Ted would also submit several cartoons to the Recorder during his time at Central, some attributed to “Pete the Pessimist,” and most of which are unremarkable. His earliest known cartoon—a joke about classmate “Frawncis” Blinn, who took six years to graduate—shows a bald and aged Blinn leaning over a cane, with a rolled-up paper helpfully labeled diploma tucked under his arm. It’s a simple line drawing of the character in profile, with some crosshatched shading at Blinn’s feet. Mostly, Ted seemed to be aping the styles he saw in the forgettable comic strips in the Springfield Union, such as Frederick Leipziger’s gag-a-day Doings of the Van Loons and Charles Wellington’s That Son-In-Law of Pa’s!, both of which relied on easy jokes about henpecked, put-upon husbands.
His drawing would improve over the next three years, though Ted would have very little formal art instruction—he could recall taking only one art class in high school, and didn’t remain in it long. As Ted remembered:
[A]t one point during the class, I turned the painting I was working on upside down—I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but actually I was checking the balance: if something is wrong with the composition upside down, then something’s wrong with it the other way. And the teacher said, “Theodor, real artists don’t turn their paintings upside down.” . . . I somehow felt I wouldn’t learn much from that teacher, so I left the course.66
As his work evolved, Ted would continue to be more influenced by the comic pages than by formal instruction. A cartoon drawn during his senior year, for example, highlighting his class trip to Washington, D.C., has an innovative layout that recalls Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, with hotel windows framing a central drawing of President Warren G. Harding shaking hands with Ted’s classmates. The cartoon has some other nice moments. There’s a decent caricature of Harding, a self-portrait of Ted playing ukulele in a hotel window, and a student feeding a dinosaur skeleton as a policeman rushes into the frame, billy club raised, ready to make an arrest. Figures have large, well-defined feet, and detailed clothing—polka-dotted trousers, pinstriped pants and dark waistcoats—reminiscent of George McManus’s Bringing Up Father, which had debuted in 1913. “He was as good an artist then as he ever was,” said classmate Walter Whittum—a statement that gave Ted either too much or too little credit.67 Ted’s high school art, while competent, would give very little indication of the unique and whimsical style to come.
* * *
• • • •
The hard stares and thrown coals of Ted’s freshman year ended late in the autumn of his sophomore year, when World War I came to a close on November 11, 1918. Anti-German sentiment would, for the most part, fade in Springfield—and Ted, no longer lying low, would take a more active role in rabble-rousing, cheekily proposing in the pages of the Recorder that students unionize into a “Pupil’s Union,” on a platform of “extra pay for homework” and “[e]ntertainment, [such] as dancing and movies, in all study rooms.”68 And Ted did love the movies and movie stars. In the winter of 1917, he had read in a film magazine that Douglas Fairbanks, his favorite movie star, shaved naked every morning. Ted decided to take up the same habit, carefully scraping away with a razor in the cold bathroom in the house on Fairfield Street. “I almost froze to death,” Ted said later. “[I] nicked myself with my father’s razor, and lost faith in Douglas Fairbanks, who was doing all his naked shaving in sunny California.”69
Ted’s father, perhaps sensing that his son needed more physical activity than he would find as a reporter for the Central Recorder, insisted that Ted enroll in dance classes from Mr. McCarty in the opulent ballroom of the Hotel Kimball. Ted hated it from the start. He felt slightly embarrassed by the act of dancing; he was already tall and slightly gangly in high school, and would eventually top out at more than six feet. Worse, he hated wearing the dancing shoes that he lugged back and forth in a green flannel bag. Dancing was purely an obligation to his father, and Ted loathed every moment of it. He would soon quit attending classes.
But his father would keep trying. Next, Ted was enrolled in fencing at the Turnverein, where instructor Chris Neubauer subjected his young student to what Ted called “hour-long agonies.” The course necessitated calisthenics and rope climbing—activities Ted openly detested—and he was mortified by the pink jersey Neubauer required him to wear. Ted would make it through seventeen classes before T.R. finally permitted his visibly exasperated son to stop attending classes altogether. Later, Neubauer—who informed T.R. that his son had “no pectoral muscles at all”70—recommended T.R. give his son a canoe so that he could row it to develop his upper body strength. T.R. complied, buying Ted an eighteen-foot canoe for his fifteenth birthday. Ted would do little more than push it onto the water at Watershops Pond and sit in it, never touching the oars.
On December 5, 1919, Ted’s grandfather, Theodor Adolph Geisel, died at age seventy-nine, after a prolonged illness. While the eldest Geisel had been out of the brewing industry for years, he’d kept a close eye on the Prohibition debate, and had been astute enough to recognize that a constitutional day of reckoning was at hand. Following the passage in late 1919 of the Volstead Act, which defined “intoxicating liquors” that would be prohibited under federal law, T.R., too, had been trying to come up with solutions that might keep the Springfield Breweries company afloat in an age of temperance. He even went so far as to change the recipe of the company’s Extra Tivoli Beer—which had won an international competition for its high quality—to give it a lower alcohol content that he hoped would bring it under the definition of “non-intoxicating liquors.”
It wouldn’t be enough. On January 17, 1920, Prohibition officially went into effect under the sledgehammer weight of the Eighteenth Amendment. For his efforts to keep Springfield Breweries solvent, T.R. was promoted to president of the company, occupying his new office the very week the sale of intoxicating liquors became illegal. That was it for Springfield Breweries. “My father was rather angry about that turn of events,” Ted said, with considerable understatement.71
For weeks, T.R. sat in the Geisels’ darkened living room, head in hand, muttering, “son of a bitch . . . son of a bitch.” “[H]e became very cynical,” said Ted, “. . . he didn’t know what to do with himself.”72 For more than a year, T.R. would mourn the loss of the industry he had grown up in, dutifully reporting to work and sitting at his desk in his offices on Fort Street, even as the company was picked to pieces around him, its assets, such as they were, slowly liquidated.
Prohibition wasn’t the only new component of societal upheaval in 1920. That summer saw the formal adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Ted’s views on feminism would evolve slowly. While he would go for cheap laughs about women in his college humor magazine and would later be criticized for the absence of female protagonists in his work, Ted quietly idealized women and craved their attention and acceptance. He would always consider himself publicly awkward and something of a wallflower, but during his high school years he exhibited a determined effort to land himself a serious girlfriend, serving on the school’s social committee and prom committee and as assistant manager of the Friday-night dances. His first kiss, however, with classmate Libby Elsborg, would be something of a disappointment for both of them. “I don’t know why I kissed Libby,” Ted said, “and neither did she.”73 Much better was his first real crush, on a girl in his class named Thelma Lester, “whom I loved right down to the bottom of my boots,”74 he said fondly.
And for a young man who would always swear his traumatic experience with Teddy Roosevelt and the missing medal had given him an aversion to appearing on stage, Ted was very involved in social activities, including those that required public speaking. He was an officer in the debate club—it was one of the clubs where he could see Thelma Lester—and the secretary of the student senate. By all accounts he performed ably in productions of The Mikado and Twelfth Night. In fact, in his final semester at Central, Ted would write and perform i
n a two-act minstrel show in the school auditorium, serving as the sole author of the show’s opening one-act comedy called Chicopee Surprised. After an intermission, Ted performed in the minstrel show with the rest of his classmates, strumming a tenor banjo in a five-piece jazz band,75 and even soloing—while made up in “blackface” common to minstrel shows of the era—on recent comedy novelty songs like “Sweet Marimba.”76
Several years later, Central High School principal William C. Hill would describe Ted as “a young man of upright character and good ability”:
Ted comes of a good family with high ideals for the success of their children, and I have sometimes thought that it was this influence which kept his head from being too much turned by the popularity which his natural gifts of good fellowship and humor brought him . . . he has qualities of leadership which can be steadied and turned to serious purpose.77
For all his modest talk, Ted was well liked in high school by classmates and teachers alike. He was good looking—his dramatically lit yearbook photo in the 1921 Pnalka shows him with a far-off stare, with no touch of a smile, in a stiff white collar, looking very much a serious young man. This may have been a private joke, since it was his sense of humor that had made him one of the most popular boys in the school. Indeed, in one of the final issues of the Recorder that would appear during Ted’s senior year, there was a description of the “ideal boy” at Central as having “Don Benson’s grin, / Ralph Walsh’s build, / Dayton Phillip’s oratorical powers, / [and] Ted Geisel’s wit.”78 His classmates voted him Class Artist and Class Wit, and next to his very serious yearbook photo, Ted had inserted as his benedictory quote: “Next comedy appeared with great applause.”79
It was important both to T.R., who hadn’t attended college, and to Nettie, who had given up a higher education to work in the family bakery, that their son go to college. For Ted, the only question was where. Like many students at Central High School, Ted had been very impressed with and strongly influenced by his English teacher, Edwin A. Smith, an outgoing twenty-three-year-old whom everyone, even the students, called by his nickname “Red.” “[R]ather than being just an English teacher, [Smith] was one of the gang,” said Ted, “—a real stimulating guy who was probably responsible for my starting to write.”80
It was Smith, in fact, who had encouraged Ted to read the work of Hilaire Belloc, the French-born, English-raised poet who wrote outlandish and often violent books of verse for children, including 1896’s The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and the 1907 satirical moral guide, Cautionary Tales for Children. Artist Basil Temple Blackwood often graphically illustrated Belloc’s tales of comeuppance for bad children—one bit of verse ends with a boy being devoured by a lion, leaving behind only his wide-eyed head—but Ted was more intrigued with Belloc’s writing. The poet had a knack for silly names—Charles Augustus Fortescue, Godolphin Horne—and knew how to get a laugh out of an unexpected use of long, unusual words:
The Microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.81
Ted would remain a lifelong fan and admirer, and he had Red Smith to thank for introducing him to Belloc’s unique voice—a voice that would shape his own verse. Smith was also a graduate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire—and Ted also fondly recalled that Smith’s family had run a candy store in White River Junction, Vermont. It was enough to help Ted, and others, make up their minds on where they wanted to go to school. “We all said, ‘Let’s go where Red Smith went,’” Ted recalled.
Encouraged by Smith, Ted and several classmates submitted their applications to Dartmouth. Decades later, in a bit of typical false modesty, Ted would downplay his ambitions to attend Dartmouth and Smith’s role in it. It had all seemed so unintentional and random, he told Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. “I had a good friend at Springfield High who planned to attend Dartmouth, and so I became interested and finally applied,” he said. “My friend never did go, but I wound up here anyway.”82
CHAPTER 2
THE SLOB GENERATION
1921–1925
Late in the summer of 1921, Ted Geisel waved goodbye to his family at Springfield’s Union Station depot—an impressive structure with peaked gables, about half a block from T. R. Geisel’s darkened offices on Fort Street—and boarded a train bound for Dartmouth College, more than 130 miles up the Connecticut River in Hanover, New Hampshire. For the next four hours, the train wove along both the eastern and western shores of the Connecticut before finally depositing Ted at White River Junction, Vermont. Here a taxi conveyed him and his suitcase the final five miles to the Dartmouth campus.
Sitting on more than 250 acres of waterfront wilderness in the little town of Hanover, Dartmouth had been quietly turning out reliable business leaders, researchers, and politicians since its founding in 1769. It was considered a small college—its enrollment when Ted attended there was around 1,800—but its students and alumni were, and are, devoted to it with a nearly religious passion. As perhaps its most famous alumnus, Daniel Webster, had explained in 1818, Dartmouth was “a small college, and yet there are those who love it.”1
And yet to some Dartmouth administrators, the school had been growing too large, too quickly. As one Dartmouth historian later bemoaned, “it became very evident . . . that some step must be taken to control this inflow of students and to prevent the institution from being overwhelmed by the mere weight of numbers.”2 In response, president Ernest Martin Hopkins had implemented a policy of selective admissions, setting up an application process that permitted faculty to cultivate higher-achieving students and encouraged the admission of students who were neither wealthy nor the sons of Dartmouth alumni or were the first in their families to attend college.
Ted was in nearly all of the latter categories. On his Dartmouth application, he had listed his father’s occupation as “Temporarily retired—Brewer,” and while a bit of money from his grandfather’s estate had made Ted’s $250 tuition attainable, T.R.’s perilous employment status meant money would remain tight for the Geisels. On the academic side of things, while Ted’s grades at Central weren’t exceptional, his application had likely prevailed mostly on the strength of Red Smith’s endorsement. Suitably inspired by Smith, Ted planned to major in English. As a freshman, then, he enrolled in English I, filling out the rest of his schedule with prerequisite courses in Latin, chemistry, citizenship, and—to his likely revulsion—physical education. With his fluency in German, he also was permitted to enroll in German 11 as a freshman, a class in which he would receive his only A of the academic year. It was the beginning of what would continue to be for the most part an unremarkable academic career. Ted’s mind would usually be elsewhere.
For his freshman year, Ted took room 416 in Topliff Hall on East Wheelock Street, just down the street from the sprawling Dartmouth Green, the enormous park-like space at the heart of the campus. It was a decent-sized room, meant to house two students—but Ted would have the place, with its view overlooking the street, all to himself. Ted quickly made friends among his floor-mates, but as Pledge Week approached in early fall for Dartmouth’s various fraternities, Ted was disappointed none of the Greek organizations attempted to recruit him—a slight he believed was due to anti-Semitism. “With my black hair and long nose, I was supposed to be Jewish,” Ted said. “It took a year and a half before word got around that I wasn’t.”3
To his surprise, he was elected class treasurer, and was one of two freshmen selected as art editors for the annual Green Book—but it was a floor-mate at Topliff who would help Ted find his true passion. Across the hall from Ted’s room was L. Bronner Jr., an upperclassman who worked as a staff member for Jack-O-Lantern, the Dartmouth humor magazine. With Bronner as his wingman, Ted began spending more and more time in the offices of Jack-O-Lantern—Jacko, as it was always called—in Robinson Hall, on the west side of Dartmouth Green.
The snubbing by Dartmouth’s fraternities was instantly forgotten; Ted knew where his people were, and what he wanted to do. “I think my interest in editing the Dartmouth humor magazine began . . . that Pledge Week.”4
He was also cheered on by a seasoned but intense-looking Jacko staffer named Norman Maclean, an aspiring novelist from Montana and the son of a Presbyterian preacher. With Maclean’s enthusiasm steeling his nerves, Ted began submitting cartoons to Jacko—and when the first issue of the fall semester was published in late October, Ted found, to his delight, that he had four cartoons featured inside. “That was an extension of my activities in high school,” he said5—and his early cartoons are much like those he drew for the Central Recorder, trying to land the joke with pithy one-liners, such as a drawing of two homely young men in beanies and ties, over the caption “Two Arguments Against Matrimony.” Some of Ted’s better freshman-year cartoons take great delight in interpreting phrases or lingo literally, such as his drawing titled “The Pied Piper,” showing a flute player getting shellacked by several thrown pies, or one of his favorites, “The Fatted Calf,” a cartoon of a clearly overweight woman’s balloon-like calves, her feet crammed into bulging high heels.6 Ted would proudly sign his work as Ted G., Ted Geisel, T. Geisel, and at one point, Fish.
Most of Ted’s freshman year, however, seems to have been devoted to working on the Green Book, as after making his debut in Jacko with four cartoons in October 1921, he would only have four more cartoons published for the rest of his freshman year. Doing homework and studying was a slog, too; while he liked the atmosphere and sturdy red-stone facade of the Wilson Library, he much preferred frequenting a cheap local eatery called Scotty’s, where his favorite menu item was a “toast side”—two pieces of toast served with a generous scoop of peanut butter on the side. “He was always raising hell and laughing a lot,” recalled classmate Frederick Blodgett, “and didn’t study worth a damn.”7 Blodgett’s memory was accurate; Ted’s grade-point average would slide from a 2.6 his first semester to a 2.4 the second. It would rarely tick much higher.
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