By the spring of 1925, Theodor Seuss Geisel was nearing the end of his senior year at Dartmouth College and had already found an outlet for the mischievous imagination that would eventually define his career. He was editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, the college’s humor magazine, where he wrote jokes, drew cartoons, and filled pages with the strange creatures and visual absurdities that were becoming his specialty.
Then came Easter weekend.
On Saturday night, Geisel and nine friends gathered in his room at the Randall Club, a student boarding house near campus. Between the ten students, there was exactly one pint of gin.
But the gin was apparently not the only thing contributing to the evening’s entertainment.
According to later accounts, Geisel and fellow student Curtis Abel eventually climbed onto the boarding house’s tin roof and began squirting seltzer water at each other. It sounds like an oddly specific form of mischief a century later, but in the 1920s the joke would have been instantly recognizable. Seltzer bottles were familiar props in vaudeville and silent-film slapstick, used to drench an unsuspecting victim for an easy laugh. Whether Geisel and Abel were consciously imitating the comedians of the day is unknown, but the scene would not have seemed nearly as peculiar then as it does now. The Smithsonian has traced the seltzer bottle’s long association with American slapstick comedy.
Pa Randall, the proprietor of the boarding house, was not entertained.
Geisel later described Randall as a man who “hated merriment.” Whatever finally prompted him to act, Randall called Hanover police chief Rood, who personally raided the gathering.
And this was 1925.
The United States was five years into Prohibition. That single pint of gin was not merely against college rules; possessing alcohol violated federal law. Geisel and his friends were brought before Dartmouth dean Craven Laycock and placed on probation. Geisel later remembered the episode with characteristic wit: “We had a pint of gin for ten people, so that proves nobody was really drinking.”
The dean was less persuaded.
Geisel was ordered to give up his extracurricular activities, including his editorship of the Jack-O-Lantern, according to his own later account in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.
Geisel apparently thought the punishment was excessive and expected that his father might agree. There was some reason to think he would. Theodor Robert Geisel had worked in the family brewing business in Springfield, Massachusetts, a business badly damaged by Prohibition.
His father, however, offered little sympathy.
In a letter later quoted by biographer Donald Pease, the elder Geisel told his son that while he did not necessarily object to his taking a drink, he did object to his doing it in Hanover, where he knew the rules. He told Ted to accept the punishment and spend his remaining time at Dartmouth trying to “eradicate this blot from your good record.” Oxford University Press recounts the exchange in an excerpt from Pease’s biography of Geisel.
For an aspiring cartoonist, that created a problem.
However, it did not stop him from drawing.
Geisel quietly continued contributing to the magazine, only now he needed to disguise who was doing the work. Some cartoons appeared without signatures. Others carried invented names such as “L. Burbank” and “D. G. Rossetti.” And in the April 22, 1925, issue, two cartoons appeared under another name: one signed “T. Seuss” and the other simply “Seuss.”
It was not an entirely invented identity. Seuss was Geisel’s middle name as well as his mother’s maiden name. As Geisel later put it, he never knew how effectively the “corny subterfuge” fooled the dean. But that, he said, was how “Seuss” first became his signature.
There was also a fitting bit of irony in what happened next. His father had told him to erase the “blot” from his record. Geisel did, in a sense, remove something—but it was his own name. “Theodor Geisel” disappeared from the pages of the Jack-O-Lantern, replaced by an assortment of pseudonyms. Among them was the name that would eventually eclipse all the others: Seuss.
A punishment for drinking in a student boarding house helped create one of the most recognizable names in children’s literature.
After Dartmouth, Geisel continued writing and drawing professionally. While working for the humor magazine Judge in the late 1920s, he developed a feature called “Boids and Beasties” and began experimenting with more elaborate versions of his pseudonym, including “Dr. Theophrastus Seuss.” He later explained in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine that he added the “Dr.” simply “to make me sound more professorial.” Over time, the name was shortened to the form that would become famous: Dr. Seuss.
The doctorate, of course, was fictional. Geisel had studied at Oxford but never earned a Ph.D. Dartmouth would eventually give him an honorary doctorate in 1955, decades after he had already bestowed one upon himself.
Geisel went on to write and illustrate more than 60 books and create some of the most recognizable characters in American children’s literature. He occasionally used other pen names as well. Books he wrote but did not illustrate appeared under “Theo. LeSieg”—Geisel spelled backward—and he used “Rosetta Stone” for Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo!!. His publisher, Penguin Random House, documents those alternate pen names alongside his better-known work as Dr. Seuss.
But none of those names came close to eclipsing the one that began at Dartmouth.
It is a fittingly peculiar origin story: ten college students, one pint of gin, two young men spraying each other with seltzer on a tin roof, an irritated boarding-house proprietor, a police raid, a stern dean, and a father who told his son to accept the consequences.
The punishment was supposed to keep Theodor Geisel out of the college humor magazine.
Instead, it helped introduce Dr. Seuss.
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