Al Revenna | Wikimedia Commons
Theodor Seuss Geisel, who we all know as Dr. Seuss, is remembered every year on his birthday, March 2nd. One of the most accomplished children’s authors in history, few people have grown up without hearing his stories and wonderful nonsense.
To start things off, you’ve been saying his name all wrong. A friend of the author once penned this poem to correct people’s pronunciations:
“You’re wrong as the deuce / And you shouldn’t rejoice / If you’re calling him Seuss / He pronounces it Soice.”
And to Think That I Saw It on Mullberry Street was Seuss’s debut children’s book, but it took quite a bit of rejection (20-40 publishers) before he finally struck a deal with Vanguard Press.
Editor Mike McClintock had known Seuss from their time at Dartmouth, and to show his appreciation, Seuss named the main character in the book after McClintock’s son, Marco.
Seuss’s father was a brewmaster for years before Prohibition went into effect. He then went to work as the superintendent of Forest Park in Springfield, Massachusetts. Part of that job was to oversee the park’s onsite zoo.
Seuss was quoted as saying, “That zoo is where I learned whatever I know about animals.”
Seuss would create weird and unusual taxidermied creatures out of the animals that had died in his father’s zoo, such as a Carbonic Walrus or the Mullberry Street Unicorn.
He called it “Unorthodox Taxidermy.”
“Kids gag at having morals crammed down their throats. But there is a moral inherent in any damn thing you write that has a dramatic point…Still I never set out to prove a point – except for “Yertle the Turtle”, a deliberate parable of the life of Hitler.” -Dr. Seuss
Seuss had one time put an NSFW drawing and poem inside of one of his books to check if his editors were really doing their jobs. On the page for the letter X in Dr. Seuss’s ABC, a naked woman was pictured above a poem that read, “Big X, little x. / X,X,X / Someday, kiddies, you will learn about SEX”.
Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism | Flickr
Springfield, Massachusetts has a sculpture garden in honor of Dr. Seuss. The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden is filled with bronze statues of the authors most recognizable characters, such as Horton the Elephant, Thing 1 and 2, The Cat in the Hat, The Lorax, The Grinch, and a lot more.
Seuss had a fear of public speaking, one that stemmed from former president Theodore Roosevelt.
Seuss’s Boy Scout troop was being honored for selling the most war bonds sold in 1917/1918. Roosevelt was to give out the medals to each of the 10 boys, but there was a shortage of medals and they ran out before Seuss could get his.
Not knowing the mix-up, Roosevelt had assumed that was an extra child onstage, and not a shortage of medals, and he looked toward Seuss and asked, “What is this little boy doing here?”. This prompted Seuss to be rushed off stage and let to his life-long fear of public speaking.
Jeremy Noble | Wikimedia Commons
Due to his fear of public speaking, when he was to give a speech to Lake Forest College’s graduating class, he instead wrote a poem about the bread roll Popovers. My Uncle Terwilliger on the Art of Eating Popovers was interesting and inspirational, if not just as weird as all of his other work.
The original copy of The Lorax has a quick line about the pollution in Lake Erie. Fifteen years later the environmental education coordinator at The Ohio State University contacted Seuss, explaining the efforts to clean up and preserve the lake.
Seuss changed the line in all future printings of the book because of this.
Seuss tried to write a children’s book about climbing Mt. Everest, to give kids a story that would be more exciting than the Dick and Jane books kids were forced to read.
The issue was that his publisher said he couldn’t use words like Everest, Scaling, Peaks, or Degrees because they would be too much for the kids to handle or understand.
In 1931, “boner” meant mistake or blunder, so Dr. Seuss’s Pocket Book of Boners is not as weird as it sounds.
The Boner book was filled with funny statement kids would say that were wildly inaccurate (people of Moscow are called Mosquitoes), and Seuss would illustrate cartoons to match the jokes.
Jed Scattergood | Flickr
Green Eggs and Ham is often served at Seuss’s alma mater, Dartmouth. The Dartmouth Outing Club often serves it to pay tribute to Seuss during outdoor excursions with new freshmen.
During World War II, Seuss worked with legendary animators Chuck Jones and Ray Harryhausen to create animated shorts for the armed forces.
Private Snafu was a memorable character from these, often teaching soldiers about minefield procedure, good hygiene, and what to do with classified information.
It took Seuss over 3 months to create the ending for How The Grinch Stole Christmas!. It was hung up on not making it too theological or religious, but still being sentimental and sincere. He chose to close the book with the image of the Grinch and the Whos seating around the table and sharing the roast beast.
The Grinch was also one of his books that was translated into Latin. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! was titled Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem Abrogaverit, The Cat in the Hat was Cattus Petasatus, and Green Eggs and Ham was Virent Ova! Viret Perna!!.
Seuss was not the biggest fan of Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal, going as far as to send a parody of his story Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! to The Washington Post.
Titled, “Richard M. Nixon, Will You Please Go Now!”, implored the president to resign seeing that he was all but certain to be impeached.
Here’s a selection of advertisments that Dr. Seuss had worked on. He would work for companies like Ford, Holly Sugar, and General Electric doing print ads before moving into animation.
Seuss’s most prized possession was a fossilized dinosaur footprint given to him by his father. I’d like to point out my dad has not given me anything that cool. Step your game up, Pops.
The footprint was 16 inches long and 11 inches wide, and estimated to be over 150 million years old. Seuss has said, “It keeps me from getting conceited, whenever I think I’m pretty good, I just go out and look at it.“
The earliest record of the word “nerd” was in Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran A Zoo. A year after the book was published, nerd was making headlines as the latest slang insult, taking over people calling each other dips or squares.
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