Hi, everybody. I hope you're having a great weekend. Chuck Bryant here, co host of the Stuff You Should Know podcast of what you are listening to. This Selects episode comes from December twenty eighteen, and it's all about old Doctor Seuss, Theodor Geisel, Doctor Seuss Colan, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Because if you talk about doctor Seuss, you gotta talk about it all the books, the great stuff.
And some of the not so great stuff.
So check it out now if you'd like Doctor Seuss Colon, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. This is the Doctor Soys.
Cast, our final episode of this.
Year, twenty eighteen. So long in the books, Doctor Seuss, Doctor Seys. That's right.
You know what's funny?
Well we'll get to that, all right, Everything that's funny can wait. Yep, we're gonna talk serious.
Doctor SEUs was an author of children's books. He was so great and also kind of racist.
Chuck, there's a lot of stuff in here. I wish I didn't know. I know.
I think we're about to ruin doctor SEUs at the end of the year, right after the holidays, right, uh yeah, but well let's just talk about the man.
Okay. So we are talking. We keep saying doctor Seuss. Everybody knows him as doctor Seuss, but apparently the correct pronunciation is sous. Yeah, and the guy would know because Suss is actually his middle name. His name is Theodore Seuss Geisel or Geisel? Is it Geisel or Geisel?
It would be Geisel in German you go with a second vowel.
So Theodore soys Geisel.
Yeah.
And it's sort of when I saw that, everyone basically was like Seuss until he eventually is like fine, like I can't fight this fight any longer.
Well, they're like, we'll spell it differently.
Then, But they're reminded me of Joe Thiesman. Oh yeah, the very famous story of quarterback Joe Theisman who changed his spelling or his pronunciation to Thigsman to run with Heisman, which I.
Think is the story. I think that's true. No, No, I think that's true. Oh really, yeah, what do you think that was just like an old football tale?
No, I'd never heard. I thought you're just being funny. Oh no, that really happened, and that really came back to bite him in the rump when his thigh bone broke open. God, he's like, I guess my knee would have busted if he had just kept that thievesman? Oh is that not? Okay? Too soon? No, so we're obviously once we get into Joe, thisman leg breaking tip awkward
talking about doctor series. That's right, Like I said, Theodore sooys Geisel, who is I can't really think of a children's book author that is more widely known.
Maybe Charles Schultz.
Maybe I think a comic strip guy children's sure, sure, children's book, yeah, like Judy Bloom, Sure, But I don't know if I call her children's book young adult like children's book. I guess the Berenstein Bears not the Berenstein Bears.
Yeah, I would say that Teddy Geisel holds that distinction for sure.
At the very least, his work, his drawing is just immediately recognizable. His style.
Yeah, I mean that font you we use that font for our Live Christmas show shirts.
Nay on the oppy right, Kay?
No, it's not his. In fact, I looked it up. I was kind of curious. I was like, what is that great font that he uses for his book titles? And I don't know what he used. He probably just hand drew it. Sure, I imagine. But now there are fonts called sois doctor soos.
Font or grinched that you can you know, you can gank that. Sure we did for our Christmas shirt.
I haven't heard that word in forever, gank. I think I was wearing like huge Jenko's the last time I heard the word gank.
He ganked my milk off my tray bringing it back.
It's the last time I used it too.
So should we go back to the beginning?
Yes, back to Springfield, Massachusetts in nineteen oh four.
That's right, March two.
As a matter of fact, fellow Pisces, doctor Seuss was born Teddy Geisel and his grandpops had come from Germany in the mid eighteen hundreds bought a brewery because they were good Germans, they knew all about beer.
And originally, get this, the name of the brewery was Combach and Geisel, and they locally called it comeback and guzzle.
I love that and that awesome in German.
No less, yeah, whatever, that would be I think it'd be comback and Geisel.
So he moved here and it would end up becoming the Springfield Breweries Company, which his father then ran.
And this is really like we did.
He even did a show on prohibition, and it never really hit home to me some of the repercussions of that. I was just like, people can't drink, But I never thought about a family business just being shut down.
That was a good episode, it was.
But that's what happened that, you know, Prohibition came along. They had this successful brewery in their family. They're like, sorry, you're no longer in business, Go find another job.
These guys, yeah, who.
Were secretly drinking.
Right, you know. So I had the job that is his father did get was eventually became the supervisor of the town's parks.
Yeah, kind of cool.
And there's a myth, an incorrect myth. From what I understand. One of the parks had a zoo in it, and so a lot of people say that drawings of the animals were some of the first at the zoo were some of the first drawings that little Ted came up with.
Not true.
No, his father became superintendent of the parks when he was already a grown man. Oh, but well not a grown man. He was definitely not a little kid at the zoo.
Did he go to the zoo and draw animals? Or is that all false?
I think it may be all false, but I'm making that part up. I just from what I read he was grown enough that he wasn't a little boy drawing pictures of animals at the zoo. Like people think, interesting, Yeah, I thought it was as well. I love busting myths. I'm going to wear a brake now.
He should do a show.
So World War one comes along, which I've been I've been doing a lot of World War One reading lately, with the really anniversary of the Armisist armacists. Yeah, you got really interesting. I didn't know much about it.
It's a pretty serious war, brutal. Everything I know about is from the Wonder Woman movie. Yeah, I kid.
So they were German, that the Geisels were like we said, and so in the United States during World War One there was a lot of anti In fact, for a long time, actually, there was a lot of anti German sentiment in the US.
Right, They're like, we're not German. Were just like beer.
Yeah, and her name is Geisel, so everyone it was clear that they were German, and so, you know, there was there was I get the feeling that he, you know, felt like he was like picked on and laughed at, teased because he was German.
Right, So if you can't beat him, join them. Turn that same kind of bigotry onto others we'll find right.
So he starts at a very early age in high school drawing cartoons, writing essays, funny essays, satirical essays. And he started using a pen name very early on, maybe because he was German, and he just reversed his last name and he became Theo la Sigue.
Yeah. Actually, one of my favorite books, Hooper Humperdink Not Him, is written by Theo Lasigue.
Oh really yeah?
Interesting, was like I always thought this was a doctor Seu's book, and then I saw this and I'm like, it was a doctor Seuss book.
Wow?
Do you ever read that one?
I don't think so.
What's it called? Hooper Humperdink Not Him. It's about this kid who's throwing a birthday party and everybody's invited to the greatest birthday party you've ever seen in your life, except for poor Hooper humber Ink. And I think he gets invited finally at the end.
Where your parents are like, we should probably get Josh this and go ahead and get him ready, right pretty much.
There actually was a birthday party I wasn't invited to. It really was like, I'm hooper humperdink.
Oh, well, you know my deal was I wasn't allowed to go to boy girl parties for a while.
So but you were still invited, right.
Yeah, But that was even worse because I was invited and I was like I had to say, no, I can't go because there's girls there.
Right, I gotcha?
And how humiliating is that?
Especially in college?
Yeah, And they were like, uh, what's wrong with girls? I'm like, I don't know.
Ask my parents.
He seemed great to me.
They told me they smell nice, all right. So he reversed his name became Lesigue. I went to Dartmouth College, and like many many famous humorist, I guess you could call him Yeah, for sure. He wrote for his college humor magazine was called The jack O Lantern, and it was just like, really solidifies that college humor magazines really have produced some of the brightest comedic minds that in this country over the years.
You know, yeah, Letterman, I think he worked at National Lampoons, didn't he?
I don't know if Terman is Conan certainly did the Harvard Lampoon.
I'm pretty sure Letterman did as well, all right, at the very least a lot of his writers did.
Sure.
Okay, fine, okay, we'll settle on.
That that version of the truth.
Okay.
But he got kicked off of the magazine staff when he was caught drinking on campus during prohibition, which is kind of awesome.
Yeah, I'll bet it wasn't for him.
What do you mean?
Oh? But he was like, well, I want to be on the magazine staff. This is terrible. This is an unjustice.
Oh yeah, not awesome for him, right, yeah, yeah, I thought you meant he wasn't doing the drinking or something.
Right. This did nothing to cut his career off though, No, no, no, he just adopted a new pseudonym. Yeah, soiss right s auss again, but he pronounced it soys right. But he was the only person who did so. He did graduate from Dartmouth and I think nineteen twenty six, which also further goes to show that he was so if he
graduated college in nineteen twenty six. Then his father's brewery wouldn't have been shut down until I don't remember when prohibition started, but he would He was obviously not a young kid necessarily.
Gotcha okay, drawn dumb animals at the zoo at the zoo.
But he went on to Oxford to I guess pursue a higher degree.
Yeah.
I think he was going to be a teacher, was his original intent, and he didn't like Oxford, but Oxford brought him to his wife, Helen Palmer, Yeah, his first wife, his first wife, and they met and she actually had a really great influence on him by saying, I think you are maybe going to be a better artist than a teacher, and kind of pushed him toward that. Yeah, and he ended up pursuing a career in art, largely because of her influence.
Yeah, And he sort of did the student thing.
He worked on the novel, and he traveled around Europe and was sort of doing and he was with Helen of course this whole time. They eventually get married and then he went to work for a magazine called Judge, drawing once again like political cartoons, humor cartoons acted. This is where he added the doctor to his name as sort of a joke because he, I guess, did not get that doctorate degree or whatever he was pursuing.
No, he didn't, but later on in life, Dartmouth did bestow an honorary degree to make him an official doctor.
When are we gonna get one of those?
I've been waiting a long time, Chuck.
And are they as worthless as I think they are?
Totally? Yeah? I mean sure you'll get like the discount at Wendy's that they offer, But that's that's really the only perk aside from saying, like, I'm a doctor.
Can you really call yourself that? Though?
Sure?
Like only chumps do that, right, Like you have to call me doctor now, dude.
You you will see me telling people to call me doctor Clark. Okay, I'll just I'll be more personal. I'll be doctor Josh like a chiropractor.
I could see you going off and getting your pH d one day.
Nah nah nah, I want the audit from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
The backdoor version pretty much, yeah version, all right?
So he got the doctor on the name, became doctor Soyer, and from then on he never wrote under his given name again. He was always doctor swye from that point for should we take a break.
You can see me getting a PhD. Yeah, this late in my career. Yeah, this mid in my career. Sure, huh am I like Natalie Portman or something?
Yes, all right, let's take a break.
Softly, Josh soft.
All right?
Natalie nat uh I wish right.
I'll bet Natalie Portman hates being called Nat. You think she seems like the type of Natalie who would hate being called Nat.
Let's find out, doctor Portman.
Natalie Portman, will you please get in touch with this and let us know whether you're cool with being called Nat or not.
Well, hey, so we're on that big shout out to mister Mark Ruffalo.
It was basically the male Natalie Portman.
Yeah.
He tweeted out our Navajo Code Talkers episode, which means that he's aware of this podcast and we're huge fan.
So if you're listening, man, thanks.
Yeah, thanks a lot and a lot. Not just aware he liked it, he encouraged people to listen to Yeah. He wasn't like, steer clear of this piece of poop. Right, this is a good podcast, is what he was saying.
Man, I remember when I saw you can count on me for the first time. Oh my god, that movie wrecked me.
It was such a good movie. Yeah, not just the first time, like just every time you watch that movie is wonderful.
It's really great. So I have another show called Movie Crush. Mister Ruffalo would love to have you on. We'll just leave it there, all right, So all right, here's what happens. Okay, Teddy Geisel starts doing ads, yeah, and does quite well.
Yeah. I mean, if you're an ad illustrator, you basically do what you're told. Client says, this is what we want. He was the kind of artist who, because of his distinctive style, his style is what the clients wanted. So as an ad illustrator, he became nationally famous.
Yeah, which is crazy to think of now.
It really is. His first big break was for something called Flit. It was a bug spray and if you look at the Flit ads, they have a picture of the flit and it was that old timey Tom and Jerry Pump candidate's like, couldn't be more poisonous?
Post out like a cloud of noxious smoke.
So that formed like a skull and crossbones in the air, basically, right, that's what he was drawing stuff for and he came up with a catchphrase because he wasn't just illustrating, he was also copywriting in these ads, and he came up with quick Henry the flit, and that just became a national catchphrase.
Yeah, like where's the beef?
Right, like somebody's pestering You're just like to somebody else, Quick Henry the flit. That's how I probably would have used it. But so he became known for that, and then a second egg campaign made him even bigger.
Oh right, so he did flit for seventeen years, dude, which is like I thought, yeah, sure, he did that for a couple of years, right, I mean there's almost two decades of doing those ads, made a lot of money, kept him, you know, nice and employed through the Great Depression. And then this one's even weirder. He went to work for Standard Oil, who had ESO Oil and so So Gas, and this was ESO Marine, which was their boat oil.
Yeah.
In nineteen thirty four, he has this pr idea to create a fake navy.
The Sous Navy, the SEUs Navy, which is nothing. He just made it up out of nowhere to promote the ESO Marine oil. Yeah, and it worked, yeah, because he basically drafted people into his navy. He would draw like famous figures like say eleanor Roosevelt or something like that, dressed up in the sous navy uniform or whatever, and it became a thing like people wanted to be in it,
so they would apply to be in it. And I guess so So would hold a party every year and just pull out all the stops and there would be this lavish so Seuss Navy party.
You know, it's called what the Seuss Navy Luncheon and.
Frolic That sounds so like thirties.
They had two thousand admirals and they included among them Vincent Astor and Guy Lombardo, famous bandleader. And as this is a Grabstarre article is ed put it, they were what you would call like tastemakers today, like wealthy influential Americans wanted to be in this fake navy, to go to this luncheon and frolic. Right, And he wrote these little navy story booklets and it astonishingly it was a
big deal and it actually worked. And when you look at him there they look like Doctor Seuss books like right, It's not like he changed his style.
No, No, this is the thing. Like he became famous for famous and salt after for his style.
Yeah, exactly.
And weirdly enough, he said that the only reason he went into children's books initially was because his standard oil contract didn't forbid it. Huh, Like that was some of the work that he was allowed to do with outside.
Gotcha.
He never he was like, it's not like I had a great thing for kids.
Well, he even said very famously multiple times that he didn't write for kids. He wrote for people.
And he also famously said, you have kids, I'll entertain them.
Right. Yeah, he didn't want kids, did not want kids, No, and he never had them, so his wish came true. So he was already pretty famous by the time World War two came around and he actually volunteered to become a soldier, but he was sent to Hollywood to work at what was called Fort Fox.
Yeah, this is strange. I mean I had heard of the Signal Corps.
Well, the Signal Core is everything from code like code and code all the way to psychological operations.
Oh, I thought the Signal Corps was just like the people that made documentaries and stuff.
This was a division within the Signal Corps gotcha, and so he was basically in this division with Frank Capra and some other like screenwriters, actors, like basically anybody who had anything to do with visual entertainment was put into this group in Hollywood on the Fox Lot at what was called Fort Fox, and that's where he spent most of the war, although there was a fascinating story about a time when he went to Europe because he had to go get approvals for a documentary he had worked
on from all the high ranking generals in Europe. So we went from headquarters to headquarters throughout Europe. And while he was in Luxembourg, he visited some of his friends and he basically got the skinny they think on the Ghost Army, you know the Ghost Army where they had inflatable tanks and like it was meant to make America's military look way bigger than it was, and these guys
were running psychological operations. Well, doctor Seuss was friends with some of the higher ups in the Ghost Army, and they think that they showed him on a map like where to go to go see some of these Well, in between the time he left and the time he got there, that was suddenly behind enemy lines.
Ye had the Battle of the Bulge literally started around him, around him.
Well, he was yeah, and he was like, I was just driving around thinking like it was just hard to find friendly troops, like as.
Part of combat Belgium, sure is pretty.
But he ended up inadvertently spending three days ten miles behind enemy lines during the Battle of the Bulge and just barely made it out with his life.
Yeah, he was rescued by the Brits. But he would eventually become a lieutenant colonel. Yeah, in his short stint as a late thirty year old he's I think thirty eight when he first went in, right, which really kind of interesting piece of backstory.
Well, he was we left out a pretty big part of his formative years early on in his career was he wanted to become He wanted to have a say in the direction America took in World War Two, and he was very much in favor of going to war against the Nazis and Japan in Italy. And one of the reasons why he was in favor was because he
was extremely anti fascist. He hated fascism and he got a job at a liberal magazine I think a newspaper actually called PM that was founded in New York and it was founded with the I to basically call people
out who are pushing other people around. It very liberal, very anti fascist, very pro World War Two, although they didn't call it that at the time, and it was very anti isolationists too, And doctor Seuss was drawing editorial cartoons, very political editorial cartoons, about seven days a week for this magazine, and he did some really good work in it.
Actually, well yeah, and then in the in the Army he actually made films. He was he's making documentaries right alongside Frank Capra. He had one series of training videos called Private Snaffoo that were animated, but they were.
The work of Chuck Jones.
Actually, it's just so crazy about all this talent that's like in the Army producing these things at the time. But he went on to make live action documentaries, one called Your Job in Germany, another called Our Job in Japan. MacArthur stopped the release of Our Job in Japan, and apparently General Patten stormed out of a screening of one of the other ones. And I couldn't find the word, but it said he uttered one loud curse word.
Oh you couldn't find it, No, do you? Did you? It was bs?
Oh?
Okay, but he's trying to think of what it would be. Sure, I was like, but one word. So it wasn't the F word unless it was just a very just long drawn out you know, all right, Yes, that makes sense.
Yeah, which I don't understand. I don't know what the problem was. But they were both the our job in Japan or your job in Germany? Yeah, where was about occupation post post occupation life in Germany or Japan? And what?
Yeah?
You can watch your job in Germany on YouTube.
Yeah, and our job in Japan too.
Yeah.
So he he recut those basically kind of rewrote and recut those later on and retitled them Hitler Lives and Designed for Death.
No he didn't. They were recut around him without his say.
Oh no no.
He and his wife later got those films, oh, and recut them and won an Academy award.
Oh okay, yeah, I had read that a producer went and did some recutting against their wishes and made it way worse than they originally intended.
Well, that may have happened, and then maybe they then later on re recut it got the Oscar for their version, right, I don't know, okay, but we left out a lot actually because he was actually had previous to the Army, had already written children's books. Like he went fully into this because of a ship trip that he took. Okay, in nineteen thirty six, let's.
Walk it back a little bit.
They went on a transatlantic voyage aboard the MS kungs Holme, and apparently the ship's engine had this beat, this hypnotic throbbing sound that just really stuck with him and it got into his head, and so he started composing rhyming couplets that match with this rhythm.
Kind of like that's my ss Kung's home impressions.
All right, Well, it ended up being what's called anapestic tetrameter, which is what he would make his career on this poetic meter.
You know what that made me think of, Chuck? That like, I've never heard those words together in my life, But no one ever taught me how to read a Doctor Seuss book. It's almost like we have some ingrain thing in our brain to read things in that kind of rhythm, or you know what I mean? Or is it just like my parents read that to me, and that's where I picked it up from. But who taught them? I
never taught anybody how to read something in rhymes. It's just like you just know intuitive and even when you when you when you're not reading it in the right rhythm, your brain realizes it and corrects you and you go back and reread it the right way. Like when you get to the next line, you're like, oh, wait, that's out a beat or whatever. Like you figure it out naturally, and I wonder why we're geared toward that.
Yeah.
It's funny too, because I obviously read a lot of kids books every night now, and some of them are great, and some of them just like, they'll do a word that doesn't quite rhyme, and I'm always like come on, come on, or they'll stuff too much in a line and it's not like graceful. In the read I'm like, man, this is lame.
Do better or engine door hinge.
Hey, that's not bad.
Well that's eminet Oh okay. He very famously can rhyme something with orange, which I found out because I think I said nothing rhymes with orange.
Well everyone's always said that because that's true.
Well I meant it door hinge.
That's funny.
So he created a children's book on that anapestic tetramet called and this is a story no one can beat that was later changed and published in nineteen thirty seven. As and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street because he had an old friend that he ran into from Dartmouth that turned out to be a children's book editor at Vanguard Press.
So I read an account of the story and the person saying telling the story said, had he been walking on the other side of the street that day, he may have never become a children's author. Yeah, like it
was that fateful. His friend from Dartmouth was a new children's book editor at Vanguard, you said, yeah, and it was so new that he was looking for a material and doctor Seuss happened to be walking around with the manuscript on him and just happened to be down there, and they ran into each other and this book got published and that was the one where he first made his name as a children's book writer. You're right, and shout out to Stephen Barr, book agent.
That's right.
Yeah, So this, this and a pestic tetrameter is what he basically stuck with the rest of his career. He would alter it here and there, use other meters here and there, but this is where he you know, as Ed said, that was his bread and butter. And it's very waltz like you can count it off in three four time. And it just was sort of perfect for kids books, right.
And with that first kid's book, and to think I saw it on Mulberry Street. Apparently it's about a kid named Marco who sees a horse and cart on his street and as he's retelling it, it just becomes this bigger and bigger and more like bizarre and grand thing that he saw. And this will come back later on in episode.
Yeah, so he's writing these books. He's doing okay. His fourth book was called Horton Hatches the Egg. I think that's where we first meet Horton, but he wasn't like lighting the world on fire. And then that's when he goes in the army.
Right, and let me tell you the story about getting caught in the Battle of the Bulge. Again, here we go. So he makes it through World War two, he escapes with his life from the Battle of the Bulge, and when he comes out of World War two, he goes right back to writing books, and he wrote a few
more in the forties. I believe he wrote Urdle the Turtle, which I know is an allegory four Hitler, and he was on record say yeah, apparently the early drafts of it he had drawn a Hitler mustache on Jurdle the Turtle and it's about anti authoritarian Is that.
Hitler or Michael Jordan?
Does he have a Hitler mustache?
He did very famously, and this one Haines Stevie commercial and everyone was like, uh, has someone not told him?
I didn't see that. Yeah, I'll have to show you picture.
I have my head in the sand like I was Charles Limberg or something.
Oh that's a nice circular rest.
It's just for you and me. So he was writing some more and he was I mean, he was selling like thousands of copies every time he released a book. He was a known children's author. He'd already established his style as something that was pretty recognizable around the United States. But it wasn't until the mid fifties that things really changed for him. Yeah, oh wow, it is a Hitler fuste. There's no mistake in that.
It's a decision.
So I think in nineteen fifty five, there was a book written called why Can't Johnny Read? Right?
Okay?
And a guy named Rudolph Flesh, And I realized what we've jumped over. We'll get back to sure, I'm not ready for it yet, all right, a guy named Rudolph Flesh, alf Flesh, Yeah, fl Age, that'd be a good one though. Yeah, you'd have to call yourself Rudy too. And anyway, Rudolf Flesh, he wrote Why Can't Johnny Read? And it was basically like an indictment of the American public school system, the
education system, and how we taught kids to read. And it was equally an indictment of like Dick and Jane, and the way that kids used to read or be taught to read was just basically, here are words on a page, memorize them. Yeah, this is a red ball. This is the word read. Don't be an idiot. Red ball.
It's kind of the worst way to teach kids stuff.
It is. And the guy in the article said, he wrote an article in Life later on too. He said, you know who'd be a great children's book author to teach kids how to read is doctor Seuss. He's kids, He's already writing books for kids. Yeah, but if he just directed that toward actually teaching him how to read, kids would definitely want that. And it turns out that an editor, I think at Houghton Mifflin or somebody wherever doctor Seuss was writing at the time, thunder Mifflin, thunder Mifflin,
you got me. He said, that's actually a pretty good idea. And that's where we got the cat in the hat.
That's right, it was. It was originally meant as a reading primer. I think there were two twenty five two hundred and twenty five words, and very famously, his editor bet him after that that he could not write a book with only fifty words. And he went, take this book, Green Eggs and Ham, and shove it and shove it and give me my fifty dollars, right, And that is supposedly true. His editor bet him that he could not do so, and that's where Green Eggs and Ham came from.
Yeah, and it's fifty words exactly, that's right. So he at this point he went from ed says, he went from being a well known children's author to probably the best known children's author in the world. Yeah, he'd shown not only could he write fun, whimsical stories with the disguised moral lesson in the middle of it too, with great illustrations and hand drawn fonts and all that he could actually teach the world's children how to read English at least.
Yeah.
And then from that success he wrote that same year How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
That's a big year, man, very big year. So cant and the Grinch the same year, right, yeah, okay.
Yeah, which is just amazing.
And then in nineteen sixty six, of course, we get the very famous TV cartoon adaptation, which people still love and enjoy today, including me.
Oh yeah.
And he ended up being so successful that they gave him his own imprint at Random House. With his wife, Helen Palmer Geisel, who was kind of by all accounts that the.
Woman behind the Man. Oh yeah, she was an author herself.
She wrote quite a few books, one called do you Know what I'm going to do Next Saturday to You?
One called I Know did Last Summer?
Man?
It's funny adding those two words just makes it threaten.
It's a horror novel, one called Why I Built the Google House, and one called I Was Kissed by a Seal at the zoo.
That sounds great.
So I didn't want to just kind of wash over her because she she was an author and very sadly, she ended up committing suicide very late in life.
Yeah, within a couple of years of an affair that he had. Yeah, and he'd apparently have multiple affairs in her. Her suicide note supposedly referenced this, this feeling that she'd kind of been overshadowed by him in his career. Yeah, And like you said, she was very much the woman behind the man, and I.
Think expected to support him and all that thing, and she did.
She put her own career away so that she could handle his correspondence and business affairs. She was in charge of correspondence to like sick kids that wrote them, or entire classes, and yeah, she was she was all. He was the artistic genius who just needed to be left alone so he could make these books every year, and she handled everything else, right. And ask somebody to put their career away so that you can have yours, that's a big thing to ask somebody.
Yeah, I mean she was sixty nine when she and I, I believe, I said, committed suicide earlier. I apologize, I know we don't use that term anymore. Yeah, So we say now that she died by suicide, right.
Yeah, because committed makes it sound like, oh my god, she committed a sin.
Yeah, and we people have written in about that, and we were both glad to be made aware of that. So she was sixty nine years old and apparently also suffered from Gilliam Bear Barr game Barre syndrome.
Yeah. We got corrected on that some other time. It's how I remember of.
How to pronounce it.
Yeah.
So I mean, who knows why someone eventually takes that path in life.
Could be a lot of factors. Yeah. Yeah.
October twenty third, nineteen sixty seven, she overdosed on medication.
After they've been married for forty years too. Yeah, man, And so shortly after that he married Audrey Diamond. Yes, Geisel, who's his widow? Who is I belief still alive in basically running his estate still.
Yeah, her name was Audrey Stone Diamond, but it was dm N d no A.
Oh, yeah, which is interesting.
I wonder if it's it's very efficient.
But yes, she became soys and he went just go ahead and get used to it.
It's sus She's like, really I've always said, soys, He's like, I love you.
And she had two daughters, and he said, I bet you they'd love boarding school. Yeah, and she went okay. And she later on even said, this is a direct quote. She said they wouldn't have been happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them.
Yeah. He really did not want kids or kids to be around. He just liked doing the books that he like to do.
It's pretty interesting.
So that nineteen fifty seven year, that was a big breakout year for him, and that was kind of the year that he became the Doctor Seuss that we see. But he kept writing for many, many years, I mean up until his death in nineteen ninety one. He apparently cranked out like a book a year. Yeah, some of them over time kind of took on much more progressive tones until he became the Doctor Seuss that we see today.
So prior to that, though, in recent years, some people have kind of said, hey, you know, doctor Seuss had some really racist, bigoted stuff in his early work. And it's become kind of this national conversation to kind of figure out how to do this, because everyone loves Doctor Seuss. Doctor Seuss, there's nobody who doesn't like doctor Seuss. But if you are his work, I should say sure. But if you if you start digging into, especially some of his early work, it becomes problematic.
And you want you want to take a break.
Okay, all right, all right, let's take a break and we will take part in that national conversation right after.
This softly jawsh soff.
All right, Chuck, So it's national conversation time. So doctor Seuss, especially in his earliest work as Jack O'Lantern and judge writer, the Humor magazine writer, a lot of his stuff was extremely racist. Yes, as Ed puts it, not just racist for the time, but but monstrously racist stuff.
Yeah, like full on blackface caricatures. It depicted African American characters as lazy as savages, have too many kids. He made jokes about slavery. There's one we can't even read on this show, but it's awful.
Yeah right. He also, especially as after Pearl Harbor, directed a lot of his creative energy toward making ugly caricatures of Japan and depicting Japanese and Japanese Americans in really unflattering light too.
Yeah, and apparently supported internment and this isn't you know, you don't want to drag somebody through the mud. But if we're going to give a picture of the man, this is who he was earlier in his life.
Right. So Ed makes a really good point. I think Ed's a great American for the way that he kind of kind of handled this too. He's saying that if you look at his early stuff, he was a younger man at the time, And I think we should also say it qualifies as like none of this excuses anything. Sure, but you know, look at the whole picture of the person.
If you look at his earlier stuff or his worst, most racist stuff is when he was youngest, and his most progressive stuff that everybody knows and loves is Doctor Seuss when the world was kind of changing too.
Yeah, it's not like in nineteen eighty nine he was like, I'm going to deliver I'm going to serve up a good old racist cartoon.
Right exactly. It's not like he invented sea monkeys or something like that. Right, So he kind of progressed with the world. And not only did he progress with the world and kind of change his views to take on much more progressive stuff, themes like bigotry with the sneeches is about discriminating against people and just how ridiculous that is how people are actually people. A lot of people point to Horton hears It, who as a bit of a mia Kulpa for his treatment of the Japanese prior
to World War two and during World War Two. The Lorax is obviously pro environmentalism. Yeah.
He fully changed one of his books altogether, an earlier version of.
And to Think I Saw On on Mulberry Street.
Yeah, it had the word Chinaman in there.
It was worse than chinaman, and.
He changed that to Chinese person like in the publication of the book for future printings.
Right, So he definitely evolved his works of alved He never came out and publicly said, hey, I'm really sorry about all the racist stuff that I did earlier. Yeah, by the time he died in nineteen ninety, I think that that really wasn't the way that the world was turning at the time. But he does seem to have evolved and changed with the times and did go back and revise some stuff that had crept into his work.
Yeah, And this has come to light more prominently in the past few years. Because there have been like some book festivals and children's literature festivals that have either been boycotted or where they've sort of tried to make him a little less prominent. The cat and the hat I think was used. Wasn't it like an official.
Read across America? Right, here's the mascot for it.
Yeah, And did they officially remove the cat?
And I think they've backed a little bit away from the cat and the hat as a mascot, if not entirely. And I think that they've kind of like Doctor Seus's books are not like the focal point of the Read Across America campaign like they were.
Right, And then last year, Millennia Trump made the news when she gifted a library some Doctor Seuss books, and the librarian refused that gift and said they are steeped and racist propaganda, caricatures and harmful stereotypes.
I don't know that that all is necessarily true, is it?
Yeah? You know, I think that might have been a little too harsh.
Well, I mean, if it's if I'm wrong, I want to know. The only thing that I've seen that could be pointed to in his work, like his books, was the was the reference in drawing of the Chinese guy. Yeah, in his first book, and to think I saw it on Mulberry Street. I didn't see anything else. I saw some reference that maybe the cat in the hat was supposed to be blackfaced, but I saw that one place right nowhere Else. It seemed to be as earlier work, not as children's books. And I didn't see any racist
propaganda that had that was hidden in the books. If anything, the books that you would give a library, and I don't know what title she gave, would have been the more progressive stuff.
Yes, she didn't go there and say here, look, here's the old jack o lantern, here's the really dirty stuff, college humor, racist cartoons, and yeah. To say that his work was steeped in racist propaganda when talking about the children's books, is, I agree, is not accurate.
Right.
What I'm trying to figure out is is that librarian hip to something we don't know about, right or not. I'm very curious to know, Like, if we didn't dig quite deep enough, I'm a little surprised because you know us, Yeah, but I want to know if we're missing something.
Then Yeah, for sure.
I found an article where they were just asking a lot of professionals in children's literature what they thought about all this, Because I'm a big dummy, you know, I don't know how to figure this stuff out of my own And Anne Neely, she's a professor of children's lit at Vanderbilt, said this, just as every author illustrator is. I think Theodore Geisel was a product of his time.
We should not judge him by today's standards, but we must evaluate his books that we decide to share with children using today's standards.
That is a really great point.
Yeah, we can outwallow in our own nostalgia when we make choices for the books we share with young children. There's simply too many outstanding books available.
Well, especially also if the books that were raising our kids on it's new to them, right, if it is steeped and ra propaganda that we're not realizing we're sharing or perpetuating, then yeah, that shouldn't be the case.
And Ed makes the great point that in the nineteen twenties and thirties it was the exceptional American who broke out of that mold and was very progressive. And I wish he would have been one of those, but he wasn't.
Yeah, and I think That's one of the reasons why there's such a cognitive dissonance when you find this stuff out is because that's what you think of doctor Seuss based on his work, that like, he would be that kind of guy, but he was human. His work is larger than him because I think what it is. And that's the case with just about everything.
It seems like, yeah, I mean, I don't want this to taint to your reading of how the Grinch Stole Christmas this year.
Although another thing that he was called out on once was his there was no female protagonist in any of his books either.
Again a product of the time. Yeah, he was a man writing about little male characters.
But he went and created a headed Mazie after that, so he so again, his books became more progressive further on in his career and he handled things like segregation
and discrimination like with the Sneetches. The Butter Battle Book was a clear, like glaring allegory for the Cold War, and The Mutual sur Destruction is Arms Race kind of a haunting book that ends without any resolution, with both sides, the Yukes and the Zeukes, I think, with their bombs pointed at one another, and it doesn't it's not like and they lived happily ever after. It's like, what's going
to happen? Yeah. And then his last book that he wrote and published while he was alive was Oh the Places You'll Go, which I had no idea, was published in nineteen ninety, did you.
I didn't know anything about it.
So it was it was his last book that was published while he was alive. It's also his top selling book. So some of these other books have been around for decades longer than All the Places You'll Go. But All the Places You'll Go is this top selling book because it's given to grads every spring there's a new batch of graduates, Yeah, who get Oh the Places You'll Go as a gift, and like ten million copies have been sold.
Because it's about like your future and what to wait to.
Yeah, just like doing things and taking risks and like trying stuff and you can do it and it'll be hard and you're gonna run into two problems, but you know you're you're a good person and you're going to make good choices. And I have a story about this. Oh yeah, So last night I was talking to you MEI, and I was like just out of nowhere. I was like, did you know that Oh the Places You'll Go was only published in nineteen ninety but it's Doctor Zeus's greatest
selling book. And she just looked at me kind of like a little flabbergasted, like why would you say that. I was like, Oh, we're doing a Doctor SEUs episode tomorrow, and she's like, that's really weird. I'll be right back, And she went into our bedroom and came back out with a copy of Oh the Places You'll Go and said, this has been an your pillow. She said, I was going to give this to you tomorrow for the last
episode of the End of the World. Oh wow, But I just happened to bring it up the day before, and that's crazy. Yeah, I thought that was really surprised.
Man, how things work out.
But I read it as recently as last night. I'm like, this is an amazing even for Seuss, it's an amazing book. Like an article I read said that somebody said, like, you can tell that he knew this was the last book that that was going to be published while he was alive, that he wanted this to be as his swan song.
Interesting, Yeah, I would not be surprised. Talking about his more progressive views and sort of catching up with the time. If either Helen and or Audrey as the women behind the Man, weren't helping him along in that respect, sure and saying like hey, get with it.
Oh oh, like for changing his views. Maybe I thought that as well.
I could totally see that.
Yeah, because if you think about it, Halen Palmer came into his life. Yeah, yeah, I could see her having that influence on him. Yeah.
He passed away finally of cancer in September twenty fourth, nineteen ninety one, eighty seven. And I remember this because that was a rough week. I was in college and he and Miles Davis died about five or six days apart. Oh really, And I just remember being like, man, this is one of those tough ones. Yeah, for dudes my age, they were beeboppers and children's book readers.
At the same time. I've got one last thing for you about doctor Seuss. Do you have anything else? I got one more thing too me first, Okay, I'll go first. He was a voracious chain smoker.
Oh interesting, so much.
So that even back in like the fifties and sixties, he knew he needed to lay off sometimes. So when he needed to lay off of smoking. He would he would take up a corn cob pipe that he kept turnip seeds in, and anytime he wanted to smoke, rather than light it, he would put a water dropper in there, and then when the turnip seeds started to sprout, he would grow go back to cigarettes.
What.
Yes, I don't fully understand that. He would start a little seed.
Corn turnip seeds, and then rather than light it, he would just put a seed dropper Yeah yeah, pof on it. But nothing was going on. It was all just mental oral fixation. And then after about three days of doing this, the seeds would would sprout Germany and he'd be like, okay, I can go back to cigarettes now. Huh. So you take about three days off of cigarettes. And he used the crop of turnip greens as his his indicator.
I thought you were going to say that that went on to feed like the children in poor neighborhoods or something who hate turnips, kids that eat turnips.
Turnips are great.
I agree.
I'm a root vegetable man myself, so my last thing. In two thousand and seven, the federal judge received a hard boiled egg in the mail from an inmate in prison protesting his diet in prison, and the federal the federal judge rendered a decision, and apparently it was worked up the ladder. I can't remember even what it was about. But he rendered a decision thussly. I do not like eggs in the file. This is Judge James Murehead. I do not like them in any style. I will not
take them fright or boiled. I will not take them poached or broiled. I will not take them softer scrambled despite an argument, well rambled, No fan, I am of the egg at hand. Destroy that egg today today, today, I say.
Without delay.
Huh.
And they threw him out of court and fired him right because he was drunk.
Yeah, no, I don't know. Wow. I wonder what came out of that.
I don't know. And it gave very little information about what the case was even on.
I know, like the guys, no, really, this is a serious complaint. Please, you're focusing on their own thing. Soon helped me.
Oh goodness.
If you want to know more about doctor Seuss, go research it. Make your own decisions about the man, the work, all that stuff. Okay, agreed, And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.
No, this is our last show of the year, so no listener mail. Is just our time of the year to thank everyone here a year. Is this the end of ten years?
Yes, it's sort of in the middle. April is the beginning and end of a year.
Right, but the end of our calendar year. And we just thank everyone for hanging in for this long with us. Yeah, it's amazing that we're still allowed to do this job.
Yeah, hang in there. It'll pay off eventually. Yeah, and we're going to keep at it forever forever. And on a personal note, a very happy birthday to my dear sweet wife Yumi. Happy birthday, Yummi pea birthday, Umi, And thank you guys for being with us for yet another year. And we'll see you next year.
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