'Dr. Seuss' widow celebrates centennial

SAN DIEGO -- Near the end of his life, Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel sat down with his wife, Audrey, to speak of the past and of things to come.\n"'I've had a wonderful life,'" Audrey Stone Geisel recalled him saying. "'I've done what I had to do. I lived where I wished to live. I had love. I had everything.'\n"'But,' he said, 'now my work will be turned over to you. And you will have to deal with those consequences.'\n"And oh-ho," said the 82-year-old heiress of the Seuss world, "has that been true!"\nNearly 13 years after her husband's passing, Geisel leads the global enterprise that has sprouted from Seuss' beloved books -- watching over the Cat in the Hat, the Grinch and all the other critters and characters that live on in movies, toys, games and ventures that perhaps not even the imaginative doctor could have envisioned.\nTed Geisel came into the world in 1904, when children learned from sterile primers. In 1937, Geisel had just suffered his 27th rejection for his first children's book, "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," when he bumped into a friend who worked for Vanguard Press.\n"Ted told him that he'd been refused all of these times and he was going home to burn it," Audrey Geisel said.\nThe encounter, of course, led to publication. The book created a stir among teachers and parents who feared it would encourage children to lie. "It was so off the wall," Geisel said. "They even thought, 'Oh, it might teach a child to fib,' instead of imagine, you see? There's the difference."\nThe book did become a hit and over the years, and Dr. Seuss became one of the most popular children's authors ever. He published 44 children's books in more than 20 languages and one non-children's book, "The Seven Lady Godivas," which was not the hit his other books were. More than 500 million Dr. Seuss books have been sold worldwide.\nDr. Seuss has often been credited with killing off "Dick and Jane," the sterile heroes of childhood readers of yore.\n"With Dick and Jane, there was never much of a story there," said Barbara Parker of the National Education Association, whose annual "Read Across America" event culminates today, the 100th anniversary of Ted Geisel's birth.\nDr. Seuss' books, however, appealed to children -- and adults -- with their clever rhymes and plot twists.\n"In 'The Cat in the Hat,' for example, kids really, really like that because they're expecting the boy and the girl to get in trouble when the mother gets home, but suddenly, it's the cat to the rescue," Parker said.\nPhilip Nel, a Kansas State English professor and author of the new book "Dr. Seuss: American Icon," says Seuss' heroes are rebels and underdogs.\n"They go against the grain. They don't do what they're expected to do," he said. As in "The Cat in the Hat," Nel said, "Why not fly a kite in the house?"\nPart of Seuss' charm is his ability to make the ordinary into the extraordinary.\n"'Ham and eggs' is just ordinary, but if you turn it around so that it's 'eggs and ham,' that's interesting. And then if you make it green, there's real genius," Nel said.\n"He gives us a world that is both familiar and strange. ... He gives us an ordinary house in which an extraordinary cat enters. There's something brilliant in the way he does that."\nAudrey Geisel is presiding over a year's worth of ceremonies celebrating "Seussentenial: A Century of Imagination."\nThe events include the debut of a Postal Service stamp, a tour of theatrical performances and children's workshops across 40 cities, a series of Dr. Seuss celebrity book reviews, exhibits of items from the Dr. Seuss archives and of Ted Geisel's art, the unveiling of a Dr. Seuss sculpture at the Geisel Library at the University of California San Diego and the presentation of a star honoring the author on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.\nAs she gazed toward the Pacific from her hilltop home, her blue eyes a shade lighter than the waters below, the petite Geisel said she understood the weight of the job immediately upon inheriting it but was surprised by how it steadily grew heavier.\n"And then suddenly, I had so much to do each day," she said, describing business responsibilities as well as her philanthropic work as head of the Dr. Seuss Foundation. "But I've complicated my own life to a degree, and I don't deserve much sympathy."\nGeisel is a disciplined and opinionated leader whose mission is largely to protect the integrity of her husband's creations.\nUnwilling to accept the traditional La Jolla socialite's life of lunches, Geisel, a former nurse, instead holds court early each morning at a nearby hotel restaurant, arriving in her faithful 1984 Cadillac with the personalized license plate: GRINCH.\n"I come down the street, and no one has seen anything like it," she said with a laugh.\nAs president and CEO of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, Geisel is tough on those encroaching on Seuss trademarks and copyrights. And when she wanted to have the local Old Globe Theater produce "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," years ago, she went to New York to free the miserly character from a production that later evolved into the musical "Seussical."\nGeisel had high hopes for the 2000-01 Broadway production "Seussical," but poor reviews doomed the musical in New York. It later won a second life on tour.\nIn a world buzzing with action, she said, it is all the more important to share with them the original seed of the Seuss enterprise -- the nonsensical yet completely sensible Seuss words.\n"Just to have their favorite Seuss story read to them by a parent -- that is the most calming, uniting, understanding thing that one generation can share with an oncoming generation"