Koalas make life bearable for Finleyville woman
The night has a thousand eyes at the home of Linda and John Schoedel.
Tiny beaded eyes peer down from the walls of the Schoedel master bedroom in their Finleyville home. The eyes belong to the hundreds of stuffed animal koala bears Linda Schoedel has collected in honor of her favorite animal.
"You never feel alone here, that's for sure," her husband says.
The koalas are part of Linda's dream, "to go to Australia and hold a koala," says Linda, 60. "They're cute and so cuddly, even though I know they can be nasty." Koalas have sharp teeth and claws for harvesting eucalyptus, their source of both nourishment and water.
Over the years, helping to raise eight children -- hers and John's from their previous marriages and those they had or adopted together -- has made Australia a more distant dream. Still, John began keeping the dream alive 30 years ago when he gave her a stuffed koala bear.
"All of a sudden, family and friends started buying them and it ballooned," says Linda, a home-health caregiver.
The Schoedels now own hundreds of images of koalas, and not only of the stuffed animal variety. They own koala images etched in clear crystal cubes, koala keychains, koala suncatchers, cell-phone covers, sticky notes, koala bedding, a koala throw and trunk, koala jewelry and even a koala Micropet, a tiny plastic koala that reacts to the human voice.
"His name is Oz," Linda says, with Oz short for Australia. "Oz, dance," Linda says, and the tiny mechanical koala sings instead.
There's Caleb, an oversized 3 1/2-foot-tall stuffed koala and the largest of the collection.
"Our adopted grandson won it and gave it to Memaw (Linda) because he knows she collects them," says John, 56. As a Port Authority bus driver, John once drove past a travel agency that featured Australia-based Qantas Airlines travel posters of koalas in its window. John returned later and managed to obtain them for his koala-loving wife.
She also has koala salt-and-pepper shakers, a koala snow globe, koala shapes covered in tiny seashells, a "skitter" koala that shakes when its string is pulled, magnets, clothing and a copy of Australian singer-actress Olivia Newton-John's record album, "Koala Blue."
One of the more unique koala-themed collectibles is a mechanical toy with plastic koalas that climb a pole. At the top, each koala slides down a curving plastic slide, landing at the bottom of the pole to start the process again.
The word "koala" is even part of Linda's license-plate registration.
But of all the koalas she has, Linda's favorite is Charlie, a stuffed koala. John gave it to her after she had a miscarriage.
"He didn't want me to go home from the hospital with empty arms," Linda says.
Koalas are frequently associated with babies; the female is often photographed with a baby on its back. According to nationalgeographic.com, koalas are not bears but marsupials. The mother carries its baby in her pouch for about six months, then on her back for about a year.
A Centennial, Colo., company that manufactures those ubiquitous baby-changing tables in restrooms named itself Koala Kare Products and uses the logo of a koala and baby.
David Leigh, director of marketing for Koala Kare, says the original name of the company was Koala T Care, a play on the close-sounding word "quality."
"But it fit with the nurturing aspects of the product," Leigh says.
Linda Schoedel has a picture of the Koala Kare baby-changing table and its logo in an album full of koala-themed photographs, articles, drawings and school reports by her children. The album also contains photographs of a weather-stained concrete-block wall because, incredibly, the random stain actually resembles a koala.
Linda still loves the real variety of koala. She has seen them at the Columbus Zoo. She is concerned about their numbers, which began diminishing in the 19th century when koalas were hunted for their fur. Hunting koalas is now outlawed. But threats to their existence remain.
Among the threats are Australian development, which has reduced the amount of eucalyptus trees, the koalas' sole source of food and water; and diseases that have limited their numbers. So Linda recently "adopted" a real koala named Charlotte, the name of one of her daughters, at www.savethekoala.com . The animal lives at Lone Pine Preserve in Australia.
Linda agrees that mothering eight children and stepchildren might be part of the reason she feels an affinity for the Australian marsupial.
"I always liked to keep the kids close to me," she says. But then again, "There were times I felt they were always on my back."
