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largest teddy bear collection.
• Her collection resides in a small home along Main Street in Hill City, a town of fewer than 800 people in western South Dakota's Black Hills. Teddy Bear Town is filled to the brim with every bear imaginable -- Beanie Babies, the talking Teddy Ruxpin and porcelain bears. Visitors can admire the collection and buy souvenirs at a teddy bear-themed gift shop.
• "I'm referring to it as a house of memories. I've got people's very first bears. I've got bears in memories of people who passed away ... It brings back childhood memories to a lot of them," Miley said of the visitors.
• Miley's path to teddy bear fame wasn't planned. She arrived in Hill City more than a decade ago to work as a live-in desk clerk at a Super 8 hotel with her first and only teddy bear, Grandma Jackie, a bear she had made at a Build-A-Bear store two years prior.
• Her collection slowly grew as she traveled to thrift stores in Rapid City and bought the bears that stood out to her.
• "One day someone pointed out to me, 'Do you know you have more bears than people we have here in town?' " she said.
• Turns out, that wasn't quite true: According to the Chamber of Commerce, her collection didn't yet match the 780 residents in Hill City.
• So, she set a goal. A few months later, she had more than 1,000 teddy bears, then 2,000 and then 3,000.
• People started coming to see the bears at the hotel -- bearing bears. Several visitors asked if she had contacted the Guinness World Records about her collection. In 2005, she sent in an itemized list, numbering 3,610 bears, and was told she had the largest teddy bear collection.
(Continued on page 66)
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