Who Was Dr. Seuss?

by Janet Pascal

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1 - Goofy Machines

  Chapter 2 - A Very Fine Flying Cow

  Chapter 3 - Boids and Beasties

  Chapter 4 - What I Saw on Mulberry Street

  Chapter 5 - An Elephant up a Tree

  Chapter 6 - Private SNAFU

  Chapter 7 - A Moose, a Nerd, and the Whos

  Chapter 8 - The Cat in the Hat Arrives

  Chapter 9 - Grinches and Turtles and Sneetches

  Chapter 10 - I Speak for the Trees

  Chapter 11 - Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

  TIMELINE OF THEODOR SEUSS GEISEL’S LIFE

  TIMELINE OF THE WORLD

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  For Diana, whom I often see

  on the other Mulberry Street—JP

  GROSSET & DUNLAP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

  Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre,

  Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any

  other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or

  encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s

  rights is appreciated.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Janet B. Pascal. Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Nancy Harrison. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Printed in the U.S.A.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pascal, Janet B.

  Who was Dr. Seuss? / by Janet Pascal ; illustrated by Nancy Harrison.

  p. cm.—(Who was...?)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-53543-1

  1. Seuss, Dr.—Juvenile literature. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography—Juvenile literature. 3. Illustrators—United States—Biography—Juvenile literature. 4. Children’s literature—Authorship—Juvenile literature.

  I. Harrison, Nancy, 1963- ill. II. Title.

  PS3513.E2Z793 2011

  813’.52—dc22

  [B]

  2010041738

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Who Was Dr. Seuss?

  In 1985, Princeton University awarded honorary degrees to six people. An honorary degree is given to a person who has done something important for the world. The students were most excited about one of the people being honored. When a tall, thin man with a gray beard stood up, they all leaped to their feet. “I am Sam,” they chanted. “Sam-I-am.” Then they recited, from memory, all of Green Eggs and Ham. It was a special way to show Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, how much his books meant to them.

  Among the Princeton students that year was Michelle Robinson. Many years later, she married Barack Obama and became the First Lady of the United States. In 2010 she chose another Dr. Seuss book, The Cat in the Hat, to read aloud to the nation’s schoolchildren. The First Lady knew that books for beginning readers used to be solemn and boring. Then Dr. Seuss appeared with his bouncy rhymes and wild and crazy characters like the Cat in the Hat, Horton, and the Grinch. Learning to read was never the same again.

  Chapter 1

  Goofy Machines

  Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on March 2, 1904. Springfield was full of factories turning out cars, guns, bicycles, tires, and toys. One of the factories was a brewery that Ted’s grandfather had started called Kalmbach and Geisel. Ted’s father became the president of the company. Its beer was so popular that the people of Springfield nicknamed the business “Come Back and Guzzle.”

  Ted grew up in a family that loved wordplay. His mother’s family owned a bakery. As a child, she made up rhymes listing the pie flavors. Later, she sang her children to sleep with the same rhymes. Ted believed that his love of verse came from his memories of those pie poems.

  His sister, two years older, was named Margaretha. But she nicknamed herself “Marnie Mecca Ding Ding Guy.”

  His father, also named Theodor, liked to dream up goofy, complicated inventions in his spare time. Ted’s favorite was a “Silk-Stocking-Back-Seam-Wrong-Detecting Mirror.”

  Young Ted loved to hang around the zoo. He got special treatment because his father helped run the zoo. Sometimes, he said, “they’d let me in the cage with the small lions and the small tigers, and I got chewed up every once in a while.” (He was famous for exaggerating when he told stories.)

  After a visit to the zoo, Ted would rush home and draw animals on the walls of his room. Somehow the animals never ended up looking quite like what he had seen, so he would make up names for them. One of his mother’s favorites was a creature with ears that were nine feet long. He called it a Wynnmph.

  Like many people in Springfield, the Geisels came from Germany. Ted grew up speaking both German and English. In 1914, World War I started in Europe. Many countries were fighting against Germany. The United States was not in the war yet. (That didn’t happen until 1917.) But Germans were becoming very unpopular in America.

  At school, German American children were often bullied. Sometimes kids would throw rocks at Ted. The Geisel family tried hard to prove that they were patriotic Americans. Ted’s Boy Scout troop had a contest to see who could sell the most Liberty bonds—a way to help the government support the war effort. Ted’s grandfather bought one thousand dollars worth. This made Ted one of the winners.

  At the awards ceremony, medals were given out by former president Theodore Roosevelt. But someone in the Boy Scouts had made a mistake. There were ten winners, yet Roosevelt had only nine medals. When he ran out of medals, Ted was left standing alone onstage. Roosevelt bellowed, “What’s this little boy doing here?” No one explained that Ted was a winner, too. Ted slunk away.

  From then on, it was very hard for Ted to get up in front of people. Even after he was famous, he refused to give speeches. When he tried to appear on a television talk show, he was so scared that he couldn’t say a word.

  After the war ended in 1918, Ted’s family faced a new problem. As 1920 began, Prohibition became the law in the United States. Prohibition meant that it was illegal to make or sell alcohol—including beer. The brewery had to close, and Ted’s father was out of a job. The family still had enough to live on. But the loss of the brewery was a terrible blow. Now the family had much less money, just as Ted was about to graduate from high school. But education was important to the Geisel family. No matter what, they made sure there was enough mo
ney for Ted to go to college.

  Ted had never paid much attention to his schoolwork. He spent most of his time writing jokes for the school paper. The one class that interested him was English.

  PROHIBITION

  IN 1920 IT BECAME ILLEGAL TO SELL OR MANUFACTURE ALCOHOL IN THE UNITED STATES. THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT, CALLED PROHIBITION, WAS PASSED BY ACTIVISTS WHO THOUGHT DRINKING LIQUOR WAS RUINING PEOPLE’S LIVES. BUT PROHIBITION WAS NOT VERY SUCCESSFUL. CRIME GROUPS SUCH AS THE MAFIA BECAME MORE POWERFUL BY SMUGGLING LIQUOR. GANGSTERS LIKE AL CAPONE BECAME FOLK HEROES. MOST PEOPLE KEPT ON DRINKING, EVEN THOUGH IT MEANT THEY WERE BREAKING THE LAW. MANY TOWNS HAD A “SPEAKEASY,” A PLACE WHERE YOU COULD BUY ALCOHOLIC DRINKS IF YOU KNEW THE SECRET PASSWORD OR KNOCK.

  THE AMENDMENT WAS ESPECIALLY HARD ON PEOPLE LIKE THE GEISELS WHO HAD MADE THEIR LIVING SELLING ALCOHOL. (TED NEVER FORGOT WHAT IT DID TO HIS FAMILY. MANY OF HIS EARLY CARTOONS MADE FUN OF PROHIBITION.) CITIES THAT HAD BEEN FAMOUS FOR THEIR BREWERIES SUDDENLY LOST THEIR MOST IMPORTANT BUSINESSES—AND ALL THE TAX MONEY AND JOBS THAT WENT WITH THEM. SOME BREWERIES TRIED TO SURVIVE BY SELLING SODA. OTHER PLACES SOLD GRAPE JUICE OR MALT SYRUP. THEY INCLUDED CAREFUL INSTRUCTIONS TELLING THEIR CUSTOMERS EXACTLY WHAT NOT TO DO TO THEIR JUICE OR SYRUP TO MAKE SURE IT DIDN’T TURN INTO ALCOHOL. BY THE 1930S, IT WAS CLEAR THAT PROHIBITION WAS A FAILED EXPERIMENT. IN 1933, PRESIDENT FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT SIGNED A LAW THAT HELPED END IT. THEN HE SAID, “I THINK THIS WOULD BE A GOOD TIME FOR A BEER.”

  Ted’s English teacher had gone to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He loved Dartmouth so much that Ted decided to go there, too.

  Chapter 2

  A Very Fine Flying Cow

  Ted loved Dartmouth. It was located in green countryside with beautiful old buildings. He made friends there who he kept for the rest of his life. Shortly after he arrived, he discovered the school humor magazine, Jack-O-Lantern, fondly known as Jacko. It became his dream to work on Jacko, and he started spending all his time in the office. Staff members would find him there in the morning, fast asleep at his typewriter.

  He was quickly elected to the staff and, at the end of his junior year, he was made editor in chief. The students loved his stories and drawings, and he became a very important person at Dartmouth. Even so, his classmates voted him “Least Likely to Succeed.” Ted never seemed to be serious about anything.

  A month before graduation, Ted threw a party. The guests shared a bottle of gin. When a couple of boys began horsing around on the roof, Ted’s landlord called the police. Because of Prohibition, gin was illegal, so Ted was in a lot of trouble.

  As punishment, he was not allowed to write for Jacko anymore. But he found a way around this. He signed his work with fake names. He had already used joke names such as Oo-La-La McCarty and Theo LeSieg (LeSieg was Geisel spelled backward). Now he started using just his middle name, Seuss.

  At Dartmouth, Ted had spent all his time on Jacko. His grades were not very good. Ted’s father was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to get a job after college. But Ted told his dad not to worry. He was going to Oxford, a famous university in England. What’s more, he said, he had won a prize to pay for it! His father was so thrilled that he told the local newspaper. The next day, Ted was headline news.

  But there was a problem. Ted had applied to Oxford. But he hadn’t really won any money. He only hoped he would. Ted had to tell his father the truth. The older Geisel was a very proud man. He had already announced to the world that Ted was going to Oxford. So he decided that he would have to pay for his son to go. In the summer of 1925, Ted boarded a steamship for the long journey to England.

  Ted never really fit in at Oxford. The university was about eight hundred years old. All the students seemed very serious. The lectures bored him. Ted tried to listen and take notes, but his mind wandered. Instead, he doodled. The pages of his notebooks were filled with chickens with windmill tails, dogs walking across tightropes, and cows with wings.

  Helen Palmer, another American, was at Oxford studying to be a teacher. One day she looked over Ted’s shoulder to see what he was drawing.

  “That’s a very fine flying cow!” she said.

  Helen told Ted his drawings were special. She said he should be an illustrator. Helen’s remark changed Ted’s life. He realized he didn’t want to teach. He didn’t want to write novels. He just wanted to keep drawing his mixed-up animals. After that, Ted and Helen spent all their time together. One day, he proposed and Helen accepted. But they couldn’t get married yet. They didn’t have any money.

  After she graduated from Oxford, Helen took a teaching job in New Jersey. Ted dropped out of school and moved back in with his parents in Springfield, MA. He knew what he wanted to do with his life. Now he just had to figure out how to make a living from his drawings.

  Chapter 3

  Boids and Beasties

  Back at his parents’ house, Ted spent his time drawing cartoons and writing funny articles. He sent them to everyone he could think of—magazines in New York, college friends, advertising agencies. But no one except Helen seemed to be interested in flying cows and dancing dogs.

  Then a famous magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, accepted a cartoon. Ted had drawn two elegant tourists with parasols. They were sitting on tame camels and imagining that they were brave explorers. He signed it, simply, “Seuss.”

  The Post paid him twenty-five dollars. Even in 1927, that wasn’t a lot of money. But it would pay for a month’s rent. Ted decided it was enough to show he could earn a living as an illustrator. He moved to New York City. But until he had a steady income, he still couldn’t marry Helen. Instead Ted shared an apartment with a friend from Dartmouth. It was cheap and dirty. Every night before they went to bed, they had to take canes and whack away the rats.

  Ted’s roommate knew someone who worked for a humor magazine called Judge. He introduced Ted, and the magazine offered him a job. He would be a writer and artist and earn a salary.

  Now he and Helen could marry. They had to change the date of their wedding once because Ted’s sister, Marnie, was about to give birth. Ted wanted his whole family to be able to come to his wedding. Ted’s niece, Peggy, was born on November 1, 1927. On November 29, Ted and Helen were married in her parents’ parlor.

  Ted became very popular at Judge. He started writing a column called “Boids and Beasties,” where he could introduce all his strange, playful creatures. He signed the column, “Dr. Seuss.” He added the “Dr.” because he had disappointed his father by dropping out of Oxford.

  Unfortunately, Judge magazine was having money troubles. They didn’t always have enough cash to pay their staff. Companies paid for ads in Judge with samples of their products instead of money. These samples got passed on to the staff as their salaries. Often Ted was paid in cases of shaving cream or soda. Once he received 1,872 nail clippers. That wasn’t much help in paying the costs of everyday life.

  Then, in 1928, he had a stroke of luck. It started with Flit, a popular bug killer. Before air-conditioning, people had to leave their windows open in the summer to let in cool breezes. Houses became full of bugs. Ted started thinking about how awful summer must have been for the knights of old. It was bad enough having bugs inside—what if dragons could fly in and bite you?

  He drew a cartoon showing a knight in armor who can’t get to sleep because there is a dragon in his room. The caption says: “Darn it all, another dragon. And just after I’d sprayed the whole castle with Flit.”

  The wife of an advertising executive for Flit was at a beauty salon where she happened to see the cartoon in a magazine. She loved it so much, she made her husband hire Ted to do all the Flit ads.

  Ted drew people in funny situations being attacked by huge bugs. This became one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.

  Today, few people remember the tagline Ted invented: “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” But from the late twenties to the fifties, everyone knew it. Comedians quoted it, and it appeared in popular songs. Sales of Flit sh
ot way up. And Dr. Seuss’s drawings became famous.

  Flit hired Ted at a salary of twelve thousand dollars a year—a lot of money at the time. The next year, the stock market crashed, and America plunged into the Great Depression. All over the country, people were out of work, poor, and starving. But thanks to Flit, Ted had plenty of money.

  With his new wealth, he and Helen began throwing parties. They had a very active social life, and Ted became famous in their circle of friends for his practical jokes. Once he sneaked into the kitchen and put a huge plastic pearl in one of the oysters that was going to be served at dinner. Another time, he filled a friend’s bathtub with Jell-O and goldfish.

  In 1931, Ted’s mother died at the age of fifty-two. Her early death was a shock to Ted. But at least she had lived long enough to see his first big success.

  Flit made Ted financially secure for life, but there was one problem: He didn’t want to spend all his time drawing Flit ads. But his contract wouldn’t let him do most other kinds of work. Years later he wrote, “I would like to say I went into children’s book work because of my great understanding of children.” But it wasn’t really true. Actually, illustrating children’s books was one of the few things his contract let him do.

  NEW YORK APARTMENTS

  THE GEISELS’ FIRST APARTMENT IN MANHATTAN WAS RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM A HORSE STABLE. SOON THEY MOVED TO A BETTER APARTMENT. THEIR NEW PHONE NUMBER WAS ONLY ONE DIGIT DIFFERENT FROM A NEARBY FISH STORE. THEY OFTEN GOT TELEPHONE CALLS FROM PEOPLE WHO WANTED TO BUY FISH. INSTEAD OF TELLING THEM THEY HAD THE WRONG NUMBER, TED WOULD DRAW A PICTURE OF THE FISH THEY HAD ORDERED AND DELIVER IT. NOT EVERYONE WAS AMUSED AT THE TIME, BUT JUST THINK WHAT THOSE DRAWINGS WOULD BE WORTH TODAY!