YALE — It’s hard to remember exactly when things got out of hand. But somewhere along the way, everything changed.
It began only because Jacklin Kinzer wanted to keep in touch with her grandkids, which is why she came up with the idea of sending them little stories about her day. But to make them more relatable, she told them through the eyes of two stuffed animals — a dog and a bear.
“It started by accident, so we could talk to them through their phones, because they’re on their phones all the time,” the 66-year-old said. “But you can’t just post pictures. So I just pretended that Little Bear was telling his friends what he did in the picture. It was meant just to be a connection with them.”
A few of her friends found the series charming and wanted to be included when new stories were sent to the kids, so Kinzer created a Facebook page called “The Adventures of Dog and Bear.”
“I am Little Bear and this is My Dog,” it began. “Follow along with us.”
She’d post pictures of the stuffed animals posing wherever she and her husband were that day. Here they were sitting on a bench in their yard. At a local restaurant. On the back of a tractor. Watching Jacklin making cookies in the kitchen.
At some point, Facebook’s algorithm seems to have begun recommending the page to strangers because out of nowhere, Dog and Bear suddenly had a huge fan base. Dozens of page likes grew to hundreds. And soon there were thousands of strangers following everything these two stuffed animals did. “We were dumbfounded,” Jacklin said.
Then things got intense.
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Jacklin and her husband Tom, 76, live in Yale, a small farm community roughly an hour north of Detroit in the Thumb region. They’d worked in real estate before retirement, but a series of medical bills left them with little more than the role of caretakers on a farm owned by extended family. They stay in a little house heated by a wood stove, surrounded by 39 acres of wildflower fields that are aflame with goldenrod blooms in the summer. A turtle pond lies in the middle. Tom grows vegetables on small plots.
“We both just live on Social Security, so we live bare bones,” Jacklin said. “Not by choice, but you know how life is.”
Seven years ago, someone promoting mattresses in an airport gave them a stuffed promotional bear for the product line. They took it home. Later, Tom bought his wife a stuffed dog to go with the bear because it reminded her of a husky she once had.
The two stuffed animals sat in the living room until she got an idea.
“On our first vacation to Cadillac we said, ‘Let’s take them with us,’ because we had four grandchildren of the age where you want to communicate. And instead of taking pictures of our chins and stuff we said, ‘Let’s take pictures of the stuffies.’ ”
Those pictures — and the short descriptions that accompanied them — became an incentive to do interesting things, a challenge to find something worth noting in everything they did. They’d visit small-town museums, local festivals, farmers markets, cider mills. Sometimes, if nothing else was going on, Dog and Bear would be shown simply watching Tom as he cut firewood or raked leaves behind the house. Each time, the bear would tell a story about that day directed to little kids in the easy, happy prose of children’s books.
“It’s nonthreatening,” said Robin Romain, 71, a longtime friend. “In today’s world it’s something that kids need. Everything is so fast-paced, and everything in Jackie’s world is like what it used to be years ago — calming kids down and finding the fun and the excitement in small things.”
Along the way, Jacklin realized something unusual was going on.
First came the surge of strangers following the stories online. Then, people started recognizing Dog and Bear when the Kinzers were out on the town with them, and these fans would come up to see them or ask to take pictures with them. But what was most surprising was the strong emotional reaction that this pair of stuffed animals provoked. And it was not only among children, but particularly among people with special needs — foster children, adults with developmental disabilities, people on the autism spectrum, others who were fighting serious illness. Dog and Bear became everybody’s friends.
Now this retired couple living quietly on a farm in the Thumb found themselves not only with a new full-time job, but also a weighty responsibility as Dog and Bear went from being a cute distraction to having a serious impact on people’s lives.
There was the nonverbal autistic boy who spoke for the first time ever while at the farm; he was silently holding Dog while sitting by the pond, watching the turtles on the logs when it happened. “He said two words, and his mom, his grandma, his aunts just fell apart,” Jacklin said. “He had not ever spoken in his whole life.”
There was the little girl who visited the farm with bandages on her face and head, who came tentatively over to Dog after staring at it from a distance for while and said, “I forgive you,” as her father choked up behind her. It turned out she had recently been attacked by a dog.
There was the girl in the wheelchair who had almost never been outside before, other than going from a car to a building or the other way around. Jacklin took her for a tour of the farm on a golf cart with Dog and Bear. “They just wanted her to experience it. But they said she’s going to scream her head off,” Jacklin recalled. “So, she came out and she screamed as loud as she could halfway around the trails, and then she started smiling and singing. And so it was the most wonderful thing ever.”
There was the woman who asked for a photo with Dog and Bear to show her niece, who was paralyzed after a car accident that killed her parents, leaving her withdrawn and unresponsive — except when the woman read to her from the Dog and Bear stories.
“The things that happen are amazing,” Jacklin said. “We’ve been places and people just cried. They’ll come running up to the table. They’re grown-ups and they’re crying and they’re grabbing them. At first it was frightening, because we were not trying to go out and be popular or anything. Sometimes I’ll say, ‘Oh gosh, why am I doing this? This is a huge responsibility.’ ”
As Dog and Bear’s popularity grew online, people began reaching out to Jacklin for the stuffed animals to appear at events. So now here they were visiting a recovery and outreach center, and back-to-school events, and a center for trafficked children. “Every time it makes a new turn, we go, ‘What on Earth? Why is this happening?’
