By MICHAEL WINERIP

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — “I’ll take you to see Mulberry Street,” said Guy McLain, the director of the Museum of Springfield History.

He meant the real Mulberry Street, the one that inspired the first of Dr. Seuss’ 44 children’s books.

I started to think what I might see on Mulberry Street. Truffula trees? Gerald McGrew? Gertrude McFuzz? A Once-ler or two?

That’s the thing about Dr. Seuss. He gets in your head and stays there.

I was listening to the radio last week when I heard an announcer say that this year is the 75th anniversary of the publication of “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.”

Dr. Seuss has sold 600 million books, so I figured there had to be something going on Mulberry Street. Springfield is where Ted Geisel was born in 1904 and thought his formative thoughts, before going off to Dartmouth in 1921 and becoming Dr. Seuss.

I planned to reread several Seuss books for the visit, including “The Sneetches,” but could not find our copy. It turned out that one of my 21-year-old twins, Adam, had taken it with him to college.

Dr. Seuss books aren’t primarily schoolbooks. They’re read-to-your-children-in-bed books. Christin LaRocque, a librarian at the Central branch in downtown Springfield, says Seuss books need to be replaced more often than any others — they wear out or disappear.

Dr. Seuss is good for most anything that ails a child. To paraphrase Sylvester McMonkey McBean: He’s heard of your troubles, he’s heard you’re unhappy, but he can fix that all up, he’s the Fix-It-Up Chappie.

Ms. LaRocque’s theory on why kids love Dr. Seuss: He’s very silly.

Anyone trying to help children write should read Dr. Seuss with them. You learn that it is not enough to see what you’ve written. The words should play in your head until you hear what you’ve written.

From, “If I Ran the Circus:”

And now Here!

In the cage

Is a beast most ferocious

Who’s known far and wide

As the Spotted Atrocious.

Springfield today is mostly poor and run-down, but on a tour, Mr. McLain, the historian, conjured a city from a century ago that was one of the country’s great manufacturing centers. The Indian company built the first motorcycles here, the ones Dr. Seuss drew for the policeman who escorted Marco’s parade down Mulberry Street. The rifles the hunters used to capture Thidwick the big-hearted moose were made at the Springfield Armory and used by American troops in World War I.

The earliest motorized cars and tractors were built in Springfield. Everett Barney, who donated miles of wooded land to the city for Forest Park — where Ted Geisel and his friends played as children — became rich by inventing clip-on ice skates and manufacturing them here.

Anything must have seemed possible and inventable in the Springfield where Dr. Seuss grew up.

That spirit fills his books.

Mr. McMonkey McBean invents the Star On and Star Off machines. Young Gerald McGrew builds a Skeegle-mobile to fill his new zoo and a Cooker-mobile to catch a Natch.

The publication of “Mulberry Street” is a lesson in perseverance.

The manuscript was rejected by 27 publishers. Dr. Seuss was about to burn it when a classmate from Dartmouth, who was new to the children’s book business, bought it. By the time it was published, in 1937, the author was 33.

Despite an excellent review in The New York Times, the royalties for the book came to just $3,500 by 1943.

Dr. Seuss was not one to sit in a garret waiting to be discovered. In the decade before “Mulberry Street,” he made a good living writing and drawing advertisements for Standard Oil, Vico Motor Oil, Flit bug spray and Narragansett beer.

As Charles D. Cohen points out in his illustrated biography, many of the characters that would fill the Dr. Seuss children’s books first appeared in advertisements. In 1932, an ad he drew for the Warren Telechron clock company featured the same man who would ride the cart down Mulberry Street. For Daggett and Ramsdell beauty products, he drew a machine that made women beautiful and looked a lot like Mr. McMonkey McBean’s Star On and Star Off machines from “The Sneetches” 40 years later.

“Mulberry Street” is not one of Dr. Seuss’ most successful books. It ranks far behind the top five: “Green Eggs and Ham,” “The Cat in the Hat,” “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,” “Dr. Seuss’s ABC” and “Oh, the Places You’ll Go.”

And while it’s not one of my favorites, I like that it hints of great things to come. The language and creatures are plainer than later Seuss. For the new zoo, McGrew Zoo, Gerald catches a Bippo-no-Bungus from Hippo-no-Hungus. While on Mulberry Street, Marco imagines a cart pulled by two giraffes.

But Mulberry’s narrative arc — boy sees something ordinary; boy blows it up into something extraordinary; boy returns to the ordinary by the last page — is the prototype for several Seuss works, including “McElligot’s Pool”(1947), “If I Ran the Zoo” (1950) and “If I Ran the Circus” (1956).

When Mulberry Street came out, critics talked about how refreshing it was to read a children’s book meant to entertain rather than edify.

Yet later Seuss books are even more entertaining and often carry a message, like “Horton Hatches the Egg” (the importance of perseverance) and “The Sneetches” (the emptiness of social status).

A few have a political feel: “Yertle the Turtle” (the evil of dictatorships) and “The Lorax” (the need to protect the environment).

Mr. McLain’s tour included the Indian factory — now an apartment complex — and the high school Ted Geisel attended, since 1989 the Classical High Condominiums.

We visited the Barney family mausoleum in Forest Park, which has a curving stairway that looks a lot like the one in “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.”

“I can’t say for certain it’s the one in the book; it’s an educated guess,” Mr. McLain said. “But I feel it in my bones.” To Mr. McLain’s credit, by then so did I.

As for Mulberry Street? A shabby place with boarded-up houses, an addiction treatment center and drug dealers. Young Marco in his necktie and dress Bermudas would be eaten alive on Mulberry Street.

Of course, that’s the magic of Dr. Seuss’ books, or any good fiction. The real Mulberry Street isn’t the real Mulberry Street and may never have been the real Mulberry Street. The real Mulberry Street is the Mulberry Street drawn by Dr. Seuss in 1937 and frozen forever in time.

Fuente: The New York Times

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