Chapter 1 Minnows Into Whales 1904-1921 On paper, Mulberry Street doesn''t look like much. It''s just another residential street on the city map of Springfield, Massachusetts, a slightly bent capital letter L lying on its back, not much more than a pass-through between the busier streets of Union and Maple. The street itself is quiet and relatively nondescript, with very little indication that it''s a major destination on a map of the American imagination. But sure enough, it was here-at least as told in the tale by Springfield''s own Dr. Seuss-that a little boy named Marco used his imagination to transform a simple horse and wagon into a colorful spectacle, with a brass band pulled by an elephant-riding sultan, flanked by motorcycle policemen and confetti-dumping airplanes, while enthusiastically being reviewed by the top-hatted mayor and the town aldermen. Modern-day pilgrims still flock to Mulberry Street, slowly trolling the neighborhood, windows down, hoping to catch a glimpse of something-anything-that inspired the magnificent imaginations of Marco and Dr. Seuss. Residents smile knowingly, pausing over lawn mowers and trunks still filled with groceries to answer the same question from visiting wayfarers.

"Where did Dr. Seuss live?" The answer, it seems, is as disappointing as discovering London''s 221B Baker Street is actually home to a bank, and never was home to Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Seuss didn''t live on Mulberry Street at all. Instead, pilgrims are directed to another spot on the map, another inverted L about two miles south: Fairfield Street. This is where Dr. Seuss grew up, and the house he lived in for nearly twenty years, at number 74, is still there, looking much as it did during his lifetime. Parts of Springfield, in fact, look as they did during Dr.

Seuss''s day-or at least the places that shaped his imagination and influenced his art can still be seen if one knows where to look. A few blocks from Fairfield on Howard Street stands the old armory. Its curved stone turrets are reflected in the castles populating so many Seuss books. Over in Forest Park, the Barney Mausoleum-built with a family fortune earned by inventing and selling clamp-on ice skates-looms two stories above the pavement, with the curving staircases and pillared archways that would show up in The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. And the nearby Forest Park Zoo? That was where "[I tried to] draw the animals," said Dr. Seuss later. "I didn''t know how to draw, so they''d come out strange." Dr.

Seuss didn''t produce Springfield''s only creations. Founded by the Puritan William Pynchon in 1636 on a high bluff overlooking the Connecticut River, Springfield has been nurturing and stirring American imaginations for nearly three hundred years. American independence was won with the reliable ammunition and gun carriages produced at the Springfield Armory beginning in 1777. (A decade later, Daniel Shays-spouting a different kind of idealism-would attempt to steal muskets and ammunition from the same armory in a thwarted attempt to overthrow the government of Massachusetts.) By 1795, Springfield Armory would regularly be producing the muskets that would be carried on the shoulders of American soldiers all the way through the War of 1812 and on into the Civil War. Weaponry wasn''t Springfield''s only specialty; true, local businessmen Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson, who developed the firearms company that bore their last names, had roots in the town-but so, too, did Charles Goodyear, who discovered and patented the process for making vulcanized rubber in a small Springfield factory in 1844. A year earlier, two industrious Springfield publishers, brothers Charles and George Merriam, acquired the rights to publish Noah Webster''s An American Dictionary of the English Language, marking the founding of another iconic American brand.

There was Milton Bradley, who would launch the American board game industry by cranking out the earliest incarnations of The Game of Life in his lithography studio in 1860. Over on State Street, the beloved and reliable Indian motorcycles would roll out of the company''s Springfield factory from 1901 until 1953. Even modern sports would find their origins in the town when in 1891 a Canadian-born physical education teacher named James Naismith, looking to keep his classes occupied through the long, cold Massachusetts winters, mounted a peach basket on a ten-foot pole in the gymnasium at the International YMCA Training School and-opting not to name the game after himself-christened the new game basketball. Springfield, then, could unequivocally and rightly stake a claim as a major landmark on the frontier of American inventiveness and imagination. Dr. Seuss himself was a construct of one of those unique American minds: a comfortable coat regularly shrugged on and off at will by one of Springfield''s most famous sons, Theodor Seuss Geisel. The dropped e at the end of Theodor would forever perplex journalists and copyeditors, but to Theodor-Dr. Seuss himself-it wouldn''t much matter.

Everyone would always call him Ted. Theodor Seuss Geisel could trace his roots back to the German town of MYhlhausen, a tiny village squatting on the western shore of a hairpin turn in the Enz River, in what is now the German state of Baden-WYrttemberg. It was here, in 1650, that Joseph Geissel married Catharina Loth; the extra s would be dropped in later generations, and well before TedÕs grandfather was born in July 1844. Born Theodor Adolph Geisel in MYlhausen, T. A. Geisel moved to nearby Pforzheim at age fourteen to enter into a six-year apprenticeship with a local jeweler. From there, he joined the German cavalry-T. A.

Geisel would always have a love for horses, and even at only five feet six, he stood tall in the saddle-and served in the German army for the seven-week Austro-Prussian War that quickly sparked, flared, and burned out in the summer of 1866. ¥¥¥¥ "My grandfather was a German cavalry officer who decided he didn''t want to be one," Ted said-and in 1869, twenty-five-year-old T. A. Geisel stepped onto the steamship Ohio at the port in Bremen, bound for the United States, where members of his extended family had secured him a job in the store of Springfield jeweler J. B. Rumrill. If Geisel missed his homeland, he seemed only ever looking forward, never back. In 1871, he married Christine Schmaelzle, another recent German immigrant four years his junior.

Two children would follow shortly. In 1875, he became an American citizen. T.A. built a reputation as a talented jeweler-in his five years in Springfield, he had become Springfield''s go-to designer for brooches-but in 1876 he abandoned brooches for booze, giving up the jeweling trade entirely to begin a new career as a brewer ("a slight jump," his grandson said archly). Pooling his savings with those of a young brewer''s apprentice named Christian Kalmbach, T.A. purchased a small brick brewing plant located way out on Boston Road on the east side of town, right at the last stop on the horsecar line.

While the facility they purchased was primitive and deemed "feeble" by locals-just a few wooden buildings that produced barely a thousand barrels of beer annually-the proprietors of the new Kalmbach & Geisel Brewery proved remarkably ambitious and adept both as businessmen and brewers. Under the guidance of T. A. Geisel, who had a knack for property and structures, the wooden brewery quickly expanded into one of the largest in the region, becoming a "magnificent" compound of redbrick buildings surrounding a central courtyard and eventually taking up twelve grassy acres. For a while, the Geisels lived on the grounds of the brewing compound, then took a small cottage directly across from the brewery on State Street. It was here, in the shadow of the smokestack of the Kalmbach & Geisel Brewery, that T.A. and Christine Geisel had their fourth child and first son, Theodor Robert Geisel-Dr.

Seuss''s father-on June 28, 1879. In the coming decade, there would be two more surviving children, Adolph and Christine-but as the first son and namesake, it was T.R. who was expected to follow in his father''s footsteps in the brewing industry. Before T.R. was three, the brewery that once produced less than a thousand barrels of beer in a year was delivering at least that much in a single day, fanning a small army of beer wagons out across Springfield every morning, each distinctive black and gold wagon drawn by majestic four-horse teams. As a boy, T.

R. would rise early to head off to school; his father, meanwhile, had already been up for hours, overseeing the several hundred barrels of Kalmbach & Geisel beer that were loaded onto trains to ship daily through all of New England. "It was good beer, too," said Ted-so good, in fact, that Kalmbach & Geisel would be fondly referred to by locals as "Come back and guzzle." And guzzle the locals did-so much so that the brewery would continue to grow and thrive over the next decade, prompting T.A. to add an enormous icehouse and replace their compound of buildings with a brand-new state-of-the-art three-story brick structure. In 1893, with profits soaring and more than 400,000 barrels of beer rolling out annually, T.A.

bought out Christian Kalmbach, renamed the business the Highland Brewing Company, and immediately designated himself as the new organization''s president, treasurer, and manager. Five years later, the still-growing Highland Brewing Company was sold and incorporated-along with several local rivals.