
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 22, 1995                   TAG: 9502220066
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.                                LENGTH: Short

N.M. OFFICIAL WHO ADOPTED SMOKEY BEAR DIES AT 91

Homer C. Pickens, who nursed a singed Smokey Bear back to health after the cub was rescued from a forest fire, has died at 91.

Pickens, a former director of the state Department of Game and Fish, died Sunday in Albuquerque after a brief illness.

Pickens kept Smokey at his house in 1950 after the injured cub was rescued after a fire near Capitan in south-central New Mexico, said Bill Huey, another former director of the department. The bear, originally called ``Hot Foot Teddy,'' became the Forest Service's national fire prevention symbol.

Huey said Pickens and another man flew the cub to Washington, D.C., amid great fanfare. Smokey resided in the National Zoo until he died in 1976.

Pickens joined the Game and Fish Department in 1931 and was a district game warden before becoming assistant director of the department in 1940.

He was appointed director in 1953 and held that job until 1958, when he became a conservation specialist with the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, N.M.

by CNB