Theodore Geisel
Springfield, Massachusetts, is not only the spiritual home of basketball. It is the seminal home of The Cat in the Hat, Horton the elephant, and the Grinch. Theodore Geisel was born in Springfield, MA in March, 1904. Geisel is universally known today by his pen name, Dr. Seuss, under which he published more than sixty children’s books, nearly all of them beloved by children and former children today. His children’s books have been translated in over 20 languages, remarkable when it is considered that in many of them he created a language of his own (Oobleck?). They’ve also been the basis of numerous television shows, animated films, live action films, and Broadway plays.
But Dr. Seuss (a name be began using as a student at Dartmouth College) was far more than a writer of children’s stories. The name Dr. Seuss was acquired when he and several of his Dartmouth classmates were caught with then illegal alcohol, leading the school’s administration to ban him from his editor’s position on the Dartmouth Jack o’ Lantern, a humor magazine. At first Geisel simply submitted his magazine work using the name Seuss. Later, while studying at Oxford for a PhD (he did not graduate) he added the salutation Dr.
Geisel was both a writer and an artist, and in the days following his leaving school he submitted political cartoons, editorial cartoons, humor cartoons, and articles for consideration of the leading magazines of the day. In the late 1920s he began contributing cartoons and advertisements for a bug spray manufactured under the name of FLIT. Many of the fanciful characters he later drew for his children’s books can be recognized in the threatening insects he drew for the FLIT campaign, to which he contributed until 1941, and which made his reputation. FLIT became a household name, and, “Quick Henry, the FLIT”, entered the lexicon as a phrase to be used humorously when confronted with a pesky situation.
As the Fascists and the Nazis presented ominous war clouds over Europe, Geisel turned to editorial cartoons denouncing their supporters in the United States. He lampooned the isolationists and America Firsters, including the still highly popular Charles Lindbergh. After the US entered the war Geisel entered the Army and widened his efforts to include Japan and Japanese-Americans. The Private Snafu series of training films presented to new Army recruits was largely his work, and he wrote and helped produce other films supporting America’s war effort, twice winning Academy Awards for his efforts in film. He was also awarded the Legion of Merit for his work in the Army.
His enduring fame came after the war when he returned to the writing and drawing of children’s books, creating the characters whose renown equals his own. What is less known is that most people pronounced his pseudonym incorrectly, rhyming with juice. Geisel said that is was intended to rhyme with voice, and that was how he pronounced it. His fame was such that an attempt to change the pronunciation among children or adult fans was fruitless. He gave up the attempt to convince people to pronounce it to rhyme with voice in the late 1960s, content to have it rhyme, he said, with Mother Goose.