But grades were beside the point; Ted, like Daniel Webster, immediately warmed to Dartmouth itself, finding a sense of purpose and sense of belonging—though rarely inside a classroom. He enjoyed having his name in print in Jacko, worked hard at Green Book, and began making friendships he would keep and value for the rest of his life. For Ted, there would be no higher testament to a man’s character than to learn he was a Dartmouth man (and they were all men—Dartmouth would not admit women until 1972, the last of the Ivy League schools to do so). As a Dartmouth man, then, Ted began to carry himself with a bit more flash and swagger, cheering enthusiastically at football games, adding bow ties to his wardrobe, and lounging on the Green—but there would still always be just a bit of reserve, a hint of that slightly nervous Boy Scout who’d been embarrassed by Teddy Roosevelt. “In person, Ted could appear to be somewhat reserved, but he was always sunny,” classmate Radford Tanzer remembered. “You never heard him grump.”8
Ted spent the summer after his freshman year back in Springfield, working odd jobs while his father dabbled at investments in real estate. While some investments paid off, most didn’t—and T.R. cautioned his son that the Geisel family’s finances were on shaky ground. Getting a college education and broadening one’s prospects were critical in light of the new family economics. T.R., with an eye on his son’s skidding grades, urged Ted to take his schooling more seriously.
Likely at his father’s behest, then, Ted’s course load for his sophomore year seems to reflect the intentions of a young man deliberately trying to apply himself. Besides the required English courses for his major and the relative safety of German classes—though despite his facility in the language, after his first year, Ted would never attain anything higher than a B—there were classes in zoology and botany, psychology and, in a deliberate nod to his father, two semesters of economics. But the work was hard, and Ted struggled to attain a C even in his English classes; the second semester of his sophomore year would represent the nadir of his academic career when a D in economics bottomed his GPA out at 2.0. That same semester, his botany professor, sensing his misery, promised to raise him one letter grade if Ted learned the Latin names of four trees that had been studied in class. With his ear for odd names, Ted complied and squeaked out a C.
No longer smarting from the freshman year slight that had kept him from pledging a fraternity, Ted became a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon, and would also pledge Pi Delta Epsilon, the honorary journalism fraternity. While he had lobbied hard to get into Sigma Phi Epsilon—and his work on Jacko had made him a desirable pledge—Ted, by his own admission, was a lackadaisical fraternity member and declined to live in the frat house at 11 Webster Avenue. “I wasn’t a good brother,” he admitted. “I didn’t live in the frat house. [It] didn’t change the way I thought.”9
Instead, he found his real brotherhood over on the upper floor of Robinson Hall—the so-called Publications Row, where the offices of both Jacko and The Dartmouth, the daily student newspaper, were located. This was his true fraternity, a place where the staffs of Jacko and The Dartmouth mingled freely, critiquing one another’s work and playing cards late into the evening. It was over the card table, in fact, that he got to know a fellow sophomore named Whitney Campbell from Oak Park, Illinois, who regularly wrote for The Dartmouth. A short fellow, Campbell was a good student, well read in history and the classics. And yet there was still something impish about Campbell that belied his otherwise serious demeanor—photos from the period show him with a wry smile on his face, as if he’s perpetually trying to stifle a laugh. Ted liked him almost immediately.
Ted and “Whit” were quickly inseparable. Campbell even managed to get Ted to regularly engage in physical activity, taking him out on the golf course, where they would play for a nickel a hole. Other times, they’d wander the streets of Hanover at night, collecting empty bottles to trade in for soda pop at Scotty’s, eat popcorn for dinner, then stay up all night talking in the offices in Publications Row or in Campbell’s room. During one of these late-night bull sessions, Ted casually mentioned that he wanted to be editor of Jacko his senior year. “Good,” Campbell replied. “I intend to become editor of The Dartmouth.”10 Both Ted and Whit would pursue their parallel goals with a similar fervor, though with different mindsets, reflective of their personalities. Whit, always the multitasker, could successfully juggle any number of obligations; for Ted, Jacko, and Jacko alone, would be the main priority.
Ted’s sophomore year Jacko cartoons are a slight improvement over those from his freshman year, at least in terms of the illustrations themselves. There’s a bolder use of blacks, the figures are less flat, and there was even an effort at some black-and-white watercoloring, though the effect reproduced so badly on Jacko’s paper that Ted never attempted it again.11 The jokes, however, are still variations on wordplay—probably the best of which is “Tucked in Tight,” in which Ted plays on tight as a slang word for drunk, drawing a disheveled gentleman passed out in a mussed-up bed, a bottle still tightly clutched in one hand. “All you had to do was say ‘gin,’” Ted said later, “and everybody would laugh.”12
There were also cannibal jokes, hunting jokes, and—in a nod to his miserable days under Chris Neubauer at the Turnverein—even a groaner of a fencing joke (“So you’ve taken up fencing?” asks one gentleman, to which the other replies, “Oh, I made a stab at it”). Still, the work was good enough that in January 1923, Norman Maclean offered Ted an official spot on Jacko as a member of the art staff. Ted’s name would now officially appear in the magazine’s masthead, and as far as Ted was concerned, he was on his way to the editor’s chair.
Maclean may have thought so, too. At the beginning of Ted’s junior year in the fall of 1923, Maclean—who’d been appointed as editor of Jack-O-Lantern for his senior year—almost immediately took Ted under his wing as his junior partner and heir apparent. “He found that I was a workhorse,” Ted said later, “so we used to write practically the whole thing ourselves every month.”13 At this point, Ted practically lived on Publications Row—he had even given up his single room in Topliff Hall to live with Robert Sharp, a fellow junior and fellow Springfielder, in South Massachusetts Hall, directly across from Robinson Hall and the offices of Jacko.
Ted loved working with Maclean, and the two of them developed what Ted admitted was a “rather peculiar” method of writing together. “Hunched behind his typewriter, he would bang out a line of words,” recalled Ted. “Sometimes he’d tell me what he’d written, sometimes not. But then he’d always say, ‘The next line’s yours.’ And always, I’d supply it.” It could sometimes make for “rough reading,” Ted admitted, “but it was great sport writing.”14 More and more, however, Ted was writing alone, as Maclean seemed to always be at work on a novel—“and the further he got with his novel,” said Ted, “the less time he had for his Jack-O-Lantern. So pretty soon I was essentially writing the whole thing myself.”15 While Maclean would later become an acclaimed writer best known for his 1976 novella A River Runs Through It, Ted was never sure exactly what Maclean was working on in the winter of 1923; the evening Maclean finished his book, he and Ted were out celebrating when Maclean’s boardinghouse burned to the ground, taking the novel with it. “I don’t think he ever rewrote it,” Ted said.16
Ted’s art was continuing to slowly evolve. His human figures were still awkward, with big feet and rubbery limbs aped from the comic pages, with no real distinctive style—but in the November 1923 issue of Jacko came a piece written and illustrated by Ted that looked like nothing he had done before: a one-pager called “Who’s Who in Bo-Bo,” featuring descriptions and drawings of “Bo-Bobians,” which can fairly be called the earliest ancestors of Seussian menageries to come. There’s a grinning plaid-patterned cowlike creature with a sagging udder captioned The Heumkia—Ted’s ear for odd names isn’t yet as finely tuned as it would become—which Ted calls “the moron of the animal kingdom,” and a wide-eyed seallike creature wearing a bow
tie, identified as The Dinglebläder. But perhaps most “Seussian,” at least for the moment, was an ostrichlike creature termed The Panfh, wearing red cleats and ribbons at the knees and staring intently at the reader with enormous, penetrating eyes.
The Bo-Bobians were crudely drawn, but there is no mistaking some of the elements that would make their way into Ted’s later distinctive style; there are wide eyes and knowing grins—and rather than hooves, the Heumkia appears to be wearing footed pajamas, with one foot casually cocked over the other, while the Panfh’s legs resemble tightly wound coils.17 Looking back, Ted appreciated that he was simply learning by doing. “I began to get it through my skull that words and pictures were yin and yang,” he said later. “I began thinking that words and pictures, married, might possibly produce a progeny more interesting than either parent . . . [though a]t Dartmouth, I couldn’t even get them engaged.”18
But Ted’s writing was getting better, and funnier, too. Ted was the instigator, for instance, behind the exploits of a group of recurring characters with the surnames Zylsch and Zimkowitz—much more Seussian-sounding names than Panfh and Heumkia. In one particularly inspired piece, Ted created a box score for the annual baseball game between the East Lebanon Zimkowitzes and the West Lebanon Zimkowitzes, in which all the names in the lineup and in the game stats are Zimkowitz (“Home run—Zimkowitz, 2 base hits—Zimkowitz”). The final score is given as “Zimkowitz 14—Zimkowitz 10.” In a later issue, there would appear a wedding announcement in which a Zimkowitz married a Zylsch, while later, in a full-page article on winter sports gear, an Otto Zimkowitz loudly checks in to give his opinion on the best brand of skis.19
Ted attributed his improved writing to the influence of a relatively new English professor at Dartmouth, W. Benfield “Ben” Pressey, a Harvard-educated thirty-year-old who taught an advanced writing course. “He was very kind and encouraging,” Ted said of Pressey, “my big inspiration.”20 Pressey wanted his students writing accessible, rather than academic, prose, an attitude Ted found refreshing. “I don’t think much of creative writing courses, because I think it is almost impossible to teach anyone how to write,” Ted said, “but Ben Pressey’s course did help me.”21
He also liked Pressey’s more informal approach to teaching. Instead of sitting for hours in the classroom, Pressey took to hosting seminars in his own home, where students were encouraged to read their work aloud as Pressey’s “very beautiful” wife served steaming mugs of cocoa. Ted thought most of the writing produced by him and his classmates was “trash,” but appreciated that Pressey “seemed to like the stuff I wrote.” At one point, he and Pressey engaged in a good-natured but heated debate in which Ted argued that great writing was more about style than subject matter. To prove his point—that good writing could transcend even the most mundane of subjects—Ted wrote a book review of the Boston & Maine Railroad timetable that treated its various schedule changes and service announcements like serious literature:
The only other bad feature of the book is found in Chapter 14, “Springfield, Greenfield and White River.” This is well written, to be sure, but horribly slow in moving, especially from Brattleboro on. Obviously, this is directly due to the poor motivation of the engineer’s character, though the author lays the blame to a “big washout down the line.”22
“Nobody in the class thought it was funny,” recalled Ted, “except Ben and me.”23
Pressey did have a good sense of humor and admired Ted’s quickness with a joke. Over cocoa one night, Pressey asked his class if any of them had read a play called The Yoke. “Ah, the triumph of the egg,” muttered Ted24—a pun Pressey could appreciate, and Ted basked in the approval of his mentor. Pressey, said Ted warmly, “was important to me.”25
It didn’t take long for Ted to change his mind about the merits of style over substance. On December 8, 1923, the famed orator and anti-evolutionist William Jennings Bryan spoke at Webster Hall to deliver a fiery rebuke of Dartmouth’s mandatory freshman course on evolution. Like many of his fellow students, Ted found Bryan and his rhetoric spellbinding—“one couldn’t hold back a swelling admiration for [Bryan’s] compelling powers,” wrote the student editors at The Dartmouth.26 And yet Bryan’s passion never persuaded; he seemed to Ted to be all flash and no substance. “Nothing but oratory,”27 sniffed The Dartmouth, and Ted agreed. Ted felt so strongly that Bryan had failed to make his case, in fact, that when the captain of Dartmouth’s track team casually mentioned to Ted that he thought Bryan had been right, an offended Ted vowed never to “look at any track event” ever again.28
Despite his fondness for Pressey, Ted would still only manage to attain a C and a B in Pressey’s writing class over its two semesters. Still, his grades had improved somewhat, to the likely relief of T. R. Geisel: on the strength of an A in Sociology I—and one of his half-hearted but regular Bs in German—Ted’s GPA crept up to 2.8 for the first semester of his junior year, the highest GPA he would attain at Dartmouth. His other English class for his junior year was a course in comparative literature—covering English literature in the first semester, German in the second—taught by William K. Stewart, a well-traveled scholar who regaled his students with stories of his adventures in Europe. Ted would end up with a B in Stewart’s classes for each of the two semesters, keeping his GPA holding at 2.6.
* * *
• • • •
On May 15, 1924, Ted was appointed editor in chief of Jack-O-Lantern for his upcoming senior year—and at the same time, just as they had vowed two years earlier, Whit Campbell was appointed editor in chief of The Dartmouth. Ted had worked hard to get there; his work in Jacko had gotten consistent laughs, and both he and his art were recognized around the campus. He had earned the editor’s chair—and yet he also knew he could thank Norman Maclean for his support and endorsement. “My big desire . . . was to run that magazine,” said Ted later. “If Mac hadn’t picked me, my whole life would have been a failure.”29 The final issue of Ted’s junior year welcomed him into the editor’s chair with a notice hailing him as the writer “who has been responsible all year for the atrocity of the Zimkowitz family and who has used Jacko for three years as a publicity agency for certain lady friends.”30
Ted spent that summer back home in Springfield, doing odd jobs—mostly washing bottles at the newly opened Wawbeek Spring Water plant, whose ginger ales and root beers had replaced the more potent ales and beers that had once rolled out of the warehouses of the Springfield Breweries—and counting down the days until he could return to Dartmouth and slide back into his Jacko editor’s chair. His sister, Marnie, was home as well, a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin firmly in hand, and preparing to pursue a doctorate at Radcliffe in the fall.
Meanwhile, T.R., still in search of full-time employment, turned a short-turnaround real estate investment into a stunning $30,000 profit—about $400,000 in today’s money. “Luck entered into it somewhere,” Ted snickered, though T.R. always insisted it had been “clever business management.”31 Whether due to providence or proficiency, the windfall was substantial enough to finally give the Geisels some much-needed financial peace of mind.
On his return to Dartmouth for his senior year, Ted chose once more to live with Robert Sharp, this time in new quarters at the Randall Club, an elegant two-story boardinghouse at 13 West Wheelock. To his delight, he’d been elected as a member of Casque & Gauntlet, Dartmouth’s highly selective senior honor society—and while he wouldn’t live at the organization’s Federalist-style brick house on Main Street, Whit Campbell did, which meant Ted spent nearly as much time at the Casque & Gauntlet as he did at the Randall Club.
But Ted’s real headquarters for the year would, as always, be the Jacko offices in Publications Row. Here, Ted ruled over his pages with a mock seriousness, laying down edicts prohibiting his staff from writing any jokes that would “ridicule the incoming freshmen”—at least in the first issue—and writing pithy editorials, includin
g a long piece on the upcoming 1924 presidential election where he urged his classmates to “Vote for Somebody”:
It is not that JACKO is interested in who shall be President. What he desires is that one vote for a man about whom he really knows something. JACKO has little desire to vote for a man like Mr. Coolidge, a man whose method of governing approximates absent treatment in its most abstract form.
But to get down to the more serious half of our editorial, JACKO certainly hopes that Dartmouth wins all of its games by enormous scores, don’t you?32
Apart from targeting freshmen, Ted and his Jacko staff also found they could get easy laughs at the expense of women. Misogynistic jokes were a mainstay of college humor and would continue to be for generations to come, and Jacko was no exception. Even as early as his freshman year, Ted had indulged in the kind of randy humor typical of the era. One of his cartoons from February 1922 shows an attractive woman standing before a balding hotel desk clerk who eyes her lecherously, a cigarette burning in his mouth. “O, clerk,” says the woman, “there’s something the matter with the keyhole in the door to my room.” “That so?” responds the clerk. “I’ll look into that tonight.” (The same page also featured a cartoon by a different artist, in which a woman exclaims, “I’ve got an idea!” to which her male colleague replies, “Treat it carefully. It’s in a strange place.”)33 In one of Ted’s first chatty pieces as editor in chief, he took considerable glee in relating a story of a group of college-age Springfield men mercilessly teasing teenage girls on a train. “For what is more pleasant,” Ted wrote, “than to see five husky college men make some silly girls realize how insignificant and helpless they are?”34
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