Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  * * *

  • • • •

  Middle school at Forest Park School was just around the corner from their house in Fairfield—there was no need to cross the busy Sumner Avenue—but Ted had grown more interested in practical jokes than practical knowledge.

  By his own admission, Ted had become something of a rabble-rouser and a smartass on Fairfield Street, but he thought in all fairness that some of his colorfully named neighbors had it coming. Living close by were the Bump and Haynes families, sanctimonious teetotalers who annoyed even the mild-mannered T. R. Geisel. Much kinder was their neighbor directly across the street, Maurice Sherman, editor of the Springfield Union, and down on the corner at number 90, the dentist Dr. Leonard Stebbins, whose surname was perhaps Ted’s favorite among his neighbors—second only to that of businessman Norval Bacon, a name Ted would file away and use several times in his career as a cartoonist.

  If Ted had a nemesis among the adults on Fairfield, however, it was probably Horace Clark, the humorless secretary of a packing case company who lived at number 36, near the Soccer Field. It was Clark who had thwarted Ted’s effort to hang a kite string telephone line between Ted’s window and that of his best friend, Bill King, who lived next door to Clark—but their antagonistic relationship reached its nadir on Halloween of 1912, when Ted and his friend Charles Napier were playing pranks on neighbors up and down the street. That night, as Ted was at Clark’s parlor window “rattling a cricket”—a rapidly spinning spool that vibrates loudly on a flat surface—Napier brazenly urinated on Clark’s front porch. Napier escaped unseen, but Ted—whose faux cricket had the desired effect of startling Clark—was nabbed when the annoyed Clark sped out the front door and collared Ted at the side window. Even as he recounted the story sixty years later, Ted was still smarting at the injustice of the situation:

  I am afraid my father never believed me when for many years after I protested my innocence . . . Horace nabbed and blamed me for the nuisance that C.N. had committed at least half an hour before. He then dragged me to my house, rang the doorbell and told my father what I had not done to his porch, using, of course, the dignified sentence, “Theodor wetted my stoop.”46

  T.R.’s response to this talebearer was never recorded.

  Ted’s antics aside, T.R. was beginning to have his hands full with work. In 1914, Ted’s recently widowed grandfather sold his business to the Springfield Breweries Company—the very same company he had sold his Highland Brewing Company to in 1898—and promptly retired. T.R. was promoted to manager at a salary of $100 per week—about $2,000 in today’s dollars. The senior Geisel, meanwhile, took his money from the sale of the company and began investing in real estate, and found he was just as good at land as he had been at lager. Hotels were bought and sold, and the stables in Sumner Avenue in which Ted’s grandfather had once kept his horses now held two Packards, carefully maintained and regularly polished by a private chauffeur.

  Still, there were signs of distress on the horizon. On May 7, 1915, the English passenger ship Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sank off the southern coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. Despite public outrage and amped-up cries for the United States to enter what was, at that moment, still a largely European conflict, President Woodrow Wilson refused to declare war. But as the United States and Germany eyed each other warily across the Atlantic, anti-German sentiment began to fester in many American communities—and Springfield was no exception. Ted began to hear himself and his family members referred to derisively as Huns, while classmates pointed him out nervously as “the German brewer’s kid.”47

  The Geisels did their best to shrug it off—but it is probably no coincidence that the Geisels spent much of 1915 on extended vacations and road trips away from Springfield. That spring, T.R. and Nettie took the train west to San Francisco for a month-long visit to the Panama–Pacific International Exposition. Years later, Ted loved to tell a story of his father’s adventures at the expo, reporting with excitement that T.R. had taken advantage of an exhibit that permitted fairgoers to make a free long-distance phone call—a very new phenomenon—to any city in the United States. As Ted told it, his father gleefully phoned Springfield mayor Frank Stacy, and even remembered their conversation had been reported in the newspaper under the large-type headline “Geisel Calls Mayor.” Ted could even quote the story down to the letter.48

  Unfortunately, Ted’s enthusiasm for the story aside, there is little evidence the dramatic phone call actually happened—for one thing, no such newspaper story ever appeared. Years later, Ted’s young narrator Marco in And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street would be warned by his father to

  “Stop telling such outlandish tales.

  Stop turning minnows into whales.”49

  But for Ted himself, turning minnows into whales was all part of the fun. There would always be a bit of Marco, the teller of outlandish tales, in Theodor Seuss Geisel—and in Dr. Seuss.

  * * *

  • • • •

  Ted spent much of that long summer of 1915 vacationing with his mother and sister in a beach house near the coast in Clinton, Connecticut. Ted loved clamming in the cold New England waters, and he and Marnie competed in endless tennis matches, a game Ted played well enough, but which Marnie—two years older and with a hard serve—almost always won. With the summer beach house excursions, and a grandfather who drove a gleaming Packard and lived at one of Springfield’s most prestigious addresses, Ted was aware that the Geisels were among the town’s more affluent families. Yet he was also aware that his family’s German heritage meant they would never truly attain the social status of the long-established families like the Wessons.

  Ted tried to put the best face on it. “Our fathers did get into some clubs, like the Elks,” said Ted, “and they took us kids to Elks’ clambakes where we ate lobsters and Quahog clams and corn-on-the-cob and our fathers drank beer until our mothers made them stop and we all came home on the trolley car singing and wildly happy.”50 But while Ted would accept the status quo, he would never be wildly happy about it. As a cartoonist, standing up to systemic injustice—whether it wore the face of racism, anti-environmentalism, or just plain meanness—would be a central theme in much of his best work.

  For the most part, the Geisels’ status would be elevated by genuine success. Business at Springfield Breweries continued to boom; the company was now moving more than half a million barrels annually across New England. T.R.’s new offices were in a building situated at Fort and Water Streets in the center of downtown,51 with easy access to both the railroad and the river, and still easily reachable by streetcar. T.R. had been promoted quickly, moving from manager of the Liberty branch over to the larger Hampden branch. While Ted rarely expressed any interest in joining his father in the brewing business, he could be persuaded to take odd jobs from time to time—and in late 1916, he spent several weekends accompanying his father out to the frozen Springfield Breweries pond to oversee a team of French Canadian workers as they harvested ice.

  On one of those cold weekend mornings, Ted watched as one of the workers suddenly fell through the ice, and joined his father and the work crew in the mad scramble to fish the man out. As the laborer was finally pulled to safety and draped with blankets, his hands went to his head in a panic. “Mon chapeau! Mon chapeau!” he exclaimed, and threw himself back into the frigid water to retrieve his missing hat. Ted loved this story, though he would shake his head in wonder that anyone would “risk his life for his hat.”52 Decades later, one of Ted’s characters would similarly risk his life because of a hat.

  And yet even as Springfield Breweries prospered, the nerves of brewers everywhere that winter were on edge about the increasingly vocal and active temperance movement; there was a very real concern that there might be a call for the all-out prohibition of the sale of any form of alcohol. Ted’s father had followed stories in the Springfield Republican abou
t the march on Washington by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League in 1913 with interest. While Woodrow Wilson had remained quiet on the issue of Prohibition during the 1916 election, the newly elected Congress leaned strongly in favor of a constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol.

  The debate erupted into the open on Fairfield Street, with the Geisels’ Prohibition-minded neighbors, the Bumps and the Hayneses, now actively lobbying for a liquor ban. Ted remembered sitting at the top of the stairs listening to his father and Uncle Will as they drank whiskey in the first-floor living room, laughing and plotting revenge on the Bumps and the Hayneses by arranging to have one of the Springfield Breweries delivery wagons pull up in front of the teetotalers’ homes to drop off several kegs. Both men would recant by the morning light of sobriety, but Ted sympathized with his father’s feelings; he would never be entirely trustful of so-called moral crusaders who tried to impose their agendas on their fellow citizens.

  Anti-German sentiment was also continuing to fracture communities around the country, further decaying with President Wilson’s February 3, 1917 announcement that the United States would be severing diplomatic relations with Germany over that nation’s continued use of U-boat warfare—a threat to the “freedom of the seas,” said Wilson. The Geisels and Seusses and their German neighbors would curtail many of their public activities at the Turnverein or at the Schützenverein riflery club, even as behind closed doors they would continue to dine on German food, drink German beer, and converse and sing loudly in the German language. Some evenings Ted’s father and grandfather would retire to the front music room to listen to classical music or opera, playing the Victrola a bit too loudly. “You really should try to see a Wagnerian opera sometime,” Ted recalled his grandfather telling his father, nearly shouting to be heard over the music. “That German music is not as bad as it sounds.” It was a perhaps too-frank appraisal of the famous German composer that always made Ted laugh.53

  Things would go from bad to worse on April 6, 1917, when the United States formally declared war on Germany. As a wave of nativism and xenophobia swept the country, all things German became taboo: Frankfurters became hot dogs. Hamburgers became liberty sandwiches. German-sounding street names were changed, and the town of Berlin, Michigan, would change its name to Marne. In a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, a thirty-year-old German immigrant named Robert Prager was lynched.54 Frightened, many recent immigrants—whether Irish, German, Italian—would try to emphasize their pride in their adopted country by assuming a hyphenated modifier, such as “German-American.” Former president Theodore Roosevelt, sounding like many Americans at the time, was having none of it. “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,” he had told a whooping Carnegie Hall crowd.55

  The Geisels would experience some harassment during the war—they weren’t just German but also brewers, pretty much playing to the stereotype. It was in this atmosphere of xenophobia that Ted began his freshman year of high school that fall, enrolling at Central High School on State Street, across from the Springfield Library. For Ted, the harassment would continue throughout his freshman year. “During the fever of World War I, when I was about fourteen, everyone was angry at the Germans,” Ted said later. “I was not only known as the ‘Kaiser,’ but because of my father’s job at the brewery, the ‘Drunken Kaiser.’ I sometimes fled home with coals bouncing off my head.”56

  The Geisels did their very best to demonstrate their American patriotism, with T.R. teaching marksmanship for the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, while Ted, as a member of Boy Scout Troop 13, dutifully sold Liberty bonds to support the allied cause. The Liberty bond sale would in fact be the source of one of Ted’s most traumatic childhood memories—even if it never really happened.

  As Ted related the story, his grandfather—also feeling he had to prove his patriotism—had purchased a supply truck for Springfield’s militia and, when he learned his grandson was selling Liberty bonds, made a point of purchasing $1,000 worth. Thanks largely to his grandfather’s largesse, Ted’s Boy Scout troop had the second-highest sales in the region—and Ted himself was among the top ten individual fundraisers. As such, he would be receiving a medal from Theodore Roosevelt when the former president came to Springfield on Wednesday, May 1, 1918, as part of his New England speaking tour to rally support for Liberty bonds.

  “We all put on our Scout uniforms and marched to City Hall,” Ted recalled, “and after Roosevelt had given a fiery speech, we lined up onstage to be decorated.” With his family and thousands of denizens of Springfield watching, Ted stood at the end of a line of nine other boys, awaiting his medal. Colonel Roosevelt slowly made his way down the row, pinning medals on chests and shaking hands. “But somebody had made a mistake,” said Ted, “and there were ten boys and only nine medals.” And so when the colonel arrived at Ted at the end of the line, “Roosevelt had nothing to pin on me,” Ted said, wincing at the memory. “He just stood there, nonplussed. Then a Scoutmaster ran up and said there had been a misunderstanding, and shoved me off the stage.”57 For the rest of his life, Ted would attribute his frequent bouts of stage fright and dread of “platform appearances” to Teddy Roosevelt and the missing medal.

  While this is a good story, it’s probably not entirely true. Over the years, Ted would continue to polish it, heightening the drama to make his embarrassment even more palpable. “I can still hear it now,” Ted said in 1965 as he recounted the story to The Saturday Evening Post. “Teddy Roosevelt looking around and asking, ‘What is this little boy doing here?’ And all those eyes from the audience staring right through me, the people whispering, ‘Ted Geisel tried to get a medal and he didn’t deserve it.’ I can hear them saying, ‘What’s he doing there?’”58

  Colonel Roosevelt was certainly in Springfield on May 1, at the invitation of the Hampden County Improvement League—and the following day the Springfield Republican ran a front-page photograph of him standing in the rain, speaking to the Boy Scouts on the steps of the auditorium. But there is no stage, no sign of a medal ceremony; Roosevelt, in a dark coat, simply stands on the steps, facing the crowd, while several Scouts are visible to his left.59 According to the contemporaneous report of the events in the Republican, “[b]efore entering the hall, he [Roosevelt] delivered a short address to the scouts, thanking them for their service and congratulating them upon engaging in training that is the basis of sound citizenship in the future.”60 Still, while it remains unclear whether there was a medal ceremony that day—and whether it went awry in the manner described by Ted—it’s obvious something happened that day that forever spooked Ted of public appearances. Perhaps, at age fourteen, Ted was simply terrified by the mere thought of appearing in public—and Roosevelt was incorporated into Ted’s panic merely because of his proximity. To Ted, the details wouldn’t matter much anyway; he had his story—and a good one—that would be related and dramatically retold countless times throughout his life, a minnow forever turned into a whale.

  * * *

  • • • •

  When Ted entered Central High School in the fall of 1917, it was considered to be the school where the upwardly mobile sent their children to prepare them for college. For the Geisels, that certainly seemed to be the case for Marnie, who got great grades, struggling only with math, and excelling in French, German, and Latin. She would graduate in 1919 magna cum laude and go on to attend Smith College. For Ted, however, school was something to be endured, not mastered, though he later boasted of maintaining a B average “without working.”61 Like Marnie, he was baffled by math—even basic arithmetic would so frustrate him that for his entire life, he refused to even balance a checkbook—and while he enjoyed foreign languages, he loathed Latin so much that he preferred to simply skip the class altogether. He would make fun of it mercilessly in the pages of the school’s student newspaper, the Central Recorder.

  “[I]n high school you had to go out for some kind of activity,”
Ted said later. “I looked at these bruisers who were playing football and I decided to do something with a pencil. It worked and I enjoyed it.”62 For most of his high school years he would write—and draw a little—for the Recorder, serving as the newspaper’s official “live wire” and then as boys’ news editor.63 Ted was never one to take his duties too seriously, however—and almost immediately he was making a name for himself among his classmates by writing short one-line jokes known as grinds. The dreaded Latin class drew Ted’s fire early, serving as the butt of the joke for a one-liner about the newly enacted federal daylight saving time: “It’ll be just our luck to be in Latin class when they turn back the clocks.”64

  He was also getting his first taste of writing clever rhyming verse for an audience, penning parodies of famous poems, most notably spoofing Walt Whitman’s ode to Abraham Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!” which Ted—again training his eye on the despised Latin class—repurposed as “O Latin” (“O Latin! my Latin! that study hour is done”).65 His name was spelled wrong on the piece—they credited him as Theodore Geisel—but Ted would be off and running with one variation on his name after another over his four years, signing pieces as Ted Geisel, Theo S. Geisel, T. S. Geisel, T.S.G., and when the mood struck, as T. S. LeSieg. Ted wasn’t the first Geisel to craft a pseudonym by spelling his surname backward; he had stolen the trick from his father, who had a weakness for playing the numbers—a bit of illegal gambling—and would sign his betting slips as “LeSieg” to avoid embarrassment in the event they were ever publicly discovered.