Man who helped rescue Smokey Bear dies

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. - Ray Bell, the game officer who cared for Smokey Bear after the young cub was rescued from a forest fire 50 years ago, died Thursday of cancer at his home here. He was 89.

Bell was stationed with the state Game and Fish Department at Capitan when a forest fire broke out in the nearby mountains in May 1950.

When a firefighter brought a small 6-week-old black bear cub with burned paws into the fire camp on May 9, 1950, Bell, a pilot, flew the bear to Santa Fe for medical attention.

''I put the little fellow in a box, about like a shoe box,'' Bell recalled in 1984.

After firefighters cleaned up the cub and veterinarians treated his fire-blistered paws and singed tail, Bell took the cub home for his wife Ruth and daughter Judy to nurse back to health.

The Bells cared for the cub for two months, and Bell once recalled that the cub was a ''mite domineering'' over the family pets and also a bit of a ham.

For the next 50 years, Bell was known as the one who brought Smokey out of the forest fire. Bell devoted his life speaking to various organizations and schools about preserving the nation's forests and was a mainstay in promoting the Smokey Bear Museum in Capitan.

Bell said the cub originally was named ''Hot Foot Teddy.'' But he was renamed Smokey and became the living embodiment of a fire-prevention symbol created by the U.S. Forest Service in 1944. The cub grew into a 400-pound bear who lived for 26 years in the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. before his death in 1976.