Miss Grace Spivey arrived in Threestep, Georgia, in August 1938. She stepped off the train wearing a pair of thick-soled boots suitable for hiking, a navy blue dress, and a little white tam that rode the waves of her red hair at a gravity-defying angle. August was a hellish month to step off the train in Georgia, although it was nothing, she said, compared to the 119 degrees that greeted her when she arrived one time in Timbuktu, which, she assured us, was a real place in Africa. I believe her remark irritated some of the people gathered to welcome her on the burned grass alongside the tracks. When folks are sweating through their shorts, they don’t like to hear that this is nothing compared to someplace else. Irritated or not, the majority of those present were inclined to see the arrival of the new schoolteacher in a positive light. Hard times were still upon us in 1938, but, like my momma said, “We weren’t no poorer than we’d ever been,” and the citizens of Threestep were in the mood for a little excitement.

Miss Spivey looked like just the right person to give it to them. She was, by almost anyone’s standards, a woman of the world. She’d gone to boarding schools since she was six years old; she’d studied French in Paris and drama in London; and during what she called a “fruitful intermission” in her formal education, she had traveled extensively in the Near East and Africa with a friend of her grandmother’s, one Janet Miller, who was a medical 30 doctor from Nashville, Tennessee. After her travels with Dr. Miller, Miss Spivey continued her education by attending Barnard College in New York City. She told us all that at school the first day. When my little brother Ralphord asked what did she study at 35 Barnyard College, Miss Spivey explained that Barnard, which she wrote on the blackboard, was the sister school of Columbia University, of which, she expected, we all had heard.

It was there, she told us, in the midst of trying to find her true mission in life, that she wandered one afternoon into a lecture by the famous John Dewey, who was talking about his famous book, Democracy and Education. Professor Dewey was in his seventies by then, Miss Spivey said, but he still liked to chat with students after a lecture—especially female students, she added—sometimes over coffee, and see in their eyes the fire his words could kindle. It was after this lecture and subsequent coffee that Miss Spivey had marched to the Teacher’s College and signed up, all aflame. Two years later, she told a cheery blue-suited woman from the WPA that she wanted to bring democracy and education to the poorest, darkest, most remote and forgotten corner of America.

They sent her to Threestep, Georgia.

Miss Spivey paused there for questions, avoiding my brother Ralphord’s eye.

What we really wanted to know about—all twenty-six of us across seven grade levels in the one room—was the pearly white button hanging on a string in front of the blackboard behind the teacher’s desk up front. That button on a string was something new. When Mavis Davis (the only bona fide seventh grader, at age thirteen) asked what it was for, Miss Spivey gave the string a tug, and to our astonishment, the whole world—or at least a wrinkled map of it—unfolded before our eyes. Her predecessor, Miss Chandler, had never once made use of that map, which was older than our fathers, and until that moment, not a one of us knew it was there.

Miss Spivey showed us on the map how she and Dr. Janet Miller had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and past the Rock of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea. Using the end of a ruler, she gently tapped such places as Morocco and Tunis and Algiers to mark their route along the top of Africa. They spent twenty hours on the train to Baghdad, she said, swathed in veils against the sand that crept in every crack and crevice.

“And can you guess what we saw from the train?” Miss Spivey asked. We could not. “Camels!” she said. “We saw a whole caravan of camels.” She looked around the room, waiting for us to be amazed and delighted at the thought.

We all hung there for a minute, thinking hard, until Mavis Davis spoke up.

“She means like the three kings rode to Bethlehem,” Mavis said, and she folded her hands smugly on her seventh-grade desk in the back of the room.

Miss Spivey made a mistake right then. Instead of beaming upon Mavis the kind of congratulatory smile that old Miss Chandler would have bestowed on her for having enlightened the rest of us, Miss Spivey simply said, “That’s right.”

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How a Cat in a Hat Changed Children’s Education

In a 1954 Life magazine article, author John Hersey expressed concern that children in the United States were disengaged from learning how to read. Among other problems, Hersey noted, the reading material available to grade-schoolers had a hard time competing with television, radio, 1. and other media for children’s attention. One solution he proposed was to make children’s books more 2. interesting, since “an individual’s sense of wholeness . . . follows, and cannot precede, a sense of accomplishment.”

The story of The Cat in the Hat’s publication began when William 3. Spaulding, the director of the education division at the publishing company Houghton Mifflin, read Hersey’s article and had an idea. Spaulding agreed that there was a need for appealing books for beginning 4. readers. He thought he knew who should write one. He arranged to have dinner with Theodor Geisel, who wrote and illustrated children’s books under the name “Dr. Seuss,” and issued him a
challenge: “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down!”

Having 5. known Spaulding for many years and having maintained a professional relationship with him, Geisel was an experienced writer and illustrator.

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