Imagine a world where you can be coerced into consuming strangely colored breakfast foods by an unclassified creature named Sam-I-Am, where you are more likely to spot a Crumple-horn, Web-footed, Green-bearded Schlottz than a pigeon on your morning jog, and where a verbose cat can trash your house in a manner that makes the aftermath of even the wildest Panarchy Rave look tame. It is the world of famed Dartmouth graduate Theodore Geisel '25, better known to most as Dr. Seuss. And while Dr. Seuss and his beloved characters are now household names across the globe (and constant presences at Dartmouth from our green eggs at the lodge to our recent celebrations of his birthday), few know that many of Geisel's "great ideas" have their roots in the author's time at the College on the Hill.
Geisel, a Springfield, Mass., native came to Dartmouth in 1921, influenced by a high school teacher who was a Big Green alumnus.
The time of his arrival was marked by a period of great social upheaval. According to a senior thesis about Geisel by Adam Lipsius '94, "an inebriated Pax Americana was sweeping the prosperous age, fueled by prohibition, jazz, and the absurd whimsy young men like [Geisel] longed to espouse an unorthodox iconoclastic blithe disinterest crept into the hard of the generation populating the college campuses none more deeply than one Ted Geisel."
Geisel came to the College hoping to split off from the normalcy of his life in Springfield and "found in the fertile insular Dartmouth college soil the whimsical environment and the bright, similarly-included young men he'd been waiting for," according to the thesis.
At the College, he majored in English, was a brother at Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, and most notably, edited and drew cartoons for the Jack-O-Lantern.
It was at the Jack-O-Lantern that Geisel discovered his talent for writing and drawing, becoming the Editor-in-Chief by the end of his junior year, according to an April 1976 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article.
As a member of the Jack-O staff, Geisel honed his passion for "combining humorous writing and zany drawing," according to the same article.
In an interview with Geisel in the article, he said, "[My junior year] was the year I discovered the excitement of marrying words to pictures. I began to get it through my skull that words and pictures were yin and yan. I began thinking that words and pictures, married, might produce a progeny more interesting than either parent."
Geisel also drew inspiration from a creative writing class he took taught by professor W. Ben Pressey. Lipsius' thesis quoted Seuss saying that Pressey was his "big inspiration for writing" because "he seemed to like the stuff I wrote He's the only person I took any creative writing courses from ever, anywhere, and he was very kind and encouraging."
But perhaps the most notable indicator of the influence that Dartmouth had on Geisel's future career is his creation of the pseudonym, Dr. Seuss, at the College itself.
After getting caught with alcohol on the night before Easter, Geisel was put on probation and stripped of his editorship at the Jack-O-Lantern for defying the laws of prohibition, according to Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article. Although Geisel could continue writing articles for the Jack-O due to their anonymous nature, since most appeared anonymously, cartoons posed a bigger problem, since the author usually signed them. To remedy this issue, Geisel began to sign his cartoons with the alias, "Seuss," his middle name, and Dr. Seuss was born.
Long after his days at Dartmouth, Geisel continued to use the name in his works. In the interview with Geisel in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article, he said, "The main reason that I picked Seuss professionally is that I still thought that one day I was going to write the Great American Novel. I was saving my real name for that and it looks like I still am."
From children's toys to amusement park rides, there is no doubting the rich legacy that Dr. Seuss left behind on the world. But at Dartmouth, Seuss' influence extends beyond the "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" tree ornaments at the Co-op or even the Theodore Geisel Room in Baker. His former presence at the College is a constant reminder to that kid doodling elephant-birds in his Writing 5 notebook or the one that would rather lie on the Green daydreaming about what it would be like to meet a Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill from the island of Gwark than sit in Chem 6 can be whoever they want to be.
After all, as Dr. Seuss so famously said in his classic, "Oh, the Places You'll Go": "You have brains in your head/ You have feet in your shoes/ You can steer yourself/ any direction you choose And will you succeed? / Yes, you will, indeed! / 98 and three-fourths percent guaranteed."
Just hope you are not part of that unlucky 1 1/4 percent.
