Word: geisel
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...here's a birthday tribute to Ted, a little Geisel geyser, a caboose to the Seussentennial...
...oxymoronality. The American expected to laugh at German-Americans (when he wasn't afraid of them), primed as he was with images of oom-pah-pah bands, clinking beer steins and Wagnerian sopranos of ample girth. It happened that Ted's father was co-owner of the Kalmbach and Geisel Brewery (later, and prudently, changed to the Liberty Brewing Company) in Springfield, Mass., and that his mother's measurements were an imposing six ft. and 200 lb. Further, the family names could have come from any ethnic vaudeville sketch of the period: Schmaelzle and Geisel on his father's side...
...down to the clich?s they are expected to inhabit. Ted's mother Henrietta ("Nettie"), for example, was indeed a mountain ... of maternal devotion. She read books and poetry to the boy, and Ted later proclaimed her as the greatest influence on his writing. His dad, Theodore Robert Geisel, may have been a beermaker, but he had a precision of mind and expression, as evidenced in a letter he sent Ted after the young man, a senior at Dartmouth, had got in trouble with the police after a loud drinking party. "While I do not object to your taking a drink...
...classmate recalling young Geisel said, "Everything Ted did seemed to be a surprise, especially to him." Who knew the source of his strange whimsy? One of his Jack-O-Lantern contributions was a news story on "the Zimkowitz annual baseball game" in the form of a box score: 19 Zimkowitzes in two columns of agate type. Nineteen, not 18: Yes. One family member had "batted for Zimkowitz in the ninth." There are also hints of Seuss creatures to come, like a two-legged elephant, with shoes. The chimerist in Ted responded to the elephant paradox: a creature that was both...
...chief he acknowledged with a third-person flourish that "He writes only for the extreme left wing of college student, for the man of social perversity." He composed a droll piece that literally translated French to English. (Everyone French student who thinks himself a wit tries that, but Geisel's was good.) He offered raffish etiquette tips: "a man should not sit down before a lady. It is, however, advisable to violate this rule if the lady expects to sit on his lap." He did lots of cartoons. One, with two chimneysweeps on a roof, had this dialogue: "Shall...