl who came to be known as Woodsy.
The team considered other animals, first—according to author Dennis Hevesi, the other contenders were a raccoon, a bull elk, a rainbow trout, and a ladybug. But an owl had the right feel: wise. It was the better choice. Though it’s never addressed in the essays written after Harold Bell’s death, we imagine an ad man would realize that any raccoon would want Mother Nature sullied with as much trash as possible.
The journey from concept to spokesowl goes like this: Harold Bell drew the earliest pictures of Woodsy—remember, he was a hobby cartoonist—and the group collectively came up with the slogan: Give a Hoot! Don’t Pollute!
Some sources give Forest Service agent Chuck Williams the primary credit for Woodsy’s catchphrase, but the development was a team effort—with Betty Hite designing the first real-life mascot costume, and all four opinions taken into account.
And so, Woodsy made his debut on Earth Day 1971—a year after his creation. He, like Smokey, made his way into ad campaigns, and Saturday morning public service announcements, and even public appearances—smiling for pictures with glassy-eyed children.
In 1974, Congress passed a law protecting Woodsy’s image and slogan from commercial use. When Harold Bell passed away in 2009 at age 90, fond tributes discussed his contributions to forestry service and his first sketches of the cheerful woodland owl.
And the birth and rise of a spokesowl would have been just that. . . except for one, strange thing.
News of Bell’s death and Woodsy’s fortieth anniversary coalesced into a number of retrospective articles—some more focused on the character, and others on the breadth of Bell’s advertising contributions.
But there was an odd addendum to some of these pieces, way down in internet comment sections. These articles sparked off a strong public response. But not on Harold Bell’a legacy, or on Woodsy the Owl’s quality, or even hot takes on Earth day. Not precisely.
Instead, there were scores of people—some angry, some confused, some disappointed, and even bemused. All claimed, individually, to have had the same experience. Harold Bell and his friends couldn’t have created Woodsy the Owl, or the catchphrase: Give a Hoot! Don’t Pollute!
Because each of these commenters had, during Earth Day celebrations in 1970, come up with the slogan, the character—or both—themselves. Or maybe their relatives had, or old friends. Some claimed to have won school-wide or state-wide contests. Others had their art sent off to some government entity, only to be told they wouldn’t get it back. But they all remembered writing that famous mantra: Give a Hoot! Don’t Pollute!
There’s an example of this phenomenon in Jamie Lewis’ article on his blog, Peeling Back the Bark: Exploring the collections, acquisitions, and treasures of the Forest History Society. In a strikingly innocuous article on Bell’s legacy, Lewis discusses the origin of the slogan, its introduction, and the enduring popularity of Woodsy. If you read only to Lewis’ final thoughts, the experience would be downright wholesome. Scroll a little further, though, and things get weird.
The very first comment is a lovely response from the Bell family, thanking Lewis for his coverage. But then the responses started.
The above is a lie, the “give a hoot don’t pollute” woodsy owl was created by a grade school kid at Breckenridge elementary school in Louisville, Kentucky. I know 1st hand, as I was in school when he made the poster. [sic]
And then:
My dad always said my sister was the first person to create the phrase “Give a hoot don’t pollute” and woodsy the owl when she won the contest while my family was living in Frankfurt, Germany. I also remember the poster my sister made that featured the owl with the German hat for the contest. It is truly the same owl and the same phrase my sister used before anyone else did. Maybe someone should give her credit where credit is due.
Strangers, there are dozens of claims. There are forty comments on this post, and the vast majority are written by people who precisely remember the spring afternoon when they—or less often, a classmate—created one of America’s favorite slogans.
These comments have spilled over into the Woodsy Wikipedia page, and various reddit threads. Story after story from all over the country, each person absolutely certain that they had invented it all. There were slight variations—a few recalled calling their owls Hootie, or not naming the bird at all—but otherwise, the stories are incredibly uniform.
The US Forestry Service eventually addressed this little-known—if intense—controversy in their “Woodsy at 40” retrospective. In the Forestry Service’s view, the real origin story isn’t up for debate.
But they have a guess or two as to why so many people might remember creating the iconic spokesowl. They write that the service never ran a contest—but that a children’s book company might have. After all, Earth Day was a new—and momentous—holiday. The first Earth Day was proposed in April of 1970. Woodsy was designed by May of that year. Classroom activities would have likely begun the next Earth Day—in 1971—the same year Woodsy officially debuted.
Maybe some students had seen the early Forest Service images, before Woodsy had been widely circulated. Maybe some kind of spokesowl osmosis had occurred.
The second theory is that an annual coloring contest—which originally featured Smokey the Bear—might have further confused the children. Woodsy made his first appearance in the contest in 1974, as a joint effort from the Forest Service and the National Garden Clubs. It could be students remembered coloring those pictures, and somehow—years later—the memory shifted.
Those explanations don’t sit well with the folks who still call the Forest Service, every now and then, asking after all manner of things: royalties, recognition. Maybe just an apology for a fifty-year-old theft.
It doesn’t matter how often the documented story of Woodsy is trotted out—with sketches and notes and letters as proof. The believers seem to know, in their hearts, that they wrote the slogan that shaped a nation and presumably stopped legions of would-be polluters.
There’s no word on whether Woodsy’s contemporary slogan— Lend a Hand! Care for the Land! — has invited similar controversy. But it’s unlikely, don’t you think? It just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
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Works Cited:
Jamie Lewis, “Remembering Harold Bell…” Forest History Society (Archives), 2009.
Dennis Hevesi, “Harold Bell, 90…” The New York Times, 2009.
Office of the Law Revision Counsel: United States Code.
Harald Fuller-Bennett and Iris Velez, “Woody Owl at…” Forest History Today, 2012.