This is America At Work. I’m Debra Stamp.

You know, the main thing in any career is getting some entrée, getting introduced to people, getting through the door.

Mike Berenstain is the son of Stan and Jan Berenstain, creators of the popular Berenstain Bears children’s books. And he’s the first to credit his parents with opening more than a few doors at the beginning of his career.

When I was starting as a freelance illustrator, I was just taking a portfolio around to art directors around New York, doing publishers and magazines and my parents knew these people, they’d call them and say, ‘Hey, will you see our son?’ Now that got me in the door, but then my work would get me the job.

Before Mike joined the family owned, family run Berenstain Bears empire, he was a very successful illustrator and author. Purely coincidental, or due in a large part to his upbringing?

Due to a very large part to my upbringing. This sounds corny, but literally my earliest memory is of my mother giving me a drawing lesson at the age, I think I must have been around three years old. I was scribbling on a pad of paper on the floor of their studio, so I must have been around three because I was still scribbling, these big black hairballs on a piece of paper, with a big black pencil. And I distinctly remember my mother coming over and pointing to this mess I’d made and saying, pointing to some little corner of it, little tangled corner and saying, ‘Look you drew a fish, it looks like a fish.’ And she colored in a little section that looked like a fish with some fins and I remember the pleasure of that I had drawn something and then from then on I just kept drawing.

Jan and Stan Berenstain’s kids tagged along to work long before it was fashionable. And as Mike remembers it, they worked a lot.

Yes, they grew up in the Depression. They were both born in 1923 and although they never starved, they grew up in the depth of the Depression, had very hard economic times in their family and when they both started to work, they just assumed that what people did was work all the time. That’s what they did all their lives and my mother continues to do that.

One has to wonder how hard it was for Mike to create his own identity, given the amazing success of his parents.

I really had to focus on science and nature as a young kid and I liked to draw pictures of animals and I was a kid who went out and collected insects and kept spiders in bottles and all kinds of wonderful things like that. And I always drew a lot of pictures of animals and then it just began to transition into an interest in art in general. I really began to focus on illustration, I liked illustration and I liked children’s book illustration and that’s what I started to do on my own. I did about 30 or 40 children’s books, most of which I also wrote, that I illustrated.

Working as a family. Tough to do?

It’s both tough and wonderful. It’s a lot of fun, you get to really have a feeling that everyone understands each other. You understand what everybody’s doing and you can really get a lot of benefit from the integration of the creative process through the intimate knowledge of everybody’s thought process. It can be challenging if there’s disagreements. And I think in any business like this there’s going to be disagreements. My main disagreements, as I recall over the years, were with my dad about things like what the focus of books about the characters should be. Sometimes we would butt heads about that. And of course since he, he and my mother were the creators of it, that could be a problem… Because where do you get off telling, having an opinion about this? So I had to be tactful and diplomatic about it.

Okay, all you Berenstain Bears book fans. Wait until you hear this. It’s sort of like being a mouse in the pocket inside the Berenstain Bears studio.

The one I had most fun with was, when I was first working with my parents on the Berenstain Bear books and I was doing sketches and drawings for a new book. And I went over them with my mother, who, as I said is the keeper of the style, look of the characters and I was, early on in this stage and I wanted to make sure that they looked right. And I went over them with her. And she says, ‘These all look great, but there’s just one problem.’ ‘What’s that mom?’ She says, ‘The bears, their ears, you’ve made their ears too low.’ ‘Oh, gee, I didn’t pick that up on that, I’m sorry. I’ll go back to my studio and I’ll redraw them, I’ll correct that.’ So I went back to my studio, I start work on these sketches and the more I look at them, the more I was baffled, because they didn’t look too low to me and I think I’m pretty sensitive to things like that. So I went out and got a whole bunch of the books to use as a guide and figured, well I’m going to figure this out. And the more I look at them, the more I’m convinced that where I had put the ears was exactly where they’ve always been. So I called my mom up and I say, ‘Okay mom, it’s fine with me if you want to make the ears higher, but, I’ve put them where they’ve always been, what’s the matter?’ She said, ‘Yeah, you’re right, they’ve always been too low.’ She said, ‘Your father always puts them too low and I’m sick of it, we’re going to make them a little higher.’ And I said, ‘Okay, great, why?’ She said, ‘Well, these are bears and you know, they’re not people and people have their ears right at the mid-line of their face lined up with their eyes, but bears really have their ears much higher and these are kind of in between. They’re going to be raised up a little to make them look a little less, a little less human and more on the bear side.’ So that’s the way we’ve done them ever since.

As much fun as it is and as much time as he spends drawing, Mike now has to deal with multi-media, licensing and the finances. So, how did he learn to run the business end of things?

Well, I learned all that stuff from my parents. I learned the drawing, the art work from both my parents and I learned the writing from both of them. And I learned the business mainly from my dad. While I was initially working as an artist with them, I was also very involved with him in discussing and dealing with business and then after his death I was able to take it on full time. It is very difficult to balance because we’re doing a lot of different things. We do virtually all the art work ourselves, as a family, and all the writing. It is very difficult to balance the time as the author/illustrators with the time of doing all these other kinds of related activities.

This sounds like the work of a large and mighty staff, but in reality there are only four full time employees. Time for what we call a probing question. So, Mike, how do you do it? What’s the secret?

Everything we else we delegate through various kinds of partnerships, through agencies, through production companies, marketing companies. We’ve never sold off any rights for our property outright, we’ve always made deals that work for a time period. For instance, currently we have an arrangement for our television producers, they have rights for all kinds of television and film development and that’s something that they work on and have projects and plans with. Nobody ever really has total control over that because it’s simply, the scale of the operation is too large, there’s too much money at stake for the people who are doing the production. So what you have is things like… The author, the creator will have approval and there will be some phrase like, ‘But not to be unreasonably withheld,’ some kind of legal words like that. In other areas like what are generally called licensing for products, that’s something where we have joint control with our television producer. We both can go out and do various kinds of product license.

Choosing those partners requires close monitoring.

We try to have contractual approval of everything that’s done because we do have to maintain the standards of exactly what the characters look like and how they’re used and what the art work looks like. And there are various degrees of approval that you can get. In some kinds of contracts, say if you’re doing clothing or toys, we simply have absolute approval that nothing can be done unless we say it’s okay. And we can be, frankly, very challenging for these people to work with because sometimes they don’t normally adhere to such strict standards and there can be a lot of friction over that. But it is difficult and I’m having, actually, a great deal of difficulty in figuring out just how to balance what should I be putting time into on the business side versus actually doing books, writing and illustrating books.

Books remain their core business. Any chance of running out of subjects or situations for the bears?

I had a friend who was kidding us and said, ‘How are you going to keep doing all these books, how many problems do people need?’ Because a lot of our books have to do with problems in the family, like the Berenstain Bears and the trouble with something. And that was a joke, but it’s funny. Life is full of issues, we do books on all kinds of subjects, but we generally do books about just everyday life, everyday family life. And I think that everyday family life is infinite in its variety and there’s just so many things that you deal with in your life that we’re always coming up with new situations and new subjects that seem to be relevant. Parents like, really appreciate having a book that’s entertaining and funny and a good story, which is also about this kind of subject, so that they can raise it and use it as a theme for dealing with issues with their children.

America At Work. Hear more at americaatworkstories.com.