Happy 100th birthday to Ted Geisel!

Ted grew up in Springfield, MA, three blocks from the public library and six blocks from the zoo. His father, Theodor Sr., was superintendent of parks (he ran the zoo, among other things). His mother, Henrietta S., read him to sleep every night, as he cuddled with his large stuffed dog, whom he had named Theophrastas. He especially liked the nonsense verse.

His mother hoped that he and his sister Marnie would go to college, as no one in the family had ever gone to college before. Maybe Ted would grow up to be Dr. Geisel!

He enjoyed doodling, sometimes even drawing on his bedroom walls with crayons, which upset everyone (except his mother). One of his doodles, of a man catching an enormous fish, was submitted to a drawing contest in the local paper by a member of his family. Ted won first prize! He got an inkling that other people liked his drawings.

During the First World War, German immigrants and people of German descent were the targets of violence in the United States. Ted had a number of bad experiences with playground bullies during this time. It taught him a lesson in tolerance that he carried with him his whole life.

Later, in high school, Ted signed up for an art course. His teacher didn't like his work because she said he broke the rules. He already knew he broke the rules, but he did it because he was trying to capture his point of view, not a perfect image of reality on paper. When the teacher told him he would never be successful in art, he quit the class. He never took another art class. Ever.

By the time he was 22 years old, Ted had discovered a market for his drawings: he started to work as a commercial cartoonist. He also began to write nonsense verse, which he illustrated. He published it under his mother's maiden name. He figured he would keep his real name for the big, important things he would doubtless write later for adults.

Little did he know at the time, his most important work would be written under that make-believe name. It would teach children to read, inspire countless imitators and parodies, be made into animated cartoons and live-action movies, and delight children and adults of all sizes and shapes.

Happy birthday, Dr. Seuss!

[Thanks to Kathleen Krull, and her book The Boy on Fairfield Street, for details of Ted Geisel's early life that appear in this post. I've read it aloud so many times this week that I can hardly tell when I'm quoting anymore.]

You think that Seussian logic has not affected you? Ha!
Observe:

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,
Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!

--from "What If Dr. Seuss Wrote Technical Manuals? A Grandchild's Guide to Using Grandpa's Computer" by Gene Zeigler

For more parodies, visit "The Dr. Seuss Parody Page". For more about Ted Seuss Geisel and his work, visit "The Dr. Seuss Web Page".

Oh, the places you'll go!

Regards--
Mary Anne