Becoming Dr. Seuss Read online

  It was here, in the Seuss house at 22 Howard Street—just down the street from the Seuss family bakery—that T.R. and Nettie Geisel had their second child and first son on March 2, 1904, a cold but fair-weathered Wednesday. Like his father and grandfather before him, the boy was named Theodor, with the middle name Seuss—pronounced Soyce, in proper German fashion—affixed as a recognition of his mother’s side of the family.

  Before his baby son was two years old, T.R. moved his family into a respectable home at 74 Fairfield Street, an address in the Forest Park district of Springfield, just a short walk from T.A.’s home on Sumner Avenue. For T.R., commuting to his Liberty Street office was now as simple as catching the new electric streetcar that ran down to Main Street from Belmont Avenue, practically right behind the house. While it wasn’t necessarily as fashionable as the Sumner Avenue address occupied by the eldest Geisel, the Fairfield neighborhood, and the house at number 74, both had their charms. Fairfield was a short stretch of tree-lined lane, running due west from its terminal point at Litchfield Street for several hundred yards before bending a gentle dogleg down to connect with Garfield Street to the south. In the bend of this leg was a small triangular grassy lot, lit by a gas lamp, which Ted and his friends would dub “the Soccer Field” and make the focal point of neighborhood games.

  The Fairfield house was a light gray three-story; with its irregularly spaced windows on the second floor and one gabled window at the top, it looked like a child’s drawing of a house. Ted and Marnie each had a bedroom at the back of the second floor, with a bathroom between them. Upstairs, under the eaves, was a room for a young nanny and housekeeper named Anna, who would terrify Ted by locking him in her closet when he misbehaved. And in the backyard was an element that was something of a Springfield novelty: a freestanding brick garage, large enough for two carriages, but which the Geisels kept filled mostly with bicycles and various equipment until the mid-1920s, when T.R. would park a gleaming Hudson Super Six automobile behind the roll-down door.

  Ted had two vivid memories of his early childhood in the Fairfield house. The first involved a large brown stuffed dog given to him by his mother. Ted named it Theophrastus, after the ancient Greek writer and philosopher, and would keep it with him throughout his life, perching the worn and frayed stuffed dog on his drawing table or on an office shelf, where it would serve as mascot and muse.

  The other early memory was more melancholy than merry. On August 17, 1906, Nettie gave birth to another daughter they named Henrietta. Several months later, the newborn developed pneumonia; Marnie, though only four, never forgot the “terrible sounds of her cough that we heard all through that three-story house.”19 After Henrietta died on December 19, 1907, a grieving T.R. moved his Pooley record cabinet out of the family’s music room on the first floor to make space for Henrietta’s little casket. Though he was only a little more than two and a half, Ted was forever haunted by the memory of the casket in the front room. Even after the casket had been removed and the Pooley cabinet returned to its rightful place, Ted would always eye the piece of furniture warily. “I always saw Henrietta in her casket in the place where the Pooley cabinet was,” he recalled.20

  T.R. and Nettie would have no more children, but the extended Geisel family was already large, loud, and close-knit, spending weeknights over huge dinners of bratwursts and “countless bolognas,”21 as Ted remembered, and weekends at endless parties and social events. “In 1905, while Albert Einstein was discovering relativity,” Ted wrote later, “I, at the age of one, was going to German clambakes on Sunday afternoons in my diapers.”22

  The German population in Springfield wasn’t large—it made up less than one percent of the city’s total population in 191023—but it was active and enthusiastic. Apart from the Seuss-established Turnverein, where there were formal dress balls between exhibitions of gymnastics, there was also the Schützenverein riflery club—T.R. and Nettie weren’t the only ones who took shooting seriously. Ted would be raised in a household where German was spoken regularly, and remembered eavesdropping from the top of the stairs on Saturday nights, listening to his family talk and sing and argue in colorful language that tumbled and rolled, growing louder as the evening wore on and the liquor flowed. On Sunday morning, if anyone wished to atone for the previous night of drinking, the Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church still held services in German.

  Ted’s parents were neither overly devout nor sticklers for services in German, for Nettie chose instead to take Ted and Marnie to services at the Episcopal Church, where Ted preferred the music and ceremony over the sermon. He was especially captivated by the sight of the local druggist walking slowly up the center aisle, swinging a smoke-seeping metal container burning incense—which, Ted noted with some surprise, “never hit anyone.”24

  But apart from its underlying morality, religion would always be more obligation than inspiration, though as a child, Ted took an obvious delight in making up rhyming verse as a mnemonic device to remember the books of the Old Testament:

  The great Jehovah speaks to us

  In Genesis and Exodus;

  Leviticus and Numbers, three,

  Followed by Deuteronomy.25

  It was a suggestion of the kind of playful Seussian wordplay to come, as well as a hint of the careful parsing and agonizing over his work that would become a later habit—for Ted subsequently admitted to inserting the word three into the poem’s third line simply to make it rhyme properly.

  Nettie, too, would directly influence Ted’s ear for the beat and intonation of words. As she put her son to bed each evening, Nettie would chant a refrain she had often sung behind the counter at the Seuss bakery to inform patrons of the day’s pie flavors: “Apple, mince, lemon . . . peach, apricot, pineapple . . . blueberry, coconut, custard and SQUASH!”—at which point she would playfully squash a giggling Ted down into his mattress. Ted later credited his mother “for the rhythms in which I write and the urgency with which I do it.”26

  Both Nettie and T.R. would inspire and encourage Ted’s love for books. Reading was a pastime the entire family took seriously, leaving well-thumbed books casually on side tables, and the pages of the Springfield Republican newspaper folded carefully over the arm of a chair. “Teaching a child to read is a family setup,” Ted said later. “It’s the business of having books around the house, not forcing them. Parents should have twenty books stacked up on tables or set around the living room. The average kid will pick one up, find something interesting. And pretty soon he’s reading.”27

  That was certainly the case with Ted, who in a 1979 interview with Parents magazine swore he was reading the works of Jonathan Swift, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Charles Dickens at age six.28 There may have been an element of Swiftian satire in his retelling of this memory—it wasn’t the first or last time Ted would give a dramatic retelling of his own childhood—but Ted did have a detailed memory of other children’s books that struck his fancy. He distinctly recalled, for instance, reading The Brownies: Their Book, stories of child-sized spirits from English and Scottish folklore, written and drawn by the poet Palmer Cox, as well as Goops and How to Be Them, a humorous book of manners and social mores by the writer and artist Gelett Burgess. “My parents bought them and I read them and loved them,” Ted said later. The Goops, he thought, with their emphasis on polite behavior, “were a little too moralistic for me, but I loved the Brownies—they were wonderful little creatures. In fact, they probably awakened my desire to draw.”29

  Ted also took great delight in books with clever concepts or conceits—and one of the cleverest of writers and artists around was Peter Newell, whose The Hole Book made a deep impression on six-year-old Ted. The book opened with a verse Ted could quote from memory, even seven decades later:

  Tom Potts was fooling with a gun

  (Such follies should not be),

  When—bang! The pesky thing went off

  Most unexpectedly!


  Every page of the book—including the cover—had a small round die-cut hole meant to trace the trajectory of the bullet as it made its way from page to page, cutting the rope on a swing, puncturing a water heater, and popping balloons. “It just raised hell,” Ted remembered fondly.30

  Nettie quickly came to realize the power that books had over her son and would use them to coax him into good behavior. In particular, Ted recalled his mother using books in Arthur M. Winfield’s series of Rover Boys novels to bribe him into focusing on his piano lessons with the church organist. “The most mighty book in my life was one of the Rover Boys series,” Ted said. “I’ve forgotten just which one, precisely, because, as a preadolescent, I gobbled down more than thirty in a row.” The Rover Boys were three brothers—Tom, Sam, and Dick Rover—who attended boarding school together and spent most of their time playing pranks and, to modern eyes, engaging in obnoxious and slightly dangerous behavior. But Ted adored the stories and their matching hardcovers. “The Rovers are the boys who made me want to read,” he said.31

  And yet it was an imperfect reading experience. The Rover Boys stories were full of stereotypes typical of the era: there was Hans Mueller, a fat German who was often the butt of the joke, and Alexander Pop, an African American handyman whose face, as described by Winfield, “shone like a piece of polished ebony,” and who spoke in a Stepin Fetchit patois: “Yo’ is a sight fo’ soah eyes, ’deed yo’ is, boys . . . I can’t tell yo’ how much I’se missed yo’!”32 Even among the otherwise charming work of Newell’s The Hole Book is an illustration in which the errant bullet leaves a hole in a watermelon as an African American family reacts in shock, eyes wide, lips protruding. It was the kind of thoughtless ethnic typecasting that had been and would be the norm for generations—stereotypes that would find their way into some of Ted’s early work as well.

  * * *

  • • • •

  At four years old, Ted Geisel entered kindergarten at the Sumner Avenue School in the fall of 1908. The nearly brand-new, brick-red building was a fifteen-minute walk away, a little more than half a mile from their home on Fairfield, and Ted was instructed to hold Marnie’s hand tightly as they crossed the wide and sometimes busy Sumner Avenue. Beyond that, Ted had few memories of his elementary school years; by all indications, he was a typical if unexceptional student. His real interests lay outside the school’s walls: playing with his toy soldiers on his front steps, engaging in ear-wiggling and pull-up contests out on the neighborhood Soccer Field (Ted, never the athlete, won at the former and lost at the latter), or eagerly reading the comics in the pages of the Boston American newspaper that his father brought home each evening.

  Even when T.R. Geisel wasn’t delivering the comics page, Ted was still fairly certain that his father was a wise and great man. Although T.R. would be expected to dole out any appropriate punishments—Nettie rarely raised her voice in anger—he was a level-headed man who imparted to his son both a sense of discipline and a foundational decency. While Ted would never be a good shot with a rifle or even fully understand his father’s obsession with marksmanship—he later said it was “an all-consuming hobby that . . . was silly and unproductive”—Ted came to appreciate the considerable discipline and commitment it took for his father to hone such an expertise. Ted remembered watching each morning as his father held his rifle steadily over his head for ten minutes, strengthening his arms and shoulders and thus ensuring the barrel of his rifle never faltered in the slightest when he aimed and shot. “He was an inspiration,” Ted said warmly. “Whatever you do, he taught me, do it to perfection.”33 Decades later, even after he had become one of the most famous and successful writers in the world, Ted still hung one of his father’s paper shooting targets in his office, with multiple bull’s-eyes shot out of its center—a constant reminder to do the work necessary to achieve excellence, regardless of the task.

  In 1909, when Ted was five years old, his father was appointed by Springfield mayor William Sanderson to fill a vacancy on the park board.34 The board oversaw all public lands in the area, including the 500-acre Forest Park on the south side of Springfield, stretching away expansively from Sumner Avenue on its northern border. The park had been created in 1884 with land donated by several wealthy Springfielders, including Everett Barney—he of the clamp-on ice skate fortune—and had been developed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the visionary designer of New York’s Central Park. Olmsted brought the same fashionable practicality to the Springfield project, installing plenty of shady walking paths and places to picnic, fish, ice-skate, and swim—Springfield, in fact, would boast one of the earliest public swimming pools.

  But to both T. R. Geisel and his son, the best part of Forest Park was its zoo, a small and well-maintained facility in the park’s north end, crammed with a large assortment of birds and animals, including alligators, monkeys, swans, lions, and even its own herd of elk.35 For most of Ted’s childhood, Sunday afternoons would be the best time of the week—for that was when T.R. would stand just inside the small foyer of the Geisel house, his hand on the knob of the carved Dutch front door, and call out, “Come on, son, let’s go over to Forest Park and count the animals.”36

  It was likely he would never have to ask more than once. “[E]very Sunday I would go to the zoo with him and I’d come back home and try to draw the animals,” said Ted.37 Try as he might, he found that realistic drawings of animals just weren’t his forte: eyes went wide, with arched eyebrows over them; knee joints appeared in the wrong places; tails ended up tufted. Even a change of media didn’t matter. “I was always drawing with pencils, pens, crayons, or anything,” said Ted. “And nearly always it was animals, goofy-looking ones. My mother overindulged me and seemed to be saying, ‘Everything you do is great. Just go ahead and do it.’”38

  But T.R., too, was supportive of his son’s artistic efforts. “Ted always had a pencil in hand,” T.R. said later, and recalled encouraging Ted to submit a few of his drawings to the instructors at an art correspondence course, who would evaluate the drawings for a small fee. “I got him to send one of his drawings and staked him the fifteen dollars [fee],” T.R. explained. “Yes, they said, he had talent—but heck, they were after the fifteen bucks, and they told that to everybody!”39 Ted thought it had been worth the money. “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t a bad investment,” said Ted. “I think I picked up a lot of technical points that really helped get me started.”40

  T.R. also had a quiet sense of humor his son would come to appreciate. Ted would later love telling a story of spending a long day fishing with his father, without catching a thing. On their way home, T.R. stopped at Deegel’s hatchery, which raised fish for local restaurants, and “bought the most beautiful mess of uncleaned trout you ever saw,” recalled Ted. “When we got home, he showed them to the neighbors and got a reputation around there as one of the greatest trout fishermen in the world.”41 Thirty years later, Ted would open his book McElligot’s Pool—the tale of a boy fishing in a tiny swimming hole—with a warm dedication to his father: “This book is dedicated to T. R. Geisel of Springfield, Mass., The World’s Greatest Authority on Blackfish, Fiddler Crabs, and Deegel Trout.”

  Besides his expertise in store-bought trout, T.R. was also something of an aspiring inventor, regularly poking around in his basement workshop, where he worked on solving simple tasks with complicated-looking devices that would, to later eyes, appear . . . well, appropriately Seussian. Among the more practical was a biceps-strengthening machine, as well as a device that could be attached to the spigots of the beer barrels, with a snapping spring clip to shoo away flies. But Ted’s favorite invention was the one his father called the Silk-Stocking-Back-Seam-Wrong-Detecting-Mirror, a complex apparatus for spot-checking the alignment of women’s stockings. Ted’s love of weird and clever contraptions, which did weird and clever things, would largely come from his early experiences in T. R. Geisel’s workshop.

  When he wasn’t tailing along after his father i
n the workshop, Ted just plain loved listening to his father talk, whether he was dispensing advice or telling stories. Ted remembered the two of them lying on their backs in the field directly behind their house on the night of April 20, 1910, talking in hushed tones as they scanned the sky for Halley’s Comet. Other times, they would take long walks together while T.R. entertained his son with stories of life in a brewery. T.R. would get considerable mileage out of a story about a local attorney he had hired to collect brewery debts in Northampton, Massachusetts: a modest and quiet young man named Calvin Coolidge. One day, on their way to visit a client, T.R. and Coolidge stopped in a saloon that sold two martinis for 25 cents. As T.R. quickly disposed of his two drinks, Coolidge slowly drank his first, then picked up his briefcase and informed the bartender, “I’ll be back tomorrow for the other one.”42 T.R. always howled with laughter at the story, though perhaps some of Coolidge’s famously silent demeanor had rubbed off on him as well. “You will never be sorry,” T.R. told his son, “for anything you never said.”43

  One thing the two of them would never share was a love of shooting. When Ted was nine, T.R. tried one last time to interest his son in guns and marksmanship, taking him along to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show when it stopped in Springfield in May 1911—advertised as “positively the last” tour of the showman’s career, and guaranteeing the aging cowboy “positively appears at every performance!”44 Ted was skeptical to begin with, but when inclement weather turned the event into a muddy, rain-soaked mess, Ted decided he was done once and for all with “all that shooting.”45 Still, it wouldn’t be the last time T.R. would fail to convince his son to take an interest in an organized sport or physical activity.