Word: otto
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Keeping a Distance. Otto Klineberg, a social psychologist from Columbia who is now a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, was struck by the contrast with his students at home. "In my seminars at Columbia, I could hardly talk for three minutes before I was interrupted. Here, it is hard to get the students to talk at all. One has to draw them out. This is the culmination of a long effort to keep a distance between the teachers and the students...
...Teddy bear," says Hans-Otto Steiff, 48, who has headed the business for the past 18 years, "has always been our most popular toy." Still, it is only one of a menagerie of 250 different stuffed animals running the gamut from A (alligators) to Z (zebras). Visiting toyshops and department stores in the U.S. last week, Steiff was taking orders for everything from a thumb-sized ladybug made of clipped wool (60?) to an 8½-ft.-tall giraffe covered in mohair plush ($500). The company's 2,100 workers also turn out life-sized gorillas, kangaroos and buffaloes...
...company's painstaking approach to toymaking began in 1880 in the Giengen dressmaking shop of Margarete Steiff, Hans-Otto's great-aunt. Partially paralyzed by polio since childhood, Margarete happened on the idea of fashioning toy elephants from scraps of felt and cloth for use as pincushions. They proved so popular with friends that Margarete soon gave up dressmaking, began turning out other stuffed animals with the help of relatives. When several Steiff-made bears wound up as table decorations at the 1906 White House wedding of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy's daughter, the resulting publicity made...
...expression. Some animals are equipped with voice boxes that enable lions to roar, bears to growl and donkeys to bray; many have movable heads and limbs. The continuing purpose is to make them lovable as well as lifelike. "We never model them after the full-grown animal," explains Hans-Otto Steiff, "but always after the young, slightly ungraceful ones...
Died. Teo Otto, 64, one of the world's leading stage designers, whose symbolic sets graced theaters from Hamburg to Haifa; of a heart attack; in Frankfurt, West Germany. A member of the Berlin group that included Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill, Otto fled Hitler's Brownshirts in 1933, set up camp in Zurich where he staged a Richard III that would either "win the Zurich public or send us back to the concentration camps." The play was a success, and Otto went on to stage such hits as Figaro and The Three-Penny Opera...