From Mulberry Street to ‘Green Eggs and Ham’

It’s a rare eye that can look at a palm tree and see something called a truffula, yet Dr. Seuss regularly transformed the commonplace into the whimsical. From the Cat in the Hat and Bartholomew Cubbins to Horton, the Lorax and the Grinch, he married impossibly acrobatic animals with inventive language and created another world.

Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, was born on this date in 1904 in the small New England town of Springfield, Mass. His home was on Mulberry Street, just a stone’s throw from the local zoo. Anyone at all familiar with his books can see that the foundation of his future work lay here.

Geisel claimed to have viewed the world through the wrong end of a telescope. He certainly had a knack for seeking out the silly. He was fascinated by the town eccentrics and their crazy inventions, to which he attributed fantastical names like the “silk-stocking-back-seam-wrong-detecting mirror.”

When he was 6, he recited the Old Testament in rhyme:

The great Jehovah speaks to us,

In Genesis and Exodus;

Leviticus and Numbers, three,

Followed by Deuteronomy.

Geisel took only one formal art class in his life, and he dropped out after his teacher told him he could not draw upside-down, as he was apt to do. Nonetheless, he worked as a cartoonist at his high school newspaper, drawing a character named Pete the Pessimist and attributing it to T.S. LeSieg--Geisel spelled backward.

After graduation, he attended Dartmouth, where his only aspiration was to become editor of the school’s humor magazine, the Jack-O-Lantern. It took him four years, but he succeeded, only to be stripped of the position when he was caught drinking during Prohibition. Still, he contributed, albeit pseudonymously, debuting the name Seuss, his mother’s maiden name.

Intent on becoming a professor, he attended Oxford in England. But his notebooks were filled less with notes than with doodles--which is how he met his wife. It was during an Anglo-Saxon for Beginners class that Helen Marion Palmer, an American student 5 1/2 years his senior, remarked: “That’s a very fine flying cow.” Just a few months later, Geisel proposed to her in a ditch, where the motorcycle he was driving had skidded from the road. Ted and Helen married in 1926 and were married for 40 years, when Helen took her own life. (He married Audrey Stone Diamond in 1968.) He had no children. “You have ‘em, I’ll amuse ‘em,” Seuss once said.

At his first wife’s urging, he turned his attention from education to illustration. Returning to the U.S., he drew advertisements--for 17 years--for an insecticide called Flit.

In 1931, he was hired to illustrate a couple of books and realized he shouldn’t just illustrate stories but write them too. His first attempt was an ABC book, populated by an alphabet’s worth of anatomically impossible animals. The book failed. Geisel didn’t try again until 1936, when he was on a ship from Europe and became mesmerized by the sound of the engine: da da da da de dum dum de da de de da. Later he matched this rhythm to the words “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” and saw his first success.

In 1942, he joined the armed forces. Later he moved to a pink stucco house on the highest hilltop in La Jolla, where he was often visited by roving packs of Boy Scouts. It was in this house that Seuss wrote almost all of his more than 40 books. “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” was his last. Dr. Seuss died Sept. 24, 1991 in his sleep.