Green eggs, Flapjack Flapper’s flapjacks for breakfast at MLPS honors Dr. Seuss on what would have been his 113th birthday
March 2 is celebrated annually as a special day in honor of the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel – better known as the author and artist of children’s books under the pen ame of Dr. Seuss.
Geisel was born on March 2, 1904, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and passed away on September 24, 1991, at the age of 87, in La Jolla, California. This year, schools across the country are remembering his legacy on what would have been his 113th birthday.
In fact, Geisel’s birthday has been adopted as the annual date for National Read Across America Day, an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association.
At Mountain Lake Public School (MLPS), Taher Inc. Food Service Staff served up green eggs for breakfast, paying homage to Green Eggs and Ham, one of the books written and illustrated by Dr. Seuss. Also on the menu was another Dr. Seuss menu specialty – Flapjack Flapper’s flapjacks with blueberry sauce (banana/peanut butter pancakes). They are mentioned in Dr. Seuss’s Oh Say Can You Say?
To top off the breakfast, participants had the opportunity to watch a Dr. Seuss video and collect a selection of take-home activities.
The ‘Dr.’ is in
In addition to being a children’s author, Geisel also wrote additional titles, was a cartoonist, animator, book publisher and artist. His children’s books sold over 600 million copies, and had been translated into more than 20 languages by the time of this death.
Geisel adopted his Dr. Seuss pen name during his university studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire and the University of Oxford in Oxford, England, United Kingdom. He left Oxford in 1927 to being his career as an illustrator and cartoonist for the magazines Vanity Fair and Life, as well as various other publications. Geisel also was an illustrator for advertising campaigns, including for Flit and Standard Oil, and a political cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM.
His first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was published in 1937. During World War II, Geisel worked in an animation department of the United States Army. During that stint, he produced several short films, including Design for Death, which later won the 1947 Academy Award for Documentary Feature.
Following the war, Geisel kept his focus on children’s books, writing If I Ran the Zoo in 1950, Horton Hears a Who! in 1955, If I Ran the Circus in 1956, The Cat in the Hat in 1957, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in 1957 and – the book saluted at MLPS on his 113th birthday – Green Eggs and Ham, in 1960.
Over the course of his career, he published more than 60 books, which have gone on to spawn numerous adaptations, including 11 television special, four feature films, a Broadway musical and four television series.
In 1958, he won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for for Horton Hatches the Egg, and again, in 1961, for And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
Sam-I-Am promotes green eggs and ham
In the Dr. Seuss story, Green Eggs and Ham, Sam-I-Am (or just Sam, for short), is the main character. Throughout the book, Sam-I-Am works to convince Joey to taste try anew dish called “Green Eggs and Ham.”
He asks him to eat green eggs and ham with different partners and locations, each time refusing with: “I do not like them Sam-I-Am.” At the end of the story, Sam finally tells his him to simply try the dish to see if he really likes it or not. To get Sam to leave him alone, he does and finds that he actually really likes green eggs and ham, which leads to the final line of the book is: “I do so like Green Eggs and Ham. Thank you, thank you, Sam-I-Am.”
The origin of Green Eggs and Ham stems from a bet Seuss had with his publisher, Bennett Cerf. Seuss’s previous book, The Cat in the Hat, used only 223 words based off a list of 348 required words for beginner readers to learn. Cerf bet Seuss that he couldn’t write a book with only 50 words from that same list.
