Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss: 30 Things You Might not Know

March 3 begins Vieau School’s annual participation of "Read Across America," an annual reading motivation and awareness program that calls for every child in every community to celebrate reading on March 2, the birthday of beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss. 

But WHO was Dr. Seuss anyWHO? 

1. His real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel.
2. His mother’s maiden name, Seuss, if correctly pronounced rhymes with “voice” not “loose”.
3. He never had any children of his own.
4. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the grandson of German immigrants.
5. He felt traveling helped his creativity and he visited at least 30 countries in his lifetime.
6. While on an ocean voyage, the rhythm of the ship's engines inspired the poem that became his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.  
   
7. Mulberry Street was rejected by 20 publishers before it was successfully published.
8. Mulberry Street in his hometown is less than a mile from his boyhood home on Fairfield Street.
9. Geisel attended Dartmouth College and graduated in 1925
10. He attended Oxford University from 1926 – 1928 but he left without earning his PhD.
11. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Dartmouth in 1956.
12. He added the “Dr.” to his pen name because his father had always wanted him to be a medical doctor.
13. In 1927, he earned $25 for his first nationally published cartoon in The Saturday Evening Post but he didn't always get paid in cash.  Once he was paid with shaving cream and hundreds of nail clippers. 
14. His other pen names were Dr. Theophrastus Seuss, Theo LeSieg, and Rosetta Stone.
    
15. He used the pen name Theo LeSieg (Geisel spelled backwards) for books that he wrote but didn’t illustrate.
16. He published 46 children’s books.
17. Green Eggs and Ham is the result of a bet that he couldn’t write a book using only 50 words. 
    
18. Horton Hears a Who is an allegory for the bombing of Hiroshima and the American post-war occupation of Japan.
19. How the Grinch Stole Christmas was a criticism of the materialism and consumerism of the Christmas season. 
20. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins was inspired by a pompous looking man Geisel saw one night while riding home on a train.  He wondered what would happen if someone knocked the hat off his head and decided that the man was so full of himself that another hat would probably appear on his head as a replacement.
    
21. His books were the inspiration for 11 television specials, 4 feature films, a Broadway musical and 4 television series.
22. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 but never won the Caldecott Medal nor the Newbery Medal (prestigious children’s literature awards).
23. He won three Academy Awards.
24. During World War II, he worked in the animation department of the U.S. Army.
25. He was a perfectionist and would sometimes spend up to a year on a book.
26. He sometimes threw away 95% of his material until he settled on a theme for his book.
27. In May 1954, Life magazine published a report on illiteracy among school children. The report suggesting that children were having trouble reading because their books were boring. This problem inspired Geisel’s publisher, prompting him to send Geisel a list of 400 words he felt were important for children to learn. The publisher asked Geisel to cut the list to 250 words and use them to “bring back a book children can’t put down.” Nine months later, Geisel used 225 of the words given to him to write The Cat in the Hat.  It was an instant success. 
    
28. Why did the Cat in the Hat wear a hat?  It might be because the author loved hats and collected them.  In fact, there is a National Touring Exhibition of his hat collection going on right now! Check it out at: Hats Off to Dr. Seuss!
29. In 2002, the Dr. Suess National Memorial Sculpture Garden opened in his birthplaceof Springfield, Massachusetts. It features sculptures of Geisel and many of his characters.  
30. Geisel died on September 24, 1991, at his home in La Jolla, California at the age of 87.  He received his star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame in March 2004 to commemorate what would have been his 100th birthday.
    
    
    

Words of wisdom from Dr. Seuss:

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.  Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and that enables you to laugh at life's realities."