William "Bill" Wall: His Stuff Rescued From The Trash

Found it in the dumpster in the month of September, 2014 or maybe it was October. It was cold. We were coming home around six in the evening and there was a large dumpster on the street adjacent to ours. Knowing that dumpsters provide people with things that they might need in bad times; One mans trash is another mans treasure. Right?  So I asked Bridget, my niece, if she wanted to go check it out. Her and I, Zachary, go and check it out. When we got to the back door of the dumpster out front of the property to see if there was no lock, the latch was sticking out as if it was just slightly closed. I pulled it open and it came open and revealed a nearly full dumpster of many common things that you would see in the house. Dishes, toiletries, bags of clothes, some office supply, and at first we thought we might be able to find some food or maybe something worth keeping so we started looking. 

After we got into  a bag of clothes, there were a lot of old style sweaters, socks, papes, some family pictures, etc. They really cleaned out this house and it seemed that there was no family involved in the clean-up work. Why would a family member toss out the collection of Olympic neck ties? Yes, the second or third bag was full of neck ties that were probably all from some Olympic Games.We don't wear ties (anymore) so we left them and dug a little deeper. After about an hour of digging into thrown away items, like Olympic Collector pins

A few Olympic Pins From Bill Wall's Collection

, we realized that there really might be something of high value in this dumpster. We moved cautiously and tried to get in there deep towards the bottom. We never got half way down. It was overwhelmingly sad as we picked into the past of a man that seemed to be into the Olympics a whole bunch! We gathered things for nearly 6 hours and it was very early hours of the morning by then. We decided to go take what we had which accumulated around the back doors of the bin, in all amounting to around six (6) laundry basket sized or large armload sized piles. 

At home I looked for the name Bill Wall as I found it written on some papers and I had a neat directors chair that had this name.

So I looked him up and was amazed to find him as a real important person in the world of American Basketball. He founded the American Basketball Asso. and the Woman's Hall Of Fame for Basketball. I wanted to go back and get more stuff but needed to sleep and go to work first. After work that day, the dumpster was gone.

I have all his stuff and would like to get it out there into his fans eyes. So here is piece of history that I believe IS the first, hand made, model of the bear chosen as Mascot for the 1980 Russian Olympics. It has real fur, tiny beads sewn together to make the eyes, a red leather belt with gold colored "Olympic Rings" as a buckle. He also has a sticker on the foot that has Russian writing on it. I am working on the translation now.

So here is a first look at a very rare stuffed teddy bear that made history in the 1980 Olympic Games as the most loved mascot of all

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