Stuff You Should Know - Dr. Seuss: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Episode Date: December 27, 2018

The Seuss is loose in this episode about legendary children's book author Ted Geisel. The funny thing is, he didn't ever want children of his own, and his past work was a bit problematic. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from House StuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there, and this is the Dr. Soiss cast. Our final episode of this year. 2018. So long. In the books. Dr. Soiss. Dr. Soiss. 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 going to talk serious. Dr. Soiss 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 Dr. Soiss at the end of the year. Right. Right after the holidays. Right. Yeah. But well, let's just talk about the man. Okay. So we are talking, we keep saying Dr. Soiss. Everybody knows him as Dr. Soiss, but apparently the correct pronunciation is Soiss. And the guy would know because Soiss is actually his middle name. His name is Theodor Soiss Geisel, or Giesel. Is it Geisel or Giesel? It would be Geisel. In German, you go with the second vowel. So Theodor Soiss Geisel. Yeah. And it's sort of when I saw that everyone basically was like Soiss until he eventually was like, fine, like I can't fight this fight any longer.

Well, they're like, we'll spell it differently then. But they reminded me of Joe Thiesman. Oh, yeah. The very famous story of quarterback Joe Thiesman who changed his spelling or his pronunciation to Thiesman to run with Heisman. Right. 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. He's like, I guess my knee would have busted if he had just kept that Thiesman. Oh. Is that not okay? Too soon? I don't know. So we're obviously, once we

get into Joe Thiesman, leg breaking talk, we're talking about Dr. Seuss. That's right. Like I said, Theodore Seuss 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 more is like a comic strip guy. Oh, well, sure, sure. Children's book. Yeah. Like Judy Bloom, sure. But I don't know if I'd call her children's book. Young adult. Yeah, that was YA. Like children's book. I guess the Bernstein Bears, not the Bernstein 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, we use that font for our

live Christmas show shirts. X-Nay on the opyrite, 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, I imagine. Yeah. But now there are fonts called... Seuss. Doctors S-O-O-S font or Grinched that you can, you know, you can gank that shirt. We did for our Christmas shirts. I haven't heard that word in forever. Gank? I think I was wearing like huge Janko's the last time I heard the word gank. He ganked my milk off my tray. Right. Yeah, I'm bringing it back. I think that was the last time I used it, too. So, should we go back to the beginning? Yes, back to Springfield,

Massachusetts in 1904. That's right. March 2, as a matter of fact. Fellow Pisces. Dr. Seuss was born, Teddy Geisel, and his grandpops had come from Germany in the mid-1800s, bought a brewery because they were good Germans. Yeah. 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. Isn't that awesome? In German, no less. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever that would be. I think it'd be Combach and Geisel. So, he moved here, and it would end up becoming the Springfield Brewery's company, which his father then ran. And this is really like, we did 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. Right. 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 prohibition came along. They had this successful brewery in their family, and they're like, sorry, you're no longer in business. Go find another job. Because these guys. Yeah. Yeah. Who were secretly drinking. Right. Yeah. So, the job that his father did get was eventually became the supervisor of the town's parks. Yeah. Kind of cool. And there's 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 did he? 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 beret from now on. You should do a show. So, World War I comes along, which I've been doing a lot of World War I reading lately with the anniversary of the armistice. Yeah, you got it. Really interesting. I didn't know much about it.

It's a pretty serious war. Man, brutal. Everything I know about it is from the Wonder Woman movie. Yeah. I kid. So, they were German, the Geisels were, like we said. And so, in the United States, during World War I, there was a lot of anti, in fact, for a long time, actually, there was a lot of anti-German sentiment in the U.S. Right. They're like, we're not German. We just like beer. Yeah. And our name is Geisels. Right. So, everyone, it was clear that they were German. And so, you know, that was, I get the feeling that he, you know, felt like he was like picked on and laughed at and teased because he was German. Right. So, if you can't beat him, join him.

Turn that same kind of bigotry on to 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 LeSig. Yeah. Actually, one of my favorite books, Hooper Humperdink, not him, is written by Theo LeSig. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. So, that was his first. I always thought this was a Dr. Seuss book, and then I saw this, and I'm like, it was a Dr. Seuss book. Wow. All right. 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 Humperdink. And I think he gets invited finally at the end. Where your parents like, I mean, 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, and I 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. 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 got you. I mean, how humiliating is that? Especially in college. Yeah, and they were like, what's wrong with girls? I'm like,

I don't know. Ask my parents. They seem great to me. They not told me. They smell nice. All right, so he reversed his name, became Le Sieg, went to Dartmouth College, and like many, many famous humorists, I guess you could call them. Yeah, for sure. He wrote for the his College Humor Magazine, it was called the Jack-O-Lantern. Obviously. 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 Lampoon, didn't he? I don't know if it was positive. I mean, 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 version of the truth. 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? I'll bet he was like, well, I want to be on the magazine staff. This is terrible. This is an unjust law. Oh, yeah, not awesome for him. Right. 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, Sois. Right. S-E-U-S-S again, but he pronounced it Sois. Right. But he was the only person who did. So he did graduate from Dartmouth in I think 1926, which also further goes to show

that he was, so if he graduated college in 1926, then his father's brewery wouldn't have been shut down until, I don't remember when prohibition started, but he was obviously not a young kid necessarily. Gotcha. Okay. Drawing 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 a 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. 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 going to 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 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 will see me telling people to call me Dr. Clark. Okay. I'll just, I'll be more personable. I'll be Dr. Josh, like a chiropractor. I could see you going off and getting your PhD one day. Nah. Nah. Nah. I want the honorary degree. From Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The backdoor version. Pretty much. Yeah. The free version. All right. So he got the doctor on the name, became Dr. Soyes. And from then on, he never wrote under his given name again. He was always Dr. Soyes from that point forth. Right.

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. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival

the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. All right, Natalie. Nat. I wish, right? I bet Natalie Portman hates being called Nat. You think? She seems like the type of Natalie who would hate being called Nat. She said that's Dr. Portman. Natalie Portman, will you please get in touch with us and let us know whether you're cool with being called Nat or not? Well, hey, since we're on that, big shout out to Mr. Mark Ruffalo, who's 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 fans. So if you're listening, man, thanks. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Not just aware. He liked it. He encouraged people to listen to it. 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. That movie wrecked me. It was such a good movie. Yeah. Not just the first time, like just every time you watch that movie, it's wonderful. It's really great. So I have another show called Movie Crush, Mr. Ruffalo. Would love to have you on. Hint. We'll just leave it there. All right, so here's what happens. Teddy Geisel starts doing ads and does quite well. Yeah. I mean,

if you're an ad illustrator, you basically do what you're told. The 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. Right. So as an ad illustrator, he became nationally famous. Yeah, which is crazy to think of now. It really is. Yeah. 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. Candidates like couldn't be more poisonous. Yeah, post out like a cloud of noxious smoke. 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 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 ad campaign made him even bigger. Oh, right. So he did flit for 17 years, dude. Right. 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 them 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 ESO gas.

Right. And this was ESO Marine, which was their boat oil. Yeah. In 1934, he has this PR idea to create a fake Navy. The Seuss Navy. The Seuss 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 Seuss 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 ESO would hold a party every year and just pull out all the stops. And there would be this lavish Seuss Navy party. You know what it was called? What? The Seuss Navy luncheon and frolic. That sounds so like 30s. They had 2000

admirals and they included among them Vincent Astor and Guy Lombardo, famous band leader. And as this is a Grabster article, as Ed put it, they were what you would call like taste makers 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 astonishingly, it was a big deal and it actually worked. And when you look at them there, they look like Dr. Seuss books. Right. It's not like he changed his style. No, no, that is the thing. Like he became famous for famous and saw it 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. Like that was some of the work that he was allowed to do on the side. 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 II 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 was strange. I mean, I had heard of the Signal Corps.

Well, the Signal Corps is everything from code, like code and code breakers. Oh, really? 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 he 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, Dr. 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. Yeah, the Battle of the Bulge literally started around him around him.

Well, he was yeah. And he's like, I was just driving around thinking like it was just hard to find friendly troops as part of combat Belgium sure is pretty, but he ended up inadvertently spending three days 10 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 in his short stint as a late 30 year old. He was like, I think 38 when he first went in, which is a really kind of interesting piece of backstory. Well, he was, we left out a pretty, 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 II. And he was very much in

favor of going to war against the Nazis and Japan and 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 eye to, to basically call people out who are pushing other people around. Yeah, it's very liberal, very anti fascist, very pro World War II. I didn't call it that at the time. And it was very anti isolationist too. And Dr. 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 making documentaries right alongside Frank Capra. He had one series of training videos called private snafu 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 Patton 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 didn't say BS. I was 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. All right, BS, 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. Whereas about occupation, post-occupation life in Germany or Japan and what we're supposed to do. Yeah, you can watch Your Job in Germany on YouTube. Yeah, and Our Job in Japan too. Yeah. So he re-cut those basically, kind of rewrote and re-cut those later on and retitled them, Hitler lives and designed for death. No, he didn't. They were re-cut around him without his say. Oh, no, no, no. He and his wife later got those films and re-cut them and won an Academy Award.

Oh, okay. Yeah. I had read that a producer went and did some re-cutting against their wishes and made it way worse than they originally intended. Oh, well, that may have happened. And then maybe they then later on re-cut it and 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 1936. Let's walk it back a little bit. They went on a transatlantic voyage aboard the MS Kong's home. And apparently the ship's engine had this beat, this hypnotic throbbing sound that just really stuck with them. And it got into his head. And so he started composing

rhyming couplets that match with this rhythm. Kind of like, this is my SS Kong's home impression. 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 Dr. Seuss book. It's almost like we have some ingrained thing in our brain to read things in that kind of rhythm or rhyme. Right. You know what I mean? Or is it just that my parents read that to me and that's where I picked it up from? But who taught them? I don't know. Who ever taught anybody how to read something in rhymes? It's

just like you just know. It's pretty intuitive. Yeah. And even 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. Right. Like when you get to the next line, you're like, oh wait, that's out of beat or whatever. Yeah. Like you figure it out naturally. And I wonder why we're geared toward that. Yeah. It's funny too. Cause 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. Orange and door hinge. Hey, that's not bad. Well, that's

M&M. 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 it's true. Well, I meant it. Door hinge. That's funny. So he created a children's book on that Anapestic to Trameter called and this is a story no one can beat that was later changed and published in 1937 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 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, he said. Yeah. And it was so new that he was looking for material and Dr. 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 Anapestic to Trameter 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 walls-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 kids 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. Yeah. And this will come back later on in the 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 II. He escapes with his life from

the Battle of the Bulge and when he comes out of World War II, he goes right back to writing books and he wrote a few more in the 40s. I believe he wrote Yurtle the Turtle, which I know is an allegory for Hitler and he was on record say, yeah, apparently the early drafts of it, he had drawn a Hitler mustache on Yurtle, the turtle. It's about anti-authoritarian. Is that Hitler or Michael Jordan? Does he have a Hitler mustache? He did very famously and it's one Haines TV commercial and everyone was like, has someone not told him? I didn't see that. Oh yeah, I'll have to show you pictures. I have my head in the sand like I was Charles Lindbergh or something. Oh, that's a nice circular ref. That was 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-50s that things really changed for him. Yeah. Oh wow, that is a Hitler mustache. There's no mistake in that. It's a decision. So I think in 1955, 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 it. I'm not ready for it yet. All right. A guy named Rudolph Flesh. Rudolph Flesh? Yeah, FLE. Was he a porn actor? That'd be a good one though. Yeah, Rudy Flesh. Yeah, you'd have to call yourself Rudy too, wouldn't you? Yeah. Anyway,

Rudolph 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. Yeah. Was this basically, here are words on a page, memorize them. Yeah. This is a red ball. This is the word red. Don't be an idiot. Red ball. Say it. Yeah, 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 Dr. Seuss. He's already writing books for kids. Yeah. But if he just directed that toward

actually teaching them how to read, the kids would definitely want that. And it turns out that an editor, I think at Haughton Mifflin or somebody, wherever Dr. Seuss was writing at the time. Dunder Mifflin. Dunder Mifflin. Oh, 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 originally meant as a reading primer. I think there were 225. 225 words. And very famously, his editor bet him after that, that he could not write a book with only 50 words. And he went, take this book, Green Eggs and Ham. And shove it. And shove it. And give me my $50. 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 50 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 cat in the hat and the Grinch of the same year, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, which is just amazing. And then in 1966, of course,

we get the very famous TV cartoon adaptation, which people still love and enjoy today, including me. 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, 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 What She Did Last Summer. Right. Man, it's funny. Adding those two words just makes it threaten me. It's a horror novel. One called Why I Built the Boogle 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 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 had multiple affairs. Her suicide note supposedly referenced 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 she was, 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 to 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 69 when she, and 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. 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 I was, we were both glad to be made aware of that. So she was 69 years old and apparently

also suffered from Guillain-Barre. Guillain-Barre. Syndrome. Yeah. We got corrected on that some other time. It's hard to remember. About to pronounce it. Yeah. So I mean, who knows why someone eventually takes that path in life? Could be a lot of factors. Yeah. But yeah. October 23rd, 1967, she overdosed on medication. After they've been married for 40 years too. Yeah, man. And so shortly after that, he married Audrey Diamond. Yes. Geisel, who's his widow, who is I believe still alive and basically running his estate still. Yeah. Her name was Audrey Stone Diamond, but it was D-I-M-O-N-D. No, A. Oh, yeah. Which is interesting. I wonder if it's... It's very efficient.

But yeah, she became soice and he went, just go ahead and get used to it. It's Seuss. She's like, really? I've always said soice. 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 liked to do. It's pretty interesting. So that 1957 year, that was a big breakout year for him. And that was kind of the year that he became the Dr. Seuss that we see.

But he kept writing for many, many years. I mean, up until his death in 1991, he apparently cranked out like a book a year. Some of them over time kind of took on much more progressive tones until he became the Dr. Seuss that we see today. So prior to that though, in recent years, some people have kind of said, hey, you know, Dr. 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 Dr. Seuss, loves Dr. Seuss. There's nobody who doesn't like Dr. Seuss. But if you, or his work, I should say. Sure. But if you start digging into, especially some of his early work, it becomes problematic. So you want to take a break?

Uh, okay. All right. All right. Let's take a break and we will take part in that national conversation right after this. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the

nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So it's national conversation time. So Dr. Seuss, especially in his earliest work as a 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 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 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 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 Ed qualifies as like, none of this excuses anything, but you know, look at the whole picture of the person. If you look at his earlier stuff, his most racist stuff is when he was youngest. Yeah. And his most progressive stuff that everybody knows and loves as Dr. Seuss is when the world was kind of changing too. Yeah, it's not like in 1989, 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 sneaches is about discriminating against people and just how ridiculous that is, how people are actually people. A lot of people point to Horton hears a who as a bit of a me a culpa for his treatment of the Japanese prior to World War II and during World War II. The Lorax is obviously pro environmentalism. Yeah, he fully changed one of his books altogether in earlier version of and to think I saw it on Mulberry Street. Yeah, it had the word Chinaman in there. It was worse than Chinaman. And he he changed that to Chinese person, right, like in the publication of the book for future printings. Right. So he he definitely evolved his his works evolved. 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 1990, I think that that really wasn't the way that the 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 his work. Yeah. And this is 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. Right. The cat in 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 they officially remove the cat in the hat? I think they backed a little bit away from

from the cat in the hat as a mascot, if not entirely. And I think that they've kind of like Dr. Seuss' books are not like the focal point of the read across America campaign, like they were. Right. And then last year, Melania Trump made the news when she gifted a library, some Dr. Seuss' books and the librarian refused that gift and said they are steeped in 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 reference and drawing of the Chinese guy 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 blackface, but I saw that one place. Right. And nowhere else, it seemed to be as earlier work, not as children's books. And I didn't see any racist propaganda that was hidden in the books. If anything, the books that you would give a librarian, 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, 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 or not. I'm very curious to know, if we didn't dig quite deep enough, I'm a little surprised because you know us, but I want to know if we're missing something there. 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. I don't know how to figure this stuff out on my own. And Ann Neely, she's a professor of children's lit at Vanderbilt, said this, just as every author or illustrator as 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 cannot wallow in our own nostalgia when we make choices for the books we share with young children. There's simply too many outstanding books available. Especially also if the books that we're raising our kids on, it's new to them. Right. If it is steeped in racist propaganda that we're not realizing we're sharing or perpetuating, then yeah, that shouldn't be the case. Ann, Ed makes the great point that in the 1920s and 30s, 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 Dr. Seuss based on his work. He would be that kind of guy, but he was human. His work is larger than him, is 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 your reading of how the Grinch stole Christmas this year. Although another thing that he was called out on once was there was no female protagonist in any of his books either. Again, a product of the time. He was a man writing about little male characters. But he went and created Daisy Headed Maisie after that. So again, his books became more progressive further on in his career, and he handled things like segregation and discrimination,

like with the Sneaches. The Butter Battle book was a clear glaring allegory for the Cold War and the mutual destruction and arms race of kind of a haunting book that ends without any resolution with both sides, the Yooks and the Zooks, I think, with their bombs pointed at one another, and it's not like, and they lived happily ever after. It's like, what's going to happen? 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 1990, did you? I didn't know anything about it. So 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 Oh, The Places You'll Go. But Oh, The Places You'll Go is his top selling book because it's given to grads every spring. There's a new batch of graduates who get Oh, The Places You'll Go as a gift and like 10 million copies have been sold. Because it's about your future and what awaits you. 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 going to run into problems. But you're a good person and you're going to make good choices. And I have a story about this. So last night, I was talking to Yumi 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 1990, but it's Dr. Seuss' 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 Dr. Seuss 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 under 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. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, I thought that was really surprising. 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, you can tell that

he knew this was the last book that was going to be published while he was alive, that he wanted this to be 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, like for changing his views? Maybe. I thought that as well. I could totally see that. Yeah. Because if you think about it, Helen Palmer came into his life. Yeah. I could see her having that influence on him. Yeah. He passed away finally of cancer in September 24, 1991 at 87. 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. Produced my age. Yeah. They were beboppers and children's book readers. At the same time. I've got one last thing for you about Dr. Seuss. Do you have anything else? I got one more thing too. You first. Okay. I'll go first. He was a voracious chain smoker. Oh, interesting. So much so that even back in like the 50s and 60s, he knew he needed to lay off sometimes. So when he needed to lay off of smoking, 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 go back to cigarettes. What? Yes. I don't fully understand that. He would start a little corn cob pipe and turnip seeds. And then rather than light it, he would just put a seed dropper and pop 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 sprout, germinate, and he'd be like, okay, I can go back to cigarettes now. So he'd take about three days off of cigarettes and he used the crop of turnip greens as his indicator. I thought you were going to say that that went on to feed like the children in poor neighborhoods or something. No. Who hate turnips? Kids don't eat turnips. Turnips are great. I agree. I'm a root vegetable man myself. So my last thing in 2007, a federal judge

received a hard-boiled egg in the mail from an inmate in prison protesting his diet in prison. And 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 thusly. I do not like eggs in the file. This is Judge James Muirhead. I do not like them in any style. I will not take them fried or boiled. I will not take them poached or broiled. I will not take them soft or 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. And they threw him out of court and fired him. Because he was drunk. No, I don't know. 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 guy's like, no, really, this is a serious complaint, please. You're focusing on the wrong thing. Someone help me. Oh, goodness. If you want to know more about Dr. 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. It's just our time of the year to thank everyone here in year. Is this the end of 10 years? Yes. Or 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. 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, Yumi. Happy birthday, Yumi. And thank you guys for being with us for yet another year. And we'll see you next year, everybody. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.