France Avenue's Wooden Bear: A Story of Loss, Community and Costumery

The France Avenue wooden bear has humble beginnings, but he’s clawed his way into many lives.

In spring, Pattiann Nordgren’s bear stares out from under a hula skirt and lei, fenced in behind a tight box of plastic tulips. At Easter time, the bear presides over dozens of plastic eggs arranged at his feet. In July, his chainsaw-carved flanks cast shadows on American flags and bunting-wrapped buckets. All year round, he grins slightly at passers-by, rearing up on hind legs, his left paw balanced lazily on his ursine paunch, his right raised in greeting.

“Everybody knows my bear,” Nordgren said. “The bear has more notoriety than it deserves.”

Back around the turn of the millenium, the honey locust tree growing in Pattiann and Earl Nordgren’s front yard at 5813 France Ave. started creaking and bending ominously under heavy winds and the Nordgrens decided it had to come down.

Pattiann Nordgren’s husband, Earl, had enjoyed watching chainsaw artist Dennis Roghair sculpt trees into ornate figures at the state fair, and decided to hire Roghair to turn his tree into a wooden giant.

It took Roghair a whole day to carve the bear, and when he finished, it was fashioned to the tree’s stump by screws and bolts.

It wasn’t long before Pattiann Nordgren started decorating her bear. She got the idea from a neighbor, whose concrete dog was kept fashionable by a changing wardrobe of scarfs.

In those days, the bear wasn’t much more than a mascot, a side project, a conversation piece.

A community-owned bear

On Christmas Eve of 2005, Earl Nordgren was terminally ill and his bear, as if in empathy, was decomposing, rotting off its stump. But a knock on the door briefly lifted Patti Nordgren’s spirits.

“It was a mother and her two little girls, maybe four or six,” Nordgren said. “They said, ‘You don’t know us but we know your bear, and we come by every Sunday to wave to the bear,’”

The girls gave Nordgren’s bear a green fleece scarf, which remains one of her favorite decorations.

Soon afterward, Earl Nordgren died, and his wife put up a sign in her front yard reading, “Goodbye Earl.” Around that time, unrelatedly, the decaying bear was removed to the garage to protect it from the elements.

But the sign and the bear’s absence became confused in the community’s collective mind. Even though the bear’s official name was O.G. (short for Oso Grande, the Spanish term for Big Bear), Nordgren started getting condolence letters for the bear. A nearby church called Nordgren to offer assistance in putting the bear back up.

“That was the first indication that the community owned the bear,” she said. “I never knew whether to laugh or cry.”

About three months later, O.G. received some wooden medical care and was reinstated to his rightful place in the Nordgren front yard, this time on a concrete foundation.

“He’s kind of like my husband reincarnated,” Nordgren said. “When I had the bear put back up it was very, very emotional.”

Now, Nordgren refers to her bear in a bemused, affectionate tone. She’ll change his outfit seven or eight times per year and paint him annually with a coat of sealant. She’s given a couple friends permission to decorate the bear. She says she’s always looking for new costume ideas.