The Boy Who Saw It on Mulberry Street

He grew up at seventy-four Fairfield Street in Springfield's Forest Park neighborhood, and he walked to school past the kind of New England architecture that seems designed to house the fantastical, onion domes on Main Street buildings, ornate Victorian rooflines, the stone bulk of a city that had been important for a long time. His name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, and he was born in Springfield on March second, nineteen oh four. His father ran the Forest Park Zoo.

Ted Geisel spent his boyhood among the animals, absorbing the particular logic of creatures that did not quite fit any known category, the kind of logic that would later produce the Lorax and Thidwick and Horton. He watched the grand parades that rolled down Main Street. He walked to school along Mulberry Street.

When he finally published his first children's book in nineteen thirty-seven, he named it And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, after the street he had walked as a child, and the Springfield street is still there. By his own varying accounts he was rejected by more than twenty publishers before one said yes. He went on to write and illustrate more than sixty books.

His characters have been translated into more than thirty languages. The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden opened in two thousand two, a few blocks from where his childhood home still stands.

His stepdaughter, sculptor Lark Grey Dimond-Cates, created the bronze figures that people the garden, the Cat, Horton, the Grinch, and Geisel himself at his drawing desk. More than three million people have visited. The boy who saw things on Mulberry Street turned out to be right: you could look at an ordinary street and find anything.