Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss
Today is Theodore Giesel's, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss, birthday, or would have been had one not passed away some time back. Dr. Seuss books play a special role in my life. Both of my parents are immigrants, coming to this country from Italy just after the end of World War II (or, as my mom calls it, World War Second). They spoke mostly Italian at home and while they had a functional knowledge of English, neither one of them was a reader and neither of them could really read to me. So Italian wound up being my first language and I only started to pick up English as I got closer to having to go to school.
I watched a lot of TV as a kid (this was the early 1960's so there was not a lot of TV to choose from, my dad owned a TV repair store so I was always around them) and I picked up most of my english from that, but I did not do much in the way of reading. By the time I got to first grade I think everyone knew I was having trouble keeping up and my first grade teacher was going to recommend that I be held back. Lots of drama for me back then as I had no idea what was going on.
This was way before there was such a thing as ESL (English as a Second Language) in schools and, really, nobody knew what to do. My teacher told my parents I needed to read more but offered little in the way of suggestions other than to find something I would read. So, my mom too me to a store and just asked me what I wanted. I must have pointed at the Dr. Seuss books because she bought nearly every book in the store and brought them home.
I read them at home, on my own and they got me going enough that my mother soon graduated me on to the things like reading the comics section of the newspaper and then, eventually, comic books. Comics are what really got me going and while I barely got by first grade, by the time I was in third grade I was way ahead of everyone else's reading level and in fourth grade I was helping everyone with their reading and english.
There was a moment I still remember in third grade, I read a lot of Superman back then and I had been reading a comic that had the Bizarros in it. I liked it, but I did not get the reference, so I wrote the word down and took it to my teacher and asked her what it meant. She asked me "Do you mean bizarre?" and I told her I got the word from a comic book and described the characters and the stories of who they were and described the context. She figured it out (I did not have the origin story in front of me, where Superboy looks at Bizarro and says he looks bizarre, to which Bizarro responds something like "Me Am Bizarro." Keep in mind at that point in my life I was doing remedial reading work and not doing it very well. The teacher gave me a chapter book to bring home, which I read in pretty much a night, and when I came back and gave her basically an oral report on the book which concluded with my saying it wasn't as cool as Batman my teacher stopped treating me like a retard (sorry, I know that word is not PC, but it fits with the way I was being treated) and started treating me like an actual student .Soon all my grades improved.
So Dr. Seuss, comic books and Charlie Brown, those things made me the man I am today, both good and bad I suppose. The comic book habit never left me, these days I wish there was some kind of 12 step program back when I was a teenager and maybe I would not have wasted so much of my life in comics as a career.
But, there is one more part of this story, something that is actually a little creepy.
So, now I flash forward about 30 years and I have kids of my own. I read to them (or my wife did, but I did most of it) every night and of course their early story experience was with Dr. Seuss. One night I came to bed after reading to the boys and I was dead tired, way more tired than usual. According to my wife I pretty much passed out in the middle of saying good night. In the middle of the night I felt myself being shaken awake, violently by my wife. She looked at me and yelled at me to snap out of it and then asked me what I was dreaming about, to which I responded that I could not remember. Then she told me I was agitated and thrashing about and repeating Dr. Seuss lines like "One Fish!!! Two Fish!!! I do NOT like that hat... Sam I AM..." all kinds of things. She told me that I should lay off the Dr. Seuss for a while.
When I woke up the next morning I turned on the news and discovered that Theodore Giselle, the man who was Dr. Seuss, had passed away that evening.
My wife was smiling. She looked at me and said "looks like he stopped by to say goodbye". I remember actually crying a little inside and feeling sadder than I probably should have.
Coincidence? Probably. But it's somehow much cooler to think that when Dr. Seuss took leave of this mortal coil that he stopped by and said goodbye to the people he touched the most. In my years as a publisher I have always been on the lookout for someone who could perhaps be the next Dr. Seuss, someone who could inspire people in such a simple way. I have never found that person and that's probably because the man was always one-of-a-kind.
So, on your birthday, if you're still looking down here, thank Dr. Seuss for all that you did for me, I probably owe you more than you could ever have known.
I watched a lot of TV as a kid (this was the early 1960's so there was not a lot of TV to choose from, my dad owned a TV repair store so I was always around them) and I picked up most of my english from that, but I did not do much in the way of reading. By the time I got to first grade I think everyone knew I was having trouble keeping up and my first grade teacher was going to recommend that I be held back. Lots of drama for me back then as I had no idea what was going on.
This was way before there was such a thing as ESL (English as a Second Language) in schools and, really, nobody knew what to do. My teacher told my parents I needed to read more but offered little in the way of suggestions other than to find something I would read. So, my mom too me to a store and just asked me what I wanted. I must have pointed at the Dr. Seuss books because she bought nearly every book in the store and brought them home.
I read them at home, on my own and they got me going enough that my mother soon graduated me on to the things like reading the comics section of the newspaper and then, eventually, comic books. Comics are what really got me going and while I barely got by first grade, by the time I was in third grade I was way ahead of everyone else's reading level and in fourth grade I was helping everyone with their reading and english.
There was a moment I still remember in third grade, I read a lot of Superman back then and I had been reading a comic that had the Bizarros in it. I liked it, but I did not get the reference, so I wrote the word down and took it to my teacher and asked her what it meant. She asked me "Do you mean bizarre?" and I told her I got the word from a comic book and described the characters and the stories of who they were and described the context. She figured it out (I did not have the origin story in front of me, where Superboy looks at Bizarro and says he looks bizarre, to which Bizarro responds something like "Me Am Bizarro." Keep in mind at that point in my life I was doing remedial reading work and not doing it very well. The teacher gave me a chapter book to bring home, which I read in pretty much a night, and when I came back and gave her basically an oral report on the book which concluded with my saying it wasn't as cool as Batman my teacher stopped treating me like a retard (sorry, I know that word is not PC, but it fits with the way I was being treated) and started treating me like an actual student .Soon all my grades improved.
So Dr. Seuss, comic books and Charlie Brown, those things made me the man I am today, both good and bad I suppose. The comic book habit never left me, these days I wish there was some kind of 12 step program back when I was a teenager and maybe I would not have wasted so much of my life in comics as a career.
But, there is one more part of this story, something that is actually a little creepy.
So, now I flash forward about 30 years and I have kids of my own. I read to them (or my wife did, but I did most of it) every night and of course their early story experience was with Dr. Seuss. One night I came to bed after reading to the boys and I was dead tired, way more tired than usual. According to my wife I pretty much passed out in the middle of saying good night. In the middle of the night I felt myself being shaken awake, violently by my wife. She looked at me and yelled at me to snap out of it and then asked me what I was dreaming about, to which I responded that I could not remember. Then she told me I was agitated and thrashing about and repeating Dr. Seuss lines like "One Fish!!! Two Fish!!! I do NOT like that hat... Sam I AM..." all kinds of things. She told me that I should lay off the Dr. Seuss for a while.
When I woke up the next morning I turned on the news and discovered that Theodore Giselle, the man who was Dr. Seuss, had passed away that evening.
My wife was smiling. She looked at me and said "looks like he stopped by to say goodbye". I remember actually crying a little inside and feeling sadder than I probably should have.
Coincidence? Probably. But it's somehow much cooler to think that when Dr. Seuss took leave of this mortal coil that he stopped by and said goodbye to the people he touched the most. In my years as a publisher I have always been on the lookout for someone who could perhaps be the next Dr. Seuss, someone who could inspire people in such a simple way. I have never found that person and that's probably because the man was always one-of-a-kind.
So, on your birthday, if you're still looking down here, thank Dr. Seuss for all that you did for me, I probably owe you more than you could ever have known.
Comments
I cried for almost 20 minutes and kept dropping into tears randomly for a week after Jim Henson passed.