He had the bullseye till his end of days. He kept a paper bullseye of his father’s hanging on his office wall, where his father had gotten the bullseye dead center, to remind him of perfection.

Writing the rhymes, he’d often fill in the last word as ‘duh-duh’ or ‘dum-dum’ and then he’d toss and turn on his couch in his office, read a nonfiction book or mystery to clear his mind, walk the beachfront property, scour thesauruses, and eventually replace the fill-in words with the rhymes. Suess’s wife was fond of saying that although Ted was witty, funny, somewhat introverted, and pleasant he was never happy when he was working on a book but happiest when he finished one. (I could’ve changed that line but I like the way it feels when considered literally!) Of course… he eventually fell into children’s books. (photos found at ) His early work for these ad companies had many touches of the fanciful animals we would all come to know. He started out drawing humorous cartoons for beer, oil companies, and the like, with a long-running very popular campaign for a bug company. Ted showed them where he’d poked holes in the plaster and he told them a tantalizing story about a mural of “a lot of crazy animals” now covered by their wallpaper. He told the current owner Ron Senez “I just stopped by to make sure you’re taking proper care of the house.” For some time he sat in Ron’s young sons’ room (Ted’s old bedroom as a child) and regaled them with stories. Many decades later, after achieving a notoriety that surprised him, he revisited that child home. To be exact, he lived in Massachusetts on 74 Fairfield Street. Like all of us, he started life as a baby, and then became a child. Memoirs are my favorite books to read, along with nonfiction, and also biology and neuroscience, and autobiography and biographies too.

Linkedin backgrounds dr. seuss sayings