D. Gary Benfield, M.D. In 1985, Princeton University awarded an honorary doctorate to a tall, 81-year-old man with a gray beard. As he approached the podium, the students leaped to their feet. I am Sam, they chanted. Sam-I-am. Then they recited all of Green Eggs and Ham. It was their special way of showing Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, how much his books meant to them. Ted Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on March 2, 1904. He grew up in a family that loved word play. At the age of 15, his mother had given up her hopes of college to work in her family s bakery. While at work, she made up rhymes about the different pies, repeating them for customers when they asked about flavors for sale each day. Later, she often sang her children to sleep using those rhymes. Ted once said that his love of rhyming verses came from his memories of his mom s pie poems. Ted also loved to doodle, often drawing on his bedroom walls his own version of the animals he saw at the Springfield Zoo. And when his teachers lectured, Ted took very few notes, choosing instead to draw flying cows and other wild and crazy characters in his notebook. As a result, he graduated from Dartmouth College with a 2.45 GPA and few prospects for a job. However, Ted loved Dartmouth, and Dartmouth loved Ted. At the end of his junior year, he was appointed editor-in-chief of Jack-O-Lantern, the school s humor magazine. The students loved his stories and his cartoons. Even so, his
classmates voted him Least Likely to Succeed. You see, Ted never seemed serious about anything. During his senior year at Dartmouth, Ted threw a party, at which his guests shared a bottle of gin. When a couple of the boys began horsing around on the roof, Ted s landlord called the police. Because of Prohibition, drinking gin was illegal, so Ted wound up in hot water. As punishment, he was removed as Editor-In-Chief and not allowed to write for the magazine. But Ted covertly submitted articles and cartoons, signing them with his middle name, Seuss. He added Dr. Seuss later, when his first children s book was published. But he never actually earned a doctorate in anything. Ted continued his education at Oxford, where he met and fell in love with Helen Palmer, an American who was working on a master s degree in education. After Helen graduated from Oxford and took a teaching job in New Jersey, Ted dropped out of school and moved back in with his parents in Springfield. Now he had to get serious and figure out a way to make a living so he and Helen could get married. After one of his cartoons was published in the Saturday Evening Post, Ted got a job with Judge, a humor magazine, which paid enough for Ted and Helen to tie the knot.
Several months after the wedding, Ted hit the jackpot. The wife of an advertising executive for Flit, a bug spray company owned by Standard Oil, was having her hair done at a beauty salon in New York City. She picked up a copy of Judge Magazine and saw a cartoon of Ted s. The caption mentioned Flit. She liked the cartoon so much that she called her husband and suggested he hire Ted to write advertising copy for the Flit account, which he did. That cartoon led to a 17-year advertising campaign featuring a four-word cry for help: Quick, Henry, the Flit! Even comedians like Fred Allen and Jack Benny used Quick, Henry, the Flit! in their acts. All across America the folksy mention of a bug spray made everyone laugh. Meanwhile, sales of Flit bug sprays skyrocketed! Soon, Ted was earning $12,000 a year, which was more than most of his Dartmouth classmates who worked on Wall Street were making. Still in their 20s, Ted and Helen were financially set for life. But there was one problem: Ted didn t want to spend the rest of his life writing quirky ads for Flit. Unfortunately, his contract did not allow him to do outside work writing for adults. However, it did not stop him from writing and illustrating children s books. So he decided to give children s books a try while continuing to write copy for Flit. In 1936, Ted completed the manuscript for his first children s book: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Unfortunately, he hit a wall of rejection.
Twenty-seven publishing houses rejected his story during the winter of 1936-37. Some said it was too different while others said stories in verse were not in vogue, or fantasy would not sell. Others said the story had no moral or message, nothing aimed at transforming children into good citizens. On the day Ted learned of the book s 27th rejection, he decided to return to his apartment and burn the manuscript. As he walked along Madison Avenue, he ran into Mike McClintock, a former classmate at Dartmouth. Just three hours earlier, McClintock had become juvenile editor at Vanguard Press. What s that under your arm? McClintock asked. That s a book no one will publish. I m lugging it home to burn. We re standing outside my new office, McClintock said. Come on up and let s look at it. An hour later, James Henle, president of Vanguard Press, agreed to publish the book. But even before Ted Geisel s second children s book for Vanguard was published, Bennett Cerf of Random House took Ted to lunch. Then he made Ted an offer he could not refuse: You come with me and I ll print anything you write, Cerf said. And that s how Random House stole Dr. Seuss from Vanguard and became the publisher-of-all-things-seuss to this day.
Dr. Seuss went on to write and illustrate 44 world-famous books for children and their parents. Along the way, he changed how children learned to read. Their favorite characters were no longer Dick and Jane, but The Cat in the Hat, Sam-Iam, Horton the elephant, The Grinch who stole Christmas, Yertle the Turtle, and many more. Learning to read was never the same again. He won a Pulitzer Prize and was awarded eight honorary doctorates. Works based on his original stories have won three Oscars, three Emmys, three Grammys, and a Peabody Award. He also got rich! Ted Geisel died of throat cancer on September 24, 1991, at his home in La Jolla, California. He was 87 years old. 2014. A further thought: The original version of this story was first published in Dec, 2015 Gary Benfield