Drinking, however, would never fall out of favor—throughout his life, Geisel would almost always makes time for cocktails. Finding a reliable drinking establishment in New York during Prohibition was something of a sport, and Ted and Helen had found their favorite evening hangout in a speakeasy called the Dizzy Club, hidden in a loft at 64 West 52nd Street.24 “A great place,” Ted told Campbell, and he particularly liked that the club stayed open all night, not shutting down until six A.M.—at which point Ted could blearily walk to the offices of Judge, about ten minutes away.25
Lately Ted and Helen had taken to meeting another couple at the Dizzy, a fellow Dartmouth man named Al Perkins and his wife who, like Ted and Helen, had “[no] conscience about staying up all night.” Perkins was both a rambunctious drinker and practical joker—“the funniest fellow I have ever met,” said Geisel—who could induce similarly bad behavior in Ted. Geisel related to Campbell how he had one evening locked a “nigger waiter”—Geisel’s casual use of that term as a young man remains horrifying to modern ears—in a walk-in refrigerator. “Some ten minutes later, I released the poor chap, thinking he would thank me for my kindness,” he told Whit. “[But h]e wasn’t that kind of nigger.”26
Out-of-control drinking would also ruin his twenty-fourth birthday celebration. Ted and Helen had invited Ted’s parents and Helen’s mother to their tiny apartment “for a nifty little party” to commemorate the occasion. Two of Ted’s Dartmouth buddies, Paul Jerman and Courtney Brown, showed up on his doorstep “most horribly stewed.” Jerman spent most of the evening vomiting in the small bathroom, then passed out. “It rather spoiled the evening for the family,” Ted said, “and gave them the idea that all my time is spent in being ill with Jerman.”27
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The February 11, 1928, issue of Judge featured a long prose piece by Geisel on “The Origin of Contract Bridge,” tracing the card game back to a croquet-type sport created by three Druids named Aethelstan, Beowulf, and Flloyd-Jones—one of whom, in Ted’s accompanying illustration, holds up a sign reading NO BEER, NO WORK. While the cartoon is signed with an all-capital-letters SEUSS, the byline on the article is, for the first time, Dr. Seuss.
Still, Geisel would continue to sign his cartoons with a simple SEUSS for another two and a half months, until the April 28, 1928, issue of Judge. There, on page 15, was a cartoon featuring two distinctly Seussian creatures: the Japanese Makaraskiijip—a camel-like creature on roller skates that ferries around children—and the Bvorlyjk of the North Pole, a winged catlike creature on snowshoes that delivers babies to frigid regions where the stork won’t go. Beneath the skates of the Makaraskiijip and under the snowshoes of the Bvorlyjk, Geisel has signed his cartoons—for the first time ever—as Dr. Seuss. While it would take several more months before Geisel would use it exclusively, six months after joining Judge, he had arrrived at the pseudonym that would define him for the rest of his life.
Why Dr. Seuss? Perhaps predictably, Geisel’s tale would evolve with the telling. In the preferred version of the story—the one Geisel told over and over—he adopted the designation of Dr. because, as he explained in 1934, “I always wanted a PhD but never got it, so I assumed my own doctorate.”28 The story would become slightly more nuanced over time, with Ted incorporating into the narrative a bit of reverence for T. R. Geisel, who had paid for his son to pursue an ultimately unfulfilled doctoral degree. “I ended up saving him thousands of dollars by giving myself my own doctorate,” Ted said in 1979. “I just took the title, because I was going crazy earning it.”29 Perhaps there was a bit of guilt behind Ted’s decision to assume the mantle of Dr. Seuss.
And yet there was also another completely different version of the story. Geisel had debuted the designation Dr. with the first installment of his “Boids and Beasties” feature—and had chosen that particular byline to give the pseudoscientific pieces a bit of scholarly credibility. “It was a mock zoological thing,” he explained in 1975, “and I put the ‘Dr.’ on the Seuss to make it sound more professorial.”30 It made sense, then, that he would use the same professorial designation for his mock history of contract bridge and, later, for a reimagining of Arthurian legends—the byline was almost always attached to pieces that could be made all the funnier with a bit of faux erudition. Geisel, who had always tinkered with pseudonyms, may have liked the sound of Dr. Seuss enough to stick with it. But it’s also feasible that the real story contained a bit of both tales: perhaps Ted had initially adopted the title Dr. to give his mock-serious pieces a bit of ersatz gravitas, then retained the title out of deference to his father and the doctorate that never was.
One could also ask why the pseudonym was adopted at all. Geisel had begun his stint at Judge as an unknown artist. He could have chosen to sign his name any way he wanted—he could even have signed his work as Geisel or Ted G., as he had done in high school. Geisel later offered two explanations for his decision to cloak himself in a pseudonym. “I wanted to write the great American novel,” he explained to The Dartmouth in 1934. “And I wanted to keep the name of Geisel clean in case that day should ever come.”31 But there was more to it than that; in a letter to Whit Campbell, Geisel stated that he was slightly embarrassed to be working for Judge, and felt more comfortable hiding behind a pen name. “I am writing for Judge, and must dumb things up,” he wrote to Campbell in March of 1928, then added parenthetically, “(hence the assumed name).”32
Even worse, he told Campbell, there were times when he worried he was falling into a creative rut. “I still eke out an existence from Judge,” he wrote in March 1928. “Perhaps it is bad for me to eke it out so easily. For it keeps me abed late of mornings, and allows me to cavort in the evening.” He told Campbell he had just put together a series of cartoons based on the stories of King Arthur, and begged his friend to “please write and tell me frankly what you think of them.” To his credit, Geisel was trying something new with the piece, writing the text in Old English rhyme. But he and his editor had argued about that particular setup and Geisel had been asked to rewrite the piece “into American slang.” Worse, he said, his editor “took out all the humor . . . and inserted his own little jests instead.” Geisel was worried the cartoons carrying his name were now an unfunny mess. “I think it rotten from a humorous point of view,” he told Campbell, “but I still maintain that the ed[itor] may be right, just being as it is.”33
Ted’s instincts were mostly correct. The series “Ye Knights of Ye Table Round: Being the Inside Dope on King Arthur’s Court” began running in Judge in late March 1928—and they weren’t all that funny. The cartoons were still heavily inked and crosshatched, though there were still some inspired moments, such as an “apartment castle” fitted out with segmented towers stretching upward at odd angles, held in place by brackets and struts, and looking very much like some of Dr. Seuss’s later cartoon architecture. Still, Geisel knew it wasn’t his best stuff, though he was hoping the cartoons might be amusing to readers of “the average point of view.” “I grant you they are terrible,” he sighed to Whit. “I am a commercial sort of fellow, though, and am playing it for all I am worth.”34
The admitted “commercial sort of fellow” was also still intentionally dropping in plenty of references to brand names in his work—and a cartoon appeared in the January 14, 1928, issue of Judge that Geisel would rightly say “changed my whole life.” In the cartoon, a knight sits bolt upright in a canopy bed, knees drawn up to his chest, armor stacked on the floor next to him, as a Seussian dragon—which looks more like a gigantic cat than a lizard—pokes its head menacingly under the canopy, very nearly in the knight’s lap. “Darn it all, another Dragon,” says the knight. “And just after I’d sprayed the whole castle with Flit.” As an insecticide joke, it was hardly a thigh-slapper—but while writing the gag, Ted had fussed over which of the two major brands of insecticide—Fly-Tox or Flit?—to use in his punch line. In the end, he had simply flipped a coin. “It came u
p heads, for Flit,” said Ted.35
It would be the luckiest coin toss of Ted Geisel’s life. The January 14 issue of Judge was picked up in a beauty salon by the wife of Lincoln Cleaves, the executive in charge of the Flit insecticide account for the McCann-Erickson advertising firm. Mrs. Cleaves brought Geisel’s Flit cartoon to the attention of her husband and suggested McCann-Erickson bring Ted in to talk about creating more Flit ad campaigns.36
Lincoln Cleaves was definitely interested and seems to have connected with Ted fairly quickly, promising to try him out on a Flit advertising campaign. But it was taking Cleaves a long time to make up his mind, and Ted complained to Whit Campbell that the Flit people were “dickering” with him, dangling before him what he thought was surely a too-good-to-be-true promise of $1,200 for twelve Flit cartoons. “God pray it go through,” Ted wrote fretfully.37 Perhaps as a reminder to Cleaves that he was still waiting for a response, Ted inserted a cartoon in the March 31 issue of Judge in which a derby-wearing, mustachioed gentleman—with a suitcase label reading “Miracle Bug Company”—blasts a flea circus using a pump bug sprayer clearly labeled FLIT.38
Cleaves and Ted eventually connected, and Ted was put under contract to create a series of Flit cartoons for McCann’s client, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, which produced Flit and marketed it through its subsidiary, Stanco Inc. Ted’s first ad would appear in the May 31, 1928, issue of Life magazine, showing a concerned father looking out the window as his son gargles loudly below. “Don’t worry, Papa,” his daughter says reassuringly. “Willie just swallowed a bug, and I’m having him gargle with Flit.”39 Ted would create a total of six cartoons for the 1928 campaign, with a new one running every other week from May through August, the height of mosquito season.
In an era when most print ads were heavy with text or featured large photographs of the product, Geisel’s Flit advertisements didn’t look like any other ads. For one thing, they were intentionally funny—a nearly foreign concept in advertising at that time. In some cartoons—such as one early ad featuring a judge sentencing a somber-looking man to prison for refusing to let his wife use Flit—the product itself was mentioned but not shown. Other ads involved Flit visibly being used in creative ways, such as a four-panel cartoon in which a mosquito-plagued cellist rigs a Flit gun to spritz repellent with every movement of his bow. Over time, Ted would draw increasingly wilder-looking insects getting their comeuppance with Flit in outlandish ways, including one ad titled “The Suicide” in which a mosquito holds a Flit gun against his body, preparing to finish himself off with a blast of the fatal spray.
But Ted’s most lasting contribution to the Flit campaign was the memorable four-word punch line he used over and over again: “Quick, Henry! The Flit!” The catchphrase would be squawked, for instance, by a ventriloquist dummy as he leapt away from his performer to escape an enormous mosquito, shrieked by a ghost at a séance as it waved away a swarm of insects, and spelled out in cursive by four snakes as advice to a mosquito-bothered snake charmer. The phrase became a national phenomenon, so popular that it would show up not only in full-page magazine ads but also on billboards, in subway stations, and at bus stops. The catchphrase eventually became so embedded in the culture of the era that it was used as a punch line by comedians for an easy laugh or referenced in the lyrics of popular songs. In the first year of Geisel’s Flit campaign, the advertising trade magazine Printers’ Ink noted, in its year-end assessment, that “[t]he most momentous theme of the summer of 1928 was not Prohibition, presidential election, aviation, or world peace. It was mosquitos.”40
Geisel had created a juggernaut of an ad campaign—and he had also found a steady source of income that would make him a lot of money. In the first years of his contract, Geisel estimated he made about $12,000 annually from advertising—nearly $200,000 today. The Flit campaign would prove so popular, in fact, that Ted would do work for Stanco for the next seventeen years. “That toss of a coin determined my whole career,” he said later.41 More important, the money Geisel earned through his advertising work would buy him his artistic freedom. There would be no more frantic pitching of projects to The New Yorker or merely eking out an existence with Judge. What would eventually become the Dr. Seuss empire would be laid on a foundation built and paid for with Standard Oil money.
With his Standard Oil contract in place, as well as a bit of unexpected money from Helen’s late father’s trust, the Geisels felt secure enough in September 1928 to abandon their apartment in the seedy Chelsea neighborhood for a more upscale and uptown address at 393 West End Avenue. “There were many fewer dead horses,” Ted said, with some relief. He also quickly learned their new phone number was only one digit away from that of the neighborhood fish market, and Ted took great delight in wrong numbers. If a customer mistakenly dialed the Geisel apartment asking for a delivery of two pounds of haddock, Ted would draw a cartoon of a two-pound haddock on a piece of cardboard, and have the drawing delivered to the baffled customer.
While Ted and Helen liked their new address, they would have their heads turned by yet another new location late in November. To celebrate their first anniversary, the Geisels took a vacation to the West Coast to visit Ted’s old New York City roommate John Rose in the little seaside town of La Jolla, California. Ted was immediately smitten with the place, with its Spanish missionary style buildings, exotic flora, and perpetually sunny skies. The Geisels decided then and there they would save up to relocate to La Jolla. On their return to New York, Helen and Ted began to curtail their spending, cutting back most notably on the time and money they invested in going to speakeasies. “When I saw La Jolla, I thought, ‘This thing is too good to be wasted on old people,’” Ted said later, reflecting on the memory. “One of my life ambitions was to get to live [t]here before I grew old.”42
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Standard Oil clearly knew it had struck pay dirt in Geisel’s Flit campaign. The cartoons had been so popular in 1928, in fact, that Stanco decided to launch its 1929 ad campaign five months early, releasing Ted’s first ad in January instead of May—and then ran new cartoons every three weeks for the entire year. And for those who couldn’t get enough of the Flit ads, Stanco would even release a collection of the cartoons in a small paperback book in September 1929—the first-ever collection of Dr. Seuss cartoons. Geisel, however, wouldn’t make a dime off it.
Judge, too, seemed to recognize they had a celebrity in their midst; the March 23, 1929, issue would sport a cover by Dr. Seuss—his first national magazine cover—featuring a mustachioed gentleman with a butterfly net hunting a Seussian menagerie of animals, including a giraffe, a turtle, several birds, and an elephant with a long, curling trunk. The beautiful full-color cover would be his first of five for the magazine. And almost as if Geisel appreciated that he now had a reputation—that he no longer had to “dumb things up”—even his prose pieces for Judge became cleverer and more experimental, especially as he began poking fun at and deconstructing the English language.
One of his best pieces would run in April 1929, a full-page titled “Ough! Ough! Or Why I Believe in Simplified Spelling,” in which Ted took great delight in playing with the various possible pronunciations of -ough in American English. Ted’s narrator, for instance, lands a job performing chores on the farm of Mr. Hough, who spends his days lounging in the bough of a tree that dangles into a horse trough. “Mr. Hoo!” shouts the narrator, “Your Boo is in the Troo!” In another, Ted’s narrator takes a beating at the hands of a boxing champ and cries out, “Eno! Eno! I’m thruff!”43
And yet Geisel would still produce his share of racial jokes, both in Judge and in his ads for Flit. The humor wasn’t intentionally cruel—there were no jokes about slavery, lynching, or other kinds of violence—but Geisel’s art and language played squarely into the negative racial stereotypes so pervasive in the mainstream culture of the era. One 1929 Flit ad features a black husband leaning lazily back in his cha
ir, smoking a pipe, while his wife—up to her elbows in laundry—berates him for his inability to find a job. “You hold a job, Worthless?” she says derisively. “Say, nigger, when you all hold a job a week, mosquitoes will brush their teeth with Flit and like it!” Geisel likely regarded it as yet another joke about a hen-pecked husband—one of his most-used tropes—rather than as a commentary on race; the offensive stereotype was the backdrop for the joke rather than the punch line itself. Still, it’s not one of Geisel’s better moments as an adman.
More shocking was a full-page cartoon in the June 7, 1929, Judge in which Geisel drew a “Cross-Section of the World’s Most Prosperous Department Store,” where patrons could acquire items needed for clichés: a fly to put in the ointment, for example, or a needle for a haystack. The final joke on the page—in a reference to a figure of speech common to the time—was a large room where shoppers could take home a “nigger for your woodpile.”44 Ted’s drawing shows the store’s tuxedo-clad owner proudly gesturing to a room full of black men—drawn in the big-lipped, wide-eyed, ink-black caricature typical of the time—who smile and chat among themselves, waiting patiently for purchase. The careless reference to slavery can’t be missed—the smiling men are for sale, after all—and yet, to Geisel, the joke was likely never intended to be at the expense of black men. Rather, it was about the frequently used idiom, which has since rightly fallen out of use, replaced mainly by skeleton in the closet.
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