Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. I hope you're having a great weekend. Chuck
Speaker 1: Bryant here, co host of the Stuff You Should Know
Speaker 1: podcast of what you are listening to. This Selects episode
Speaker 1: comes from December twenty eighteen, and it's all about old
Speaker 1: Doctor Seuss, Theodor Geisel, Doctor Seuss Colan, The Good, the Bad,
Speaker 1: and the Ugly. Because if you talk about doctor Seuss,
Speaker 1: you gotta talk about it all the books, the great stuff.
Speaker 2: And some of the not so great stuff.
Speaker 1: So check it out now if you'd like Doctor Seuss Colon,
Speaker 1: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's
Speaker 4: Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. This is
Speaker 4: the Doctor Soys.
Speaker 2: Cast, our final episode of this.
Speaker 4: Year, twenty eighteen. So long in the books, Doctor Seuss,
Speaker 4: Doctor Seys. That's right.
Speaker 2: You know what's funny?
Speaker 4: Well we'll get to that, all right, Everything that's funny
Speaker 4: can wait. Yep, we're gonna talk serious.
Speaker 1: Doctor SEUs was an author of children's books. He was
Speaker 1: so great and also kind of racist.
Speaker 4: Chuck, there's a lot of stuff in here. I wish
Speaker 4: I didn't know. I know.
Speaker 1: I think we're about to ruin doctor SEUs at the
Speaker 1: end of the year, right after the holidays, right, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: but well let's just talk about the man.
Speaker 4: Okay. So we are talking. We keep saying doctor Seuss.
Speaker 4: Everybody knows him as doctor Seuss, but apparently the correct
Speaker 4: pronunciation is sous. Yeah, and the guy would know because
Speaker 4: Suss is actually his middle name. His name is Theodore
Speaker 4: Seuss Geisel or Geisel? Is it Geisel or Geisel?
Speaker 2: It would be Geisel in German you go with a
Speaker 2: second vowel.
Speaker 4: So Theodore soys Geisel.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's sort of when I saw that, everyone basically
Speaker 1: was like Seuss until he eventually is like fine, like
Speaker 1: I can't fight this fight any longer.
Speaker 4: Well, they're like, we'll spell it differently.
Speaker 1: Then, But they're reminded me of Joe Thiesman. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: the very famous story of quarterback Joe Theisman who changed
Speaker 1: his spelling or his pronunciation to Thigsman to run with Heisman,
Speaker 1: which I.
Speaker 2: Think is the story. I think that's true. No, No,
Speaker 2: I think that's true. Oh really, yeah, what do you
Speaker 2: think that was just like an old football tale?
Speaker 4: No, I'd never heard. I thought you're just being funny.
Speaker 4: Oh no, that really happened, and that really came back
Speaker 4: to bite him in the rump when his thigh bone
Speaker 4: broke open. God, he's like, I guess my knee would
Speaker 4: have busted if he had just kept that thievesman? Oh
Speaker 4: is that not? Okay? Too soon? No, so we're obviously
Speaker 4: once we get into Joe, thisman leg breaking tip awkward
Speaker 4: talking about doctor series. That's right, Like I said, Theodore
Speaker 4: sooys Geisel, who is I can't really think of a
Speaker 4: children's book author that is more widely known.
Speaker 2: Maybe Charles Schultz.
Speaker 4: Maybe I think a comic strip guy children's sure, sure,
Speaker 4: children's book, yeah, like Judy Bloom, Sure, But I don't
Speaker 4: know if I call her children's book young adult like
Speaker 4: children's book. I guess the Berenstein Bears not the Berenstein Bears.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say that Teddy Geisel holds that distinction
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 4: At the very least, his work, his drawing is just
Speaker 4: immediately recognizable. His style.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that font you we use that font
Speaker 1: for our Live Christmas show shirts.
Speaker 4: Nay on the oppy right, Kay?
Speaker 1: No, it's not his. In fact, I looked it up.
Speaker 1: I was kind of curious. I was like, what is
Speaker 1: that great font that he uses for his book titles?
Speaker 1: And I don't know what he used. He probably just
Speaker 1: hand drew it. Sure, I imagine. But now there are
Speaker 1: fonts called sois doctor soos.
Speaker 2: Font or grinched that you can you know, you can
Speaker 2: gank that. Sure we did for our Christmas shirt.
Speaker 4: I haven't heard that word in forever, gank. I think
Speaker 4: I was wearing like huge Jenko's the last time I
Speaker 4: heard the word gank.
Speaker 1: He ganked my milk off my tray bringing it back.
Speaker 4: It's the last time I used it too.
Speaker 2: So should we go back to the beginning?
Speaker 4: Yes, back to Springfield, Massachusetts in nineteen oh four.
Speaker 2: That's right, March two.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, fellow Pisces, doctor Seuss was
Speaker 1: born Teddy Geisel and his grandpops had come from Germany
Speaker 1: in the mid eighteen hundreds bought a brewery because they
Speaker 1: were good Germans, they knew all about beer.
Speaker 4: And originally, get this, the name of the brewery was
Speaker 4: Combach and Geisel, and they locally called it comeback and guzzle.
Speaker 2: I love that and that awesome in German.
Speaker 4: No less, yeah, whatever, that would be I think it'd
Speaker 4: be comback and Geisel.
Speaker 1: So he moved here and it would end up becoming
Speaker 1: the Springfield Breweries Company, which his father then ran.
Speaker 2: And this is really like we did.
Speaker 1: He even did a show on prohibition, and it never
Speaker 1: really hit home to me some of the repercussions of that.
Speaker 1: I was just like, people can't drink, But I never
Speaker 1: thought about a family business just being shut down.
Speaker 4: That was a good episode, it was.
Speaker 1: But that's what happened that, you know, Prohibition came along.
Speaker 1: They had this successful brewery in their family. They're like, sorry,
Speaker 1: you're no longer in business, Go find another job.
Speaker 4: These guys, yeah, who.
Speaker 2: Were secretly drinking.
Speaker 4: Right, you know. So I had the job that is
Speaker 4: his father did get was eventually became the supervisor of
Speaker 4: the town's parks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of cool.
Speaker 4: And there's a myth, an incorrect myth. From what I understand.
Speaker 4: One of the parks had a zoo in it, and
Speaker 4: so a lot of people say that drawings of the
Speaker 4: animals were some of the first at the zoo were
Speaker 4: some of the first drawings that little Ted came up with.
Speaker 2: Not true.
Speaker 4: No, his father became superintendent of the parks when he
Speaker 4: was already a grown man. Oh, but well not a
Speaker 4: grown man. He was definitely not a little kid at
Speaker 4: the zoo.
Speaker 2: Did he go to the zoo and draw animals? Or
Speaker 2: is that all false?
Speaker 4: I think it may be all false, but I'm making
Speaker 4: that part up. I just from what I read he
Speaker 4: was grown enough that he wasn't a little boy drawing
Speaker 4: pictures of animals at the zoo. Like people think, interesting, Yeah,
Speaker 4: I thought it was as well. I love busting myths.
Speaker 4: I'm going to wear a brake now.
Speaker 2: He should do a show.
Speaker 1: So World War one comes along, which I've been I've
Speaker 1: been doing a lot of World War One reading lately,
Speaker 1: with the really anniversary of the Armisist armacists. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: got really interesting. I didn't know much about it.
Speaker 4: It's a pretty serious war, brutal. Everything I know about
Speaker 4: is from the Wonder Woman movie. Yeah, I kid.
Speaker 1: So they were German, that the Geisels were like we said,
Speaker 1: and so in the United States during World War One
Speaker 1: there was a lot of anti In fact, for a
Speaker 1: long time, actually, there was a lot of anti German
Speaker 1: sentiment in the US.
Speaker 4: Right, They're like, we're not German. Were just like beer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and her name is Geisel, so everyone it was
Speaker 1: clear that they were German, and so, you know, there
Speaker 1: was there was I get the feeling that he, you know,
Speaker 1: felt like he was like picked on and laughed at,
Speaker 1: teased because he was German.
Speaker 4: Right, So if you can't beat him, join them. Turn
Speaker 4: that same kind of bigotry onto others we'll find right.
Speaker 1: So he starts at a very early age in high
Speaker 1: school drawing cartoons, writing essays, funny essays, satirical essays. And
Speaker 1: he started using a pen name very early on, maybe
Speaker 1: because he was German, and he just reversed his last
Speaker 1: name and he became Theo la Sigue.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Actually, one of my favorite books, Hooper Humperdink Not Him,
Speaker 4: is written by Theo Lasigue.
Speaker 2: Oh really yeah?
Speaker 4: Interesting, was like I always thought this was a doctor
Speaker 4: Seu's book, and then I saw this and I'm like,
Speaker 4: it was a doctor Seuss book.
Speaker 2: Wow?
Speaker 4: Do you ever read that one?
Speaker 2: I don't think so.
Speaker 4: What's it called? Hooper Humperdink Not Him. It's about this
Speaker 4: kid who's throwing a birthday party and everybody's invited to
Speaker 4: the greatest birthday party you've ever seen in your life,
Speaker 4: except for poor Hooper humber Ink. And I think he
Speaker 4: gets invited finally at the end.
Speaker 1: Where your parents are like, we should probably get Josh
Speaker 1: this and go ahead and get him ready, right pretty much.
Speaker 4: There actually was a birthday party I wasn't invited to.
Speaker 4: It really was like, I'm hooper humperdink.
Speaker 1: Oh, well, you know my deal was I wasn't allowed
Speaker 1: to go to boy girl parties for a while.
Speaker 4: So but you were still invited, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But that was even worse because I was invited
Speaker 1: and I was like I had to say, no, I
Speaker 1: can't go because there's girls there.
Speaker 4: Right, I gotcha?
Speaker 2: And how humiliating is that?
Speaker 4: Especially in college?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And they were like, uh, what's wrong with girls?
Speaker 1: I'm like, I don't know.
Speaker 4: Ask my parents.
Speaker 2: He seemed great to me.
Speaker 1: They told me they smell nice, all right. So he
Speaker 1: reversed his name became Lesigue. I went to Dartmouth College,
Speaker 1: and like many many famous humorist, I guess you could
Speaker 1: call him Yeah, for sure. He wrote for his college
Speaker 1: humor magazine was called The jack O Lantern, and it
Speaker 1: was just like, really solidifies that college humor magazines really
Speaker 1: have produced some of the brightest comedic minds that in
Speaker 1: this country over the years.
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, Letterman, I think he worked at National Lampoons,
Speaker 4: didn't he?
Speaker 2: I don't know if Terman is Conan certainly did the
Speaker 2: Harvard Lampoon.
Speaker 4: I'm pretty sure Letterman did as well, all right, at
Speaker 4: the very least a lot of his writers did.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 4: Okay, fine, okay, we'll settle on.
Speaker 2: That that version of the truth.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 1: But he got kicked off of the magazine staff when
Speaker 1: he was caught drinking on campus during prohibition, which is
Speaker 1: kind of awesome.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll bet it wasn't for him.
Speaker 2: What do you mean?
Speaker 4: Oh? But he was like, well, I want to be
Speaker 4: on the magazine staff. This is terrible. This is an unjustice.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, not awesome for him, right, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: thought you meant he wasn't doing the drinking or something.
Speaker 4: Right. This did nothing to cut his career off though, No, no, no,
Speaker 4: he just adopted a new pseudonym. Yeah, soiss right s
Speaker 4: auss again, but he pronounced it soys right. But he
Speaker 4: was the only person who did so. He did graduate
Speaker 4: from Dartmouth and I think nineteen twenty six, which also
Speaker 4: further goes to show that he was so if he
Speaker 4: graduated college in nineteen twenty six. Then his father's brewery
Speaker 4: wouldn't have been shut down until I don't remember when
Speaker 4: prohibition started, but he would He was obviously not a
Speaker 4: young kid necessarily.
Speaker 2: Gotcha okay, drawn dumb animals at the zoo at the zoo.
Speaker 4: But he went on to Oxford to I guess pursue
Speaker 4: a higher degree.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think he was going to be a teacher, was
Speaker 4: his original intent, and he didn't like Oxford, but Oxford
Speaker 4: brought him to his wife, Helen Palmer, Yeah, his first wife,
Speaker 4: his first wife, and they met and she actually had
Speaker 4: a really great influence on him by saying, I think
Speaker 4: you are maybe going to be a better artist than
Speaker 4: a teacher, and kind of pushed him toward that. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and he ended up pursuing a career in art, largely
Speaker 4: because of her influence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And he sort of did the student thing.
Speaker 1: He worked on the novel, and he traveled around Europe
Speaker 1: and was sort of doing and he was with Helen
Speaker 1: of course this whole time. They eventually get married and
Speaker 1: then he went to work for a magazine called Judge,
Speaker 1: drawing once again like political cartoons, humor cartoons acted. This
Speaker 1: is where he added the doctor to his name as
Speaker 1: sort of a joke because he, I guess, did not
Speaker 1: get that doctorate degree or whatever he was pursuing.
Speaker 4: No, he didn't, but later on in life, Dartmouth did
Speaker 4: bestow an honorary degree to make him an official doctor.
Speaker 2: When are we gonna get one of those?
Speaker 4: I've been waiting a long time, Chuck.
Speaker 2: And are they as worthless as I think they are?
Speaker 4: Totally? Yeah? I mean sure you'll get like the discount
Speaker 4: at Wendy's that they offer, But that's that's really the
Speaker 4: only perk aside from saying, like, I'm a doctor.
Speaker 2: Can you really call yourself that? Though?
Speaker 4: Sure?
Speaker 2: Like only chumps do that, right, Like you have to
Speaker 2: call me doctor now, dude.
Speaker 4: You you will see me telling people to call me
Speaker 4: doctor Clark. Okay, I'll just I'll be more personal. I'll
Speaker 4: be doctor Josh like a chiropractor.
Speaker 2: I could see you going off and getting your pH
Speaker 2: d one day.
Speaker 4: Nah nah nah, I want the audit from Bowling Green
Speaker 4: State University in Ohio.
Speaker 2: The backdoor version pretty much, yeah version, all right?
Speaker 1: So he got the doctor on the name, became doctor Soyer,
Speaker 1: and from then on he never wrote under his given
Speaker 1: name again. He was always doctor swye from that point
Speaker 1: for should we take a break.
Speaker 4: You can see me getting a PhD. Yeah, this late
Speaker 4: in my career. Yeah, this mid in my career. Sure,
Speaker 4: huh am I like Natalie Portman or something?
Speaker 2: Yes, all right, let's take a break.
Speaker 5: Softly, Josh soft.
Speaker 4: All right?
Speaker 2: Natalie nat uh I wish right.
Speaker 4: I'll bet Natalie Portman hates being called Nat. You think
Speaker 4: she seems like the type of Natalie who would hate
Speaker 4: being called Nat.
Speaker 2: Let's find out, doctor Portman.
Speaker 4: Natalie Portman, will you please get in touch with this
Speaker 4: and let us know whether you're cool with being called
Speaker 4: Nat or not.
Speaker 2: Well, hey, so we're on that big shout out to
Speaker 2: mister Mark Ruffalo.
Speaker 4: It was basically the male Natalie Portman.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He tweeted out our Navajo Code Talkers episode, which means
Speaker 1: that he's aware of this podcast and we're huge fan.
Speaker 2: So if you're listening, man, thanks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks a lot and a lot. Not just aware
Speaker 4: he liked it, he encouraged people to listen to Yeah.
Speaker 4: He wasn't like, steer clear of this piece of poop. Right,
Speaker 4: this is a good podcast, is what he was saying.
Speaker 1: Man, I remember when I saw you can count on
Speaker 1: me for the first time. Oh my god, that movie
Speaker 1: wrecked me.
Speaker 4: It was such a good movie. Yeah, not just the
Speaker 4: first time, like just every time you watch that movie
Speaker 4: is wonderful.
Speaker 1: It's really great. So I have another show called Movie Crush.
Speaker 1: Mister Ruffalo would love to have you on. We'll just
Speaker 1: leave it there, all right, So all right, here's what happens. Okay,
Speaker 1: Teddy Geisel starts doing ads, yeah, and does quite well.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, if you're an ad illustrator, you basically
Speaker 4: do what you're told. Client says, this is what we want.
Speaker 4: He was the kind of artist who, because of his
Speaker 4: distinctive style, his style is what the clients wanted. So
Speaker 4: as an ad illustrator, he became nationally famous.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is crazy to think of now.
Speaker 4: It really is. His first big break was for something
Speaker 4: called Flit. It was a bug spray and if you
Speaker 4: look at the Flit ads, they have a picture of
Speaker 4: the flit and it was that old timey Tom and
Speaker 4: Jerry Pump candidate's like, couldn't be more poisonous?
Speaker 2: Post out like a cloud of noxious smoke.
Speaker 4: So that formed like a skull and crossbones in the air, basically, right,
Speaker 4: that's what he was drawing stuff for and he came
Speaker 4: up with a catchphrase because he wasn't just illustrating, he
Speaker 4: was also copywriting in these ads, and he came up
Speaker 4: with quick Henry the flit, and that just became a
Speaker 4: national catchphrase.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like where's the beef?
Speaker 4: Right, like somebody's pestering You're just like to somebody else,
Speaker 4: Quick Henry the flit. That's how I probably would have
Speaker 4: used it. But so he became known for that, and
Speaker 4: then a second egg campaign made him even bigger.
Speaker 1: Oh right, so he did flit for seventeen years, dude,
Speaker 1: which is like I thought, yeah, sure, he did that
Speaker 1: for a couple of years, right, I mean there's almost
Speaker 1: two decades of doing those ads, made a lot of money,
Speaker 1: kept him, you know, nice and employed through the Great Depression.
Speaker 1: And then this one's even weirder. He went to work
Speaker 1: for Standard Oil, who had ESO Oil and so So Gas,
Speaker 1: and this was ESO Marine, which was their boat oil.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty four, he has this pr idea to
Speaker 1: create a fake navy.
Speaker 4: The Sous Navy, the SEUs Navy, which is nothing. He
Speaker 4: just made it up out of nowhere to promote the
Speaker 4: ESO Marine oil. Yeah, and it worked, yeah, because he
Speaker 4: basically drafted people into his navy. He would draw like
Speaker 4: famous figures like say eleanor Roosevelt or something like that,
Speaker 4: dressed up in the sous navy uniform or whatever, and
Speaker 4: it became a thing like people wanted to be in it,
Speaker 4: so they would apply to be in it. And I
Speaker 4: guess so So would hold a party every year and
Speaker 4: just pull out all the stops and there would be
Speaker 4: this lavish so Seuss Navy party.
Speaker 2: You know, it's called what the Seuss Navy Luncheon and.
Speaker 4: Frolic That sounds so like thirties.
Speaker 1: They had two thousand admirals and they included among them
Speaker 1: Vincent Astor and Guy Lombardo, famous bandleader. And as this
Speaker 1: is a Grabstarre article is ed put it, they were
Speaker 1: what you would call like tastemakers today, like wealthy influential
Speaker 1: Americans wanted to be in this fake navy, to go
Speaker 1: to this luncheon and frolic. Right, And he wrote these
Speaker 1: little navy story booklets and it astonishingly it was a
Speaker 1: big deal and it actually worked. And when you look
Speaker 1: at him there they look like Doctor Seuss books like right,
Speaker 1: It's not like he changed his style.
Speaker 4: No, No, this is the thing. Like he became famous
Speaker 4: for famous and salt after for his style.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And weirdly enough, he said that the only reason he
Speaker 1: went into children's books initially was because his standard oil
Speaker 1: contract didn't forbid it. Huh, Like that was some of
Speaker 1: the work that he was allowed to do with outside.
Speaker 4: Gotcha.
Speaker 1: He never he was like, it's not like I had
Speaker 1: a great thing for kids.
Speaker 4: Well, he even said very famously multiple times that he
Speaker 4: didn't write for kids. He wrote for people.
Speaker 1: And he also famously said, you have kids, I'll entertain them.
Speaker 4: Right. Yeah, he didn't want kids, did not want kids, No,
Speaker 4: and he never had them, so his wish came true.
Speaker 4: So he was already pretty famous by the time World
Speaker 4: War two came around and he actually volunteered to become
Speaker 4: a soldier, but he was sent to Hollywood to work
Speaker 4: at what was called Fort Fox.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is strange. I mean I had heard of
Speaker 2: the Signal Corps.
Speaker 4: Well, the Signal Core is everything from code like code
Speaker 4: and code all the way to psychological operations.
Speaker 1: Oh, I thought the Signal Corps was just like the
Speaker 1: people that made documentaries and stuff.
Speaker 4: This was a division within the Signal Corps gotcha, and
Speaker 4: so he was basically in this division with Frank Capra
Speaker 4: and some other like screenwriters, actors, like basically anybody who
Speaker 4: had anything to do with visual entertainment was put into
Speaker 4: this group in Hollywood on the Fox Lot at what
Speaker 4: was called Fort Fox, and that's where he spent most
Speaker 4: of the war, although there was a fascinating story about
Speaker 4: a time when he went to Europe because he had
Speaker 4: to go get approvals for a documentary he had worked
Speaker 4: on from all the high ranking generals in Europe. So
Speaker 4: we went from headquarters to headquarters throughout Europe. And while
Speaker 4: he was in Luxembourg, he visited some of his friends
Speaker 4: and he basically got the skinny they think on the
Speaker 4: Ghost Army, you know the Ghost Army where they had
Speaker 4: inflatable tanks and like it was meant to make America's
Speaker 4: military look way bigger than it was, and these guys
Speaker 4: were running psychological operations. Well, doctor Seuss was friends with
Speaker 4: some of the higher ups in the Ghost Army, and
Speaker 4: they think that they showed him on a map like
Speaker 4: where to go to go see some of these Well,
Speaker 4: in between the time he left and the time he
Speaker 4: got there, that was suddenly behind enemy lines.
Speaker 1: Ye had the Battle of the Bulge literally started around him,
Speaker 1: around him.
Speaker 4: Well, he was yeah, and he was like, I was
Speaker 4: just driving around thinking like it was just hard to
Speaker 4: find friendly troops, like as.
Speaker 2: Part of combat Belgium, sure is pretty.
Speaker 4: But he ended up inadvertently spending three days ten miles
Speaker 4: behind enemy lines during the Battle of the Bulge and
Speaker 4: just barely made it out with his life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was rescued by the Brits. But he would
Speaker 1: eventually become a lieutenant colonel. Yeah, in his short stint
Speaker 1: as a late thirty year old he's I think thirty
Speaker 1: eight when he first went in, right, which really kind
Speaker 1: of interesting piece of backstory.
Speaker 4: Well, he was we left out a pretty big part
Speaker 4: of his formative years early on in his career was
Speaker 4: he wanted to become He wanted to have a say
Speaker 4: in the direction America took in World War Two, and
Speaker 4: he was very much in favor of going to war
Speaker 4: against the Nazis and Japan in Italy. And one of
Speaker 4: the reasons why he was in favor was because he
Speaker 4: was extremely anti fascist. He hated fascism and he got
Speaker 4: a job at a liberal magazine I think a newspaper
Speaker 4: actually called PM that was founded in New York and
Speaker 4: it was founded with the I to basically call people
Speaker 4: out who are pushing other people around. It very liberal,
Speaker 4: very anti fascist, very pro World War Two, although they
Speaker 4: didn't call it that at the time, and it was
Speaker 4: very anti isolationists too, And doctor Seuss was drawing editorial cartoons,
Speaker 4: very political editorial cartoons, about seven days a week for
Speaker 4: this magazine, and he did some really good work in it.
Speaker 1: Actually, well yeah, and then in the in the Army
Speaker 1: he actually made films. He was he's making documentaries right
Speaker 1: alongside Frank Capra. He had one series of training videos
Speaker 1: called Private Snaffoo that were animated, but they were.
Speaker 2: The work of Chuck Jones.
Speaker 1: Actually, it's just so crazy about all this talent that's
Speaker 1: like in the Army producing these things at the time.
Speaker 1: But he went on to make live action documentaries, one
Speaker 1: called Your Job in Germany, another called Our Job in Japan.
Speaker 1: MacArthur stopped the release of Our Job in Japan, and
Speaker 1: apparently General Patten stormed out of a screening of one
Speaker 1: of the other ones. And I couldn't find the word,
Speaker 1: but it said he uttered one loud curse word.
Speaker 4: Oh you couldn't find it, No, do you? Did you?
Speaker 4: It was bs?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Okay, but he's trying to think of what it would be. Sure,
Speaker 1: I was like, but one word. So it wasn't the
Speaker 1: F word unless it was just a very just long
Speaker 1: drawn out you know, all right, Yes, that makes sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which I don't understand. I don't know what the
Speaker 4: problem was. But they were both the our job in
Speaker 4: Japan or your job in Germany? Yeah, where was about
Speaker 4: occupation post post occupation life in Germany or Japan? And what?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: You can watch your job in Germany on YouTube.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and our job in Japan too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he he recut those basically kind of rewrote and
Speaker 1: recut those later on and retitled them Hitler Lives and
Speaker 1: Designed for Death.
Speaker 4: No he didn't. They were recut around him without his say.
Speaker 2: Oh no no.
Speaker 1: He and his wife later got those films, oh, and
Speaker 1: recut them and won an Academy award.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, yeah, I had read that a producer went
Speaker 4: and did some recutting against their wishes and made it
Speaker 4: way worse than they originally intended.
Speaker 1: Well, that may have happened, and then maybe they then
Speaker 1: later on re recut it got the Oscar for their version, right,
Speaker 1: I don't know, okay, but we left out a lot
Speaker 1: actually because he was actually had previous to the Army,
Speaker 1: had already written children's books. Like he went fully into
Speaker 1: this because of a ship trip that he took. Okay,
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty six, let's.
Speaker 4: Walk it back a little bit.
Speaker 1: They went on a transatlantic voyage aboard the MS kungs Holme,
Speaker 1: and apparently the ship's engine had this beat, this hypnotic
Speaker 1: throbbing sound that just really stuck with him and it
Speaker 1: got into his head, and so he started composing rhyming
Speaker 1: couplets that match with this rhythm.
Speaker 4: Kind of like that's my ss Kung's home impressions.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, it ended up being what's called anapestic tetrameter,
Speaker 1: which is what he would make his career on this
Speaker 1: poetic meter.
Speaker 4: You know what that made me think of, Chuck? That like,
Speaker 4: I've never heard those words together in my life, But
Speaker 4: no one ever taught me how to read a Doctor
Speaker 4: Seuss book. It's almost like we have some ingrain thing
Speaker 4: in our brain to read things in that kind of rhythm,
Speaker 4: or you know what I mean? Or is it just
Speaker 4: like my parents read that to me, and that's where
Speaker 4: I picked it up from. But who taught them? I
Speaker 4: never taught anybody how to read something in rhymes. It's
Speaker 4: just like you just know intuitive and even when you
Speaker 4: when you when you're not reading it in the right rhythm,
Speaker 4: your brain realizes it and corrects you and you go
Speaker 4: back and reread it the right way. Like when you
Speaker 4: get to the next line, you're like, oh, wait, that's
Speaker 4: out a beat or whatever. Like you figure it out naturally,
Speaker 4: and I wonder why we're geared toward that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's funny too, because I obviously read a lot of
Speaker 1: kids books every night now, and some of them are great,
Speaker 1: and some of them just like, they'll do a word
Speaker 1: that doesn't quite rhyme, and I'm always like come on,
Speaker 1: come on, or they'll stuff too much in a line
Speaker 1: and it's not like graceful. In the read I'm like, man,
Speaker 1: this is lame.
Speaker 4: Do better or engine door hinge.
Speaker 2: Hey, that's not bad.
Speaker 4: Well that's eminet Oh okay. He very famously can rhyme
Speaker 4: something with orange, which I found out because I think
Speaker 4: I said nothing rhymes with orange.
Speaker 2: Well everyone's always said that because that's true.
Speaker 4: Well I meant it door hinge.
Speaker 2: That's funny.
Speaker 1: So he created a children's book on that anapestic tetramet
Speaker 1: called and this is a story no one can beat
Speaker 1: that was later changed and published in nineteen thirty seven.
Speaker 1: As and to think that I saw it on Mulberry
Speaker 1: Street because he had an old friend that he ran
Speaker 1: into from Dartmouth that turned out to be a children's
Speaker 1: book editor at Vanguard Press.
Speaker 4: So I read an account of the story and the
Speaker 4: person saying telling the story said, had he been walking
Speaker 4: on the other side of the street that day, he
Speaker 4: may have never become a children's author. Yeah, like it
Speaker 4: was that fateful. His friend from Dartmouth was a new
Speaker 4: children's book editor at Vanguard, you said, yeah, and it
Speaker 4: was so new that he was looking for a material
Speaker 4: and doctor Seuss happened to be walking around with the
Speaker 4: manuscript on him and just happened to be down there,
Speaker 4: and they ran into each other and this book got
Speaker 4: published and that was the one where he first made
Speaker 4: his name as a children's book writer. You're right, and
Speaker 4: shout out to Stephen Barr, book agent.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So this, this and a pestic tetrameter is what
Speaker 1: he basically stuck with the rest of his career. He
Speaker 1: would alter it here and there, use other meters here
Speaker 1: and there, but this is where he you know, as
Speaker 1: Ed said, that was his bread and butter. And it's
Speaker 1: very waltz like you can count it off in three
Speaker 1: four time. And it just was sort of perfect for
Speaker 1: kids books, right.
Speaker 4: And with that first kid's book, and to think I
Speaker 4: saw it on Mulberry Street. Apparently it's about a kid named
Speaker 4: Marco who sees a horse and cart on his street
Speaker 4: and as he's retelling it, it just becomes this bigger
Speaker 4: and bigger and more like bizarre and grand thing that
Speaker 4: he saw. And this will come back later on in episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he's writing these books. He's doing okay. His
Speaker 1: fourth book was called Horton Hatches the Egg. I think
Speaker 1: that's where we first meet Horton, but he wasn't like
Speaker 1: lighting the world on fire. And then that's when he
Speaker 1: goes in the army.
Speaker 4: Right, and let me tell you the story about getting
Speaker 4: caught in the Battle of the Bulge. Again, here we go.
Speaker 4: So he makes it through World War two, he escapes
Speaker 4: with his life from the Battle of the Bulge, and
Speaker 4: when he comes out of World War two, he goes
Speaker 4: right back to writing books, and he wrote a few
Speaker 4: more in the forties. I believe he wrote Urdle the Turtle,
Speaker 4: which I know is an allegory four Hitler, and he
Speaker 4: was on record say yeah, apparently the early drafts of
Speaker 4: it he had drawn a Hitler mustache on Jurdle the
Speaker 4: Turtle and it's about anti authoritarian Is that.
Speaker 2: Hitler or Michael Jordan?
Speaker 4: Does he have a Hitler mustache?
Speaker 1: He did very famously, and this one Haines Stevie commercial
Speaker 1: and everyone was like, uh, has someone not told him?
Speaker 2: I didn't see that. Yeah, I'll have to show you picture.
Speaker 4: I have my head in the sand like I was
Speaker 4: Charles Limberg or something.
Speaker 2: Oh that's a nice circular rest.
Speaker 4: It's just for you and me. So he was writing
Speaker 4: some more and he was I mean, he was selling
Speaker 4: like thousands of copies every time he released a book.
Speaker 4: He was a known children's author. He'd already established his
Speaker 4: style as something that was pretty recognizable around the United States.
Speaker 4: But it wasn't until the mid fifties that things really
Speaker 4: changed for him. Yeah, oh wow, it is a Hitler fuste.
Speaker 4: There's no mistake in that.
Speaker 2: It's a decision.
Speaker 4: So I think in nineteen fifty five, there was a
Speaker 4: book written called why Can't Johnny Read? Right?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 4: And a guy named Rudolph Flesh, And I realized what
Speaker 4: we've jumped over. We'll get back to sure, I'm not
Speaker 4: ready for it yet, all right, a guy named Rudolph Flesh,
Speaker 4: alf Flesh, Yeah, fl Age, that'd be a good one though. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you'd have to call yourself Rudy too. And anyway, Rudolf Flesh,
Speaker 4: he wrote Why Can't Johnny Read? And it was basically
Speaker 4: like an indictment of the American public school system, the
Speaker 4: education system, and how we taught kids to read. And
Speaker 4: it was equally an indictment of like Dick and Jane,
Speaker 4: and the way that kids used to read or be
Speaker 4: taught to read was just basically, here are words on
Speaker 4: a page, memorize them. Yeah, this is a red ball.
Speaker 4: This is the word read. Don't be an idiot. Red ball.
Speaker 2: It's kind of the worst way to teach kids stuff.
Speaker 4: It is. And the guy in the article said, he
Speaker 4: wrote an article in Life later on too. He said,
Speaker 4: you know who'd be a great children's book author to
Speaker 4: teach kids how to read is doctor Seuss. He's kids,
Speaker 4: He's already writing books for kids. Yeah, but if he
Speaker 4: just directed that toward actually teaching him how to read,
Speaker 4: kids would definitely want that. And it turns out that
Speaker 4: an editor, I think at Houghton Mifflin or somebody wherever
Speaker 4: doctor Seuss was writing at the time, thunder Mifflin, thunder Mifflin,
Speaker 4: you got me. He said, that's actually a pretty good idea.
Speaker 4: And that's where we got the cat in the hat.
Speaker 1: That's right, it was. It was originally meant as a
Speaker 1: reading primer. I think there were two twenty five two
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty five words, and very famously, his editor
Speaker 1: bet him after that that he could not write a
Speaker 1: book with only fifty words. And he went, take this book,
Speaker 1: Green Eggs and Ham, and shove it and shove it
Speaker 1: and give me my fifty dollars, right, And that is
Speaker 1: supposedly true. His editor bet him that he could not
Speaker 1: do so, and that's where Green Eggs and Ham came from.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's fifty words exactly, that's right. So he
Speaker 4: at this point he went from ed says, he went
Speaker 4: from being a well known children's author to probably the
Speaker 4: best known children's author in the world. Yeah, he'd shown
Speaker 4: not only could he write fun, whimsical stories with the
Speaker 4: disguised moral lesson in the middle of it too, with
Speaker 4: great illustrations and hand drawn fonts and all that he
Speaker 4: could actually teach the world's children how to read English
Speaker 4: at least.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then from that success he wrote that same year
Speaker 1: How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Speaker 4: That's a big year, man, very big year. So cant
Speaker 4: and the Grinch the same year, right, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is just amazing.
Speaker 1: And then in nineteen sixty six, of course, we get
Speaker 1: the very famous TV cartoon adaptation, which people still love
Speaker 1: and enjoy today, including me.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: And he ended up being so successful that they gave
Speaker 1: him his own imprint at Random House. With his wife,
Speaker 1: Helen Palmer Geisel, who was kind of by all accounts
Speaker 1: that the.
Speaker 2: Woman behind the Man. Oh yeah, she was an author herself.
Speaker 1: She wrote quite a few books, one called do you
Speaker 1: Know what I'm going to do Next Saturday to You?
Speaker 2: One called I Know did Last Summer?
Speaker 5: Man?
Speaker 2: It's funny adding those two words just makes it threaten.
Speaker 1: It's a horror novel, one called Why I Built the
Speaker 1: Google House, and one called I Was Kissed by a
Speaker 1: Seal at the zoo.
Speaker 4: That sounds great.
Speaker 1: So I didn't want to just kind of wash over
Speaker 1: her because she she was an author and very sadly,
Speaker 1: she ended up committing suicide very late in life.
Speaker 4: Yeah, within a couple of years of an affair that
Speaker 4: he had. Yeah, and he'd apparently have multiple affairs in her.
Speaker 4: Her suicide note supposedly referenced this, this feeling that she'd
Speaker 4: kind of been overshadowed by him in his career. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And like you said, she was very much the woman
Speaker 4: behind the man, and I.
Speaker 1: Think expected to support him and all that thing, and
Speaker 1: she did.
Speaker 4: She put her own career away so that she could
Speaker 4: handle his correspondence and business affairs. She was in charge
Speaker 4: of correspondence to like sick kids that wrote them, or
Speaker 4: entire classes, and yeah, she was she was all. He
Speaker 4: was the artistic genius who just needed to be left
Speaker 4: alone so he could make these books every year, and
Speaker 4: she handled everything else, right. And ask somebody to put
Speaker 4: their career away so that you can have yours, that's
Speaker 4: a big thing to ask somebody.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean she was sixty nine when she and
Speaker 1: I, I believe, I said, committed suicide earlier. I apologize, I
Speaker 1: know we don't use that term anymore. Yeah, So we
Speaker 1: say now that she died by suicide, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because committed makes it sound like, oh my god,
Speaker 4: she committed a sin.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we people have written in about that, and
Speaker 1: we were both glad to be made aware of that.
Speaker 1: So she was sixty nine years old and apparently also
Speaker 1: suffered from Gilliam Bear Barr game Barre syndrome.
Speaker 4: Yeah. We got corrected on that some other time. It's
Speaker 4: how I remember of.
Speaker 2: How to pronounce it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I mean, who knows why someone eventually takes that
Speaker 1: path in life.
Speaker 2: Could be a lot of factors. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: October twenty third, nineteen sixty seven, she overdosed on medication.
Speaker 4: After they've been married for forty years too. Yeah, man,
Speaker 4: And so shortly after that he married Audrey Diamond. Yes, Geisel,
Speaker 4: who's his widow? Who is I belief still alive in
Speaker 4: basically running his estate still.
Speaker 1: Yeah, her name was Audrey Stone Diamond, but it was
Speaker 1: dm N d no A.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, which is interesting.
Speaker 4: I wonder if it's it's very efficient.
Speaker 2: But yes, she became soys and he went just go
Speaker 2: ahead and get used to it.
Speaker 4: It's sus She's like, really I've always said, soys, He's like,
Speaker 4: I love you.
Speaker 1: And she had two daughters, and he said, I bet
Speaker 1: you they'd love boarding school. Yeah, and she went okay.
Speaker 1: And she later on even said, this is a direct quote.
Speaker 1: She said they wouldn't have been happy with Ted, and
Speaker 1: Ted wouldn't have been happy with them.
Speaker 4: Yeah. He really did not want kids or kids to
Speaker 4: be around. He just liked doing the books that he
Speaker 4: like to do.
Speaker 2: It's pretty interesting.
Speaker 4: So that nineteen fifty seven year, that was a big
Speaker 4: breakout year for him, and that was kind of the
Speaker 4: year that he became the Doctor Seuss that we see.
Speaker 4: But he kept writing for many, many years, I mean
Speaker 4: up until his death in nineteen ninety one. He apparently
Speaker 4: cranked out like a book a year. Yeah, some of
Speaker 4: them over time kind of took on much more progressive
Speaker 4: tones until he became the Doctor Seuss that we see today.
Speaker 4: So prior to that, though, in recent years, some people
Speaker 4: have kind of said, hey, you know, doctor Seuss had
Speaker 4: some really racist, bigoted stuff in his early work. And
Speaker 4: it's become kind of this national conversation to kind of
Speaker 4: figure out how to do this, because everyone loves Doctor Seuss.
Speaker 4: Doctor Seuss, there's nobody who doesn't like doctor Seuss. But
Speaker 4: if you are his work, I should say sure. But
Speaker 4: if you if you start digging into, especially some of
Speaker 4: his early work, it becomes problematic.
Speaker 2: And you want you want to take a break.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, all right, let's take a break and
Speaker 1: we will take part in that national conversation right after.
Speaker 5: This softly jawsh soff.
Speaker 4: All right, Chuck, So it's national conversation time. So doctor Seuss,
Speaker 4: especially in his earliest work as Jack O'Lantern and judge writer,
Speaker 4: the Humor magazine writer, a lot of his stuff was
Speaker 4: extremely racist. Yes, as Ed puts it, not just racist
Speaker 4: for the time, but but monstrously racist stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like full on blackface caricatures. It depicted African American
Speaker 1: characters as lazy as savages, have too many kids. He
Speaker 1: made jokes about slavery. There's one we can't even read
Speaker 1: on this show, but it's awful.
Speaker 4: Yeah right. He also, especially as after Pearl Harbor, directed
Speaker 4: a lot of his creative energy toward making ugly caricatures
Speaker 4: of Japan and depicting Japanese and Japanese Americans in really
Speaker 4: unflattering light too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and apparently supported internment and this isn't you know,
Speaker 1: you don't want to drag somebody through the mud. But
Speaker 1: if we're going to give a picture of the man,
Speaker 1: this is who he was earlier in his life.
Speaker 4: Right. So Ed makes a really good point. I think
Speaker 4: Ed's a great American for the way that he kind
Speaker 4: of kind of handled this too. He's saying that if
Speaker 4: you look at his early stuff, he was a younger
Speaker 4: man at the time, And I think we should also
Speaker 4: say it qualifies as like none of this excuses anything. Sure,
Speaker 4: but you know, look at the whole picture of the person.
Speaker 4: If you look at his earlier stuff or his worst,
Speaker 4: most racist stuff is when he was youngest, and his
Speaker 4: most progressive stuff that everybody knows and loves is Doctor
Speaker 4: Seuss when the world was kind of changing too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not like in nineteen eighty nine he was like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to deliver I'm going to serve up a
Speaker 1: good old racist cartoon.
Speaker 4: Right exactly. It's not like he invented sea monkeys or
Speaker 4: something like that. Right, So he kind of progressed with
Speaker 4: the world. And not only did he progress with the
Speaker 4: world and kind of change his views to take on
Speaker 4: much more progressive stuff, themes like bigotry with the sneeches
Speaker 4: is about discriminating against people and just how ridiculous that
Speaker 4: is how people are actually people. A lot of people
Speaker 4: point to Horton hears It, who as a bit of
Speaker 4: a mia Kulpa for his treatment of the Japanese prior
Speaker 4: to World War two and during World War Two. The
Speaker 4: Lorax is obviously pro environmentalism. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He fully changed one of his books altogether, an earlier
Speaker 1: version of.
Speaker 4: And to Think I Saw On on Mulberry Street.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it had the word Chinaman in there.
Speaker 4: It was worse than chinaman, and.
Speaker 1: He changed that to Chinese person like in the publication
Speaker 1: of the book for future printings.
Speaker 4: Right, So he definitely evolved his works of alved He
Speaker 4: never came out and publicly said, hey, I'm really sorry
Speaker 4: about all the racist stuff that I did earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 4: by the time he died in nineteen ninety, I think
Speaker 4: that that really wasn't the way that the world was
Speaker 4: turning at the time. But he does seem to have
Speaker 4: evolved and changed with the times and did go back
Speaker 4: and revise some stuff that had crept into his work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this has come to light more prominently in
Speaker 1: the past few years. Because there have been like some
Speaker 1: book festivals and children's literature festivals that have either been
Speaker 1: boycotted or where they've sort of tried to make him
Speaker 1: a little less prominent. The cat and the hat I
Speaker 1: think was used. Wasn't it like an official.
Speaker 4: Read across America? Right, here's the mascot for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And did they officially remove the cat?
Speaker 4: And I think they've backed a little bit away from
Speaker 4: the cat and the hat as a mascot, if not entirely.
Speaker 4: And I think that they've kind of like Doctor Seus's
Speaker 4: books are not like the focal point of the Read
Speaker 4: Across America campaign like they were.
Speaker 1: Right, And then last year, Millennia Trump made the news
Speaker 1: when she gifted a library some Doctor Seuss books, and
Speaker 1: the librarian refused that gift and said they are steeped
Speaker 1: and racist propaganda, caricatures and harmful stereotypes.
Speaker 4: I don't know that that all is necessarily true, is it?
Speaker 2: Yeah? You know, I think that might have been a
Speaker 2: little too harsh.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, if it's if I'm wrong, I want
Speaker 4: to know. The only thing that I've seen that could
Speaker 4: be pointed to in his work, like his books, was
Speaker 4: the was the reference in drawing of the Chinese guy. Yeah,
Speaker 4: in his first book, and to think I saw it
Speaker 4: on Mulberry Street. I didn't see anything else. I saw
Speaker 4: some reference that maybe the cat in the hat was
Speaker 4: supposed to be blackfaced, but I saw that one place
Speaker 4: right nowhere Else. It seemed to be as earlier work,
Speaker 4: not as children's books. And I didn't see any racist
Speaker 4: propaganda that had that was hidden in the books. If anything,
Speaker 4: the books that you would give a library, and I
Speaker 4: don't know what title she gave, would have been the
Speaker 4: more progressive stuff.
Speaker 1: Yes, she didn't go there and say here, look, here's
Speaker 1: the old jack o lantern, here's the really dirty stuff,
Speaker 1: college humor, racist cartoons, and yeah. To say that his
Speaker 1: work was steeped in racist propaganda when talking about the
Speaker 1: children's books, is, I agree, is not accurate.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: What I'm trying to figure out is is that librarian
Speaker 4: hip to something we don't know about, right or not.
Speaker 4: I'm very curious to know, Like, if we didn't dig
Speaker 4: quite deep enough, I'm a little surprised because you know us, Yeah,
Speaker 4: but I want to know if we're missing something.
Speaker 2: Then Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: I found an article where they were just asking a
Speaker 1: lot of professionals in children's literature what they thought about
Speaker 1: all this, Because I'm a big dummy, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know how to figure this stuff out of my
Speaker 1: own And Anne Neely, she's a professor of children's lit
Speaker 1: at Vanderbilt, said this, just as every author illustrator is.
Speaker 1: I think Theodore Geisel was a product of his time.
Speaker 1: We should not judge him by today's standards, but we
Speaker 1: must evaluate his books that we decide to share with
Speaker 1: children using today's standards.
Speaker 4: That is a really great point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we can outwallow in our own nostalgia when we
Speaker 1: make choices for the books we share with young children.
Speaker 1: There's simply too many outstanding books available.
Speaker 4: Well, especially also if the books that were raising our
Speaker 4: kids on it's new to them, right, if it is
Speaker 4: steeped and ra propaganda that we're not realizing we're sharing
Speaker 4: or perpetuating, then yeah, that shouldn't be the case.
Speaker 1: And Ed makes the great point that in the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties and thirties it was the exceptional American who broke
Speaker 1: out of that mold and was very progressive. And I
Speaker 1: wish he would have been one of those, but he wasn't.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think That's one of the reasons why
Speaker 4: there's such a cognitive dissonance when you find this stuff
Speaker 4: out is because that's what you think of doctor Seuss
Speaker 4: based on his work, that like, he would be that
Speaker 4: kind of guy, but he was human. His work is
Speaker 4: larger than him because I think what it is. And
Speaker 4: that's the case with just about everything.
Speaker 1: It seems like, yeah, I mean, I don't want this
Speaker 1: to taint to your reading of how the Grinch Stole
Speaker 1: Christmas this year.
Speaker 4: Although another thing that he was called out on once
Speaker 4: was his there was no female protagonist in any of
Speaker 4: his books either.
Speaker 1: Again a product of the time. Yeah, he was a
Speaker 1: man writing about little male characters.
Speaker 4: But he went and created a headed Mazie after that,
Speaker 4: so he so again, his books became more progressive further
Speaker 4: on in his career and he handled things like segregation
Speaker 4: and discrimination like with the Sneetches. The Butter Battle Book
Speaker 4: was a clear, like glaring allegory for the Cold War,
Speaker 4: and The Mutual sur Destruction is Arms Race kind of
Speaker 4: a haunting book that ends without any resolution, with both sides,
Speaker 4: the Yukes and the Zeukes, I think, with their bombs
Speaker 4: pointed at one another, and it doesn't it's not like
Speaker 4: and they lived happily ever after. It's like, what's going
Speaker 4: to happen? Yeah. And then his last book that he
Speaker 4: wrote and published while he was alive was Oh the
Speaker 4: Places You'll Go, which I had no idea, was published
Speaker 4: in nineteen ninety, did you.
Speaker 2: I didn't know anything about it.
Speaker 4: So it was it was his last book that was
Speaker 4: published while he was alive. It's also his top selling book.
Speaker 4: So some of these other books have been around for
Speaker 4: decades longer than All the Places You'll Go. But All
Speaker 4: the Places You'll Go is this top selling book because
Speaker 4: it's given to grads every spring there's a new batch
Speaker 4: of graduates, Yeah, who get Oh the Places You'll Go
Speaker 4: as a gift, and like ten million copies have been sold.
Speaker 2: Because it's about like your future and what to wait to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just like doing things and taking risks and like
Speaker 4: trying stuff and you can do it and it'll be
Speaker 4: hard and you're gonna run into two problems, but you
Speaker 4: know you're you're a good person and you're going to
Speaker 4: make good choices. And I have a story about this.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, So last night I was talking to you MEI,
Speaker 4: and I was like just out of nowhere. I was like,
Speaker 4: did you know that Oh the Places You'll Go was
Speaker 4: only published in nineteen ninety but it's Doctor Zeus's greatest
Speaker 4: selling book. And she just looked at me kind of
Speaker 4: like a little flabbergasted, like why would you say that.
Speaker 4: I was like, Oh, we're doing a Doctor SEUs episode tomorrow,
Speaker 4: and she's like, that's really weird. I'll be right back,
Speaker 4: And she went into our bedroom and came back out
Speaker 4: with a copy of Oh the Places You'll Go and said,
Speaker 4: this has been an your pillow. She said, I was
Speaker 4: going to give this to you tomorrow for the last
Speaker 4: episode of the End of the World. Oh wow, But
Speaker 4: I just happened to bring it up the day before,
Speaker 4: and that's crazy. Yeah, I thought that was really surprised.
Speaker 2: Man, how things work out.
Speaker 4: But I read it as recently as last night. I'm like,
Speaker 4: this is an amazing even for Seuss, it's an amazing book.
Speaker 4: Like an article I read said that somebody said, like,
Speaker 4: you can tell that he knew this was the last
Speaker 4: book that that was going to be published while he
Speaker 4: was alive, that he wanted this to be as his
Speaker 4: swan song.
Speaker 1: Interesting, Yeah, I would not be surprised. Talking about his
Speaker 1: more progressive views and sort of catching up with the time.
Speaker 1: If either Helen and or Audrey as the women behind
Speaker 1: the Man, weren't helping him along in that respect, sure
Speaker 1: and saying like hey, get with it.
Speaker 4: Oh oh, like for changing his views. Maybe I thought
Speaker 4: that as well.
Speaker 2: I could totally see that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because if you think about it, Halen Palmer came
Speaker 4: into his life. Yeah, yeah, I could see her having
Speaker 4: that influence on him. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He passed away finally of cancer in September twenty fourth,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, eighty seven. And I remember this because
Speaker 1: that was a rough week. I was in college and
Speaker 1: he and Miles Davis died about five or six days apart.
Speaker 1: Oh really, And I just remember being like, man, this
Speaker 1: is one of those tough ones. Yeah, for dudes my age,
Speaker 1: they were beeboppers and children's book readers.
Speaker 4: At the same time. I've got one last thing for
Speaker 4: you about doctor Seuss. Do you have anything else? I
Speaker 4: got one more thing too me first, Okay, I'll go first.
Speaker 4: He was a voracious chain smoker.
Speaker 2: Oh interesting, so much.
Speaker 4: So that even back in like the fifties and sixties,
Speaker 4: he knew he needed to lay off sometimes. So when
Speaker 4: he needed to lay off of smoking. He would he
Speaker 4: would take up a corn cob pipe that he kept
Speaker 4: turnip seeds in, and anytime he wanted to smoke, rather
Speaker 4: than light it, he would put a water dropper in there,
Speaker 4: and then when the turnip seeds started to sprout, he
Speaker 4: would grow go back to cigarettes.
Speaker 3: What.
Speaker 1: Yes, I don't fully understand that. He would start a
Speaker 1: little seed.
Speaker 4: Corn turnip seeds, and then rather than light it, he
Speaker 4: would just put a seed dropper Yeah yeah, pof on it.
Speaker 4: But nothing was going on. It was all just mental
Speaker 4: oral fixation. And then after about three days of doing this,
Speaker 4: the seeds would would sprout Germany and he'd be like, okay,
Speaker 4: I can go back to cigarettes now. Huh. So you
Speaker 4: take about three days off of cigarettes. And he used
Speaker 4: the crop of turnip greens as his his indicator.
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to say that that went
Speaker 1: on to feed like the children in poor neighborhoods or
Speaker 1: something who hate turnips, kids that eat turnips.
Speaker 4: Turnips are great.
Speaker 2: I agree.
Speaker 1: I'm a root vegetable man myself, so my last thing.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and seven, the federal judge received a
Speaker 1: hard boiled egg in the mail from an inmate in
Speaker 1: prison protesting his diet in prison, and the federal the
Speaker 1: federal judge rendered a decision, and apparently it was worked
Speaker 1: up the ladder. I can't remember even what it was about.
Speaker 1: But he rendered a decision thussly. I do not like
Speaker 1: eggs in the file. This is Judge James Murehead. I
Speaker 1: do not like them in any style. I will not
Speaker 1: take them fright or boiled. I will not take them
Speaker 1: poached or broiled. I will not take them softer scrambled
Speaker 1: despite an argument, well rambled, No fan, I am of
Speaker 1: the egg at hand. Destroy that egg today today, today,
Speaker 1: I say.
Speaker 2: Without delay.
Speaker 4: Huh.
Speaker 1: And they threw him out of court and fired him
Speaker 1: right because he was drunk.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I don't know. Wow. I wonder what came
Speaker 4: out of that.
Speaker 2: I don't know. And it gave very little information about
Speaker 2: what the case was even on.
Speaker 4: I know, like the guys, no, really, this is a
Speaker 4: serious complaint. Please, you're focusing on their own thing. Soon
Speaker 4: helped me.
Speaker 2: Oh goodness.
Speaker 4: If you want to know more about doctor Seuss, go
Speaker 4: research it. Make your own decisions about the man, the work,
Speaker 4: all that stuff. Okay, agreed, And since I said that,
Speaker 4: it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1: No, this is our last show of the year, so
Speaker 1: no listener mail. Is just our time of the year
Speaker 1: to thank everyone here a year. Is this the end
Speaker 1: of ten years?
Speaker 4: Yes, it's sort of in the middle. April is the
Speaker 4: beginning and end of a year.
Speaker 1: Right, but the end of our calendar year. And we
Speaker 1: just thank everyone for hanging in for this long with us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's amazing that we're still allowed to do this job.
Speaker 4: Yeah, hang in there. It'll pay off eventually. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: we're going to keep at it forever forever. And on
Speaker 4: a personal note, a very happy birthday to my dear
Speaker 4: sweet wife Yumi. Happy birthday, Yummi pea birthday, Umi, And
Speaker 4: thank you guys for being with us for yet another year.
Speaker 4: And we'll see you next year.
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