GREEN EGGS AND MAYHEM
BEFORE HE WAS A LITERARY SENSATION, THEODOR GEISEL — AKA DR. SEUSS — BROUGHT HIS ABSURDIST STYLINGS TO TINSELTOWN. THE RESULT, BONKERS FANTASY THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T, WOULD PUT HIM OFF FILMMAKING FOREVER…
WORDS ADAM SMITH
Piano-lesson-hater Bart (Tommy Rettig) in his yellow-fingered beanie — reminiscent of another famous Bart.
The commencement address was, until relatively recently, a uniquely American phenomenon. Each fall, at colleges and universities across the United States, deans of degrees scour alumni lists, call contacts, rack their brains in search of a celebrity, a politician, a half-successful businessman or a second-fiddle astronaut with alimony debts, to deliver inspirational homilies to that year’s departing students.
It was always thus, but in 1977 Eugene Hotchkiss III, the President Emeritus of Lake Forest College, a private liberal arts college just north of Chicago, found himself with an unusual problem. He had landed his speaker at the last minute: an artist and writer by the name of Theodor Geisel, who had been lured to the campus with the promise of an honourary degree. But Geisel, who was turning out to be a mildly eccentric character, had not actually committed to saying anything in return. The quid pro quo of the arrangement was apparently lost on him. Until the last minute, Hotchkiss had been worried that Geisel might trouser his degree and depart without saying anything at all.
But, as the grey-haired, 73-year-old man shuffled to the front of the stage and finally pulled from his pocket a small piece of paper, Hotchkiss sighed with relief. The young audience was obviously rapt. Because to them Geisel was known by another name, Dr. Seuss, and his books — The Cat In The Hat, Green Eggs And Ham, How The Grinch Stole Christmas — were as much a part of the scaffolding of an American childhood as milk, cookies and the Pledge Of Allegiance. It was not an exaggeration to say that for many of these students about to depart the world of letters, Dr. Seuss was the man who had taught them to read.
Geisel announced the title of his speech — “My Uncle Terwilliger On The Art Of Eating Popovers” — and proceeded to deliver one of the strangest commencement addresses in the history of the form. At 14 lines long it is certainly the only such speech short enough to be memorialised, in full, on a small plaque which still adorns a rock on the college’s leafy campus to this day.