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"View Slideshow\n\nHigh on a hill in La Jolla, California, stands a comfortable and charming house with a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean. It is happy and rambling, the home of Audrey and Theodor Geisel. Like the owners of every successful house, they have managed to create their own small world.\n\nThat world, however, is not always as private as they might wish it to be. In particular, Mr. Geisel's birthdays create unusual problems and are generally chaotic. \"Ted's birthdays are a little crazy,\" says Mrs. Geisel. \"So lately we've taken to fleeing to quiet places like Las Vegas! But I still remember those wonderful days\u2014with school buses full of children all up and down the hill, and every room in the house piled high with birthday cards and, as often as not, thirty-seven cakes. The last madness I remember was a marvelous fat blimp flying back and forth over the house with a message flashing on its side: \u2018Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!' \"\n\nFor it is no secret that this house on a hill in La Jolla is something rather more than a charming family home. It is the center of a realm of the imagination that reaches into almost every part of the world. Theodor S. Geisel, of course, is the celebrated Dr. Seuss, an artist and writer who has brought more happiness to more children than almost anyone else\u2014with the possible exception of Saint Nicholas. In an age of computers and humorless technology, it is a comfort to know that Dr. Seuss, provided with little more than brush and pencil, has traveled well beyond the moon. Wherever the flag of innocence and wonder and magic is flying, he has helped to raise it.\n\nUnique seems an inadequate word with which to describe Dr. Seuss and his books and his life and his house. Nevertheless, unique they are. For he is here, but he is there\u2014perhaps planting a new Truffula Tree under the clean clouds to the song of the Swomee-Swans. Who can say? All that really can be said is that he is a man who is pleased, and pleased in a way that hardly suggests conceit. Simply pleased\u2014with his work and his family and his children, indeed with all the children of the world. And he is most certainly pleased with his house. For it is, as few other places are, a self-contained universe of life and poetry and imagination.\n\nNot unexpectedly, its beginnings were somewhat unusual. Soon after he had completed his tour of duty in World War II, as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, Dr. Seuss found himself working in Hollywood. Often, on weekends and holidays, he went to La Jolla for relaxation. And here, one day in 1947, he came across an abandoned observation tower on a hill overlooking the sea. It consisted of two small rooms, one above the other, and he knew in an instant that he had come home. Today the tower forms the nucleus of the large comfortable house that has spread out from it in every direction. After these many years, is the house completely finished? \"Oh, my, no,\" says Dr. Seuss. \"Perhaps five years from now. It's difficult to say.\"\n\nIndeed it is difficult to say, for his enthusiasm and curiosity are without end. His creativity increases with each passing year, and more room is always needed. He must have space for his paintings: unusual creations with titles like I Dreamed I Was a Doorman at the Hotel Coronado. That Spring Winter Came Late, Venetian Cat/ O Sole Meow. He must have room for the mounted heads of those marvelous characters from his books, prepared according to the rules of what he describes as the Seuss System of Unorthodox Taxidermy. Among them is the Tufted Gustard, boasting a handsome head of hair created from an abandoned shaving brush. And, of course, there is his closet full of hats\u2014innumerable hats, hats of all kinds, hats from everywhere, Peruvian fireman's hats, yachting hats, Mexican hats and, last but not least, the Cat in the Hat's hat.\n\nThe wonderful world of Dr. Seuss extends from the studio, where he creates, into every part of the house. There is his bathroom, where one of his paintings is displayed next to a Picasso ceramic. \"I'm sure this is the only place in the world where Picasso and Dr. Seuss hang on the wall together.\" And there is the dining room, where a carved medallion is found on the back of each chair, a medallion representing the unusual features of one or another of his creations. He is pleased with the dining room for other reasons as well. It has a splendid view of the ocean, reflected on one of the mirrored walls. \"Where else can you stand in one room and see the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Atlantic on the other?\" It is a Dr. Seuss question, and there is no answer. As always, he has seen what no one else can see.\n\nHe is equally enthusiastic about a large stone outside the house, containing the impression of a dinosaur's footprint. His father, director of a zoo, found it long ago in Massachusetts, and now it reposes in La Jolla, some hundred and fifty million years after that particular dinosaur went for his walk. \"Don't you think this must be the oldest antique in the world?\" Another Dr. Seuss question, quite unanswerable.\n\nUnanswerable, surely, because there is only one Dr. Seuss. It is not enough to say that he sees the world through the eyes of a child. More accurately, he has never lost the enthusiasm of childhood, its sense of wonder, or its joy in discovery. However, it requires hard work to keep these natural gifts fresh and untarnished. \"When you live in what was, until recently, a resort town,\" says Dr. Seuss, \"you need a good deal of discipline in order to work.\"\n\nHis own discipline is immense, but his pleasure is more so. For here in La Jolla he works every day with familiar old friends and delightful new ones. They are all around him: Marvin K. Mooney, Thidwick the Moose, Bartholomew Cubbins, the Lorax, the Grinch, the Cat in the Hat. There are few artists anywhere who have so magically created a world of their own. And, like Horton in Horton Hears a Who!, it is certain that Dr. Seuss would say to the millions of children who have followed him into that special world: \"Of course I will stick. I'll stick by you small folks through thin and through thick!\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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