Editor’s note: This story was initially published on Feb. 23, 2013. Roy McKie passed away in 2015.
Children around the country celebrate the birthday of Dr. Seuss this week. Unfortunately, they do so in the absence of the guest of honor.
Ground-breaking children’s author-illustrator Theodor Seuss Geisel passed on in 1991 at the age of 87, though he lives on in his many whimsical creations. The Cat in the Hat, most famous of them all, serves as the fun-loving host for many of these fetes.
Roy McKie, though, can remember a birthday party that the good doctor himself attended.
It was Geisel’s 80th, in 1984. The festivities began at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and progressed to Manhattan’s 21 Club for dinner, recalled McKie, an illustrator who collaborated with him on a number of books.
McKie and his wife of 49 years, June Reynard McKie, a fashion illustrator, moved from the West Village in New York to Garden Spot Village in New Holland late in 2010 after 40 years of visiting Lancaster County.
They knew Geisel, socially and professionally, in the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, when McKie shared credit for such classics from Dr. Seuss or Theo. LeSieg (another pen name) as “My Book About Me,” “Ten Apples Up on Top!” “Would You Rather Be a Bullfrog?” “The Pop-Up Mice of Mr. Brice,” “The Eye Book” and “The Tooth Book.”
“He was a wonderful man,” McKie says about Dr. Seuss. “You would have liked him,” he assures a reporter.
He adds, “I hated to see him go.” But he finds satisfaction in the fact that Dr. Seuss’ books live on.
• McKie’s friends Phyllis and Bennett Cerf, whose books McKie illustrated, introduced him to Geisel one weekend at the Cerfs’ country home in upstate New York. “Ted,” as Geisel was known to friends, was looking for an illustrator, and “we got along fine,” McKie says.
That weekend they “sketched a couple of books that he wanted me to help him with,” McKie recalls. “He had so many projects, so many ideas!”
Geisel preferred the simplest illustrations in his books, says McKie, whose gallerylike apartment attests to his and his wife’s talents as fine artists as well as commercial illustrators.
When it came to the drawings for his books, Dr. Seuss ” liked to look at it from a child’s point of view,” McKie explains. “It didn’t matter how many lines there were” because he wasn’t concerned with shading, depth, realism. Dr. Seuss went for the basic image, the simplest representation of a dog, a tree, a house that a child would recognize, McKie says.
“It did make perfect sense,” he adds.
A 1995 biography, titled “Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel,” by Judith and Neil Morgan, acknowledges McKie’s contributions to the Dr. Seuss oeuvre, particularly his Beginner Books line for the youngest readers.
The biography notes: “Roy McKie was often the LeSieg illustrator; he was fast and reliable and understood Ted. For the loyal McKie, Ted was ‘the center of my life for a long time. I believed in him completely. Whatever anybody might choose to say about his work, he was the one author who could make kids giggle.’ “
June McKie recalls those years, vividly. Her husband “was never late for a deadline, always working all night, all weekend. But that’s freelance for you,” she says.
She also recalls a “working visit” to the Geisel home in LaJolla, Calif. The wives followed their husbands into the studio, where the men engaged in a long discussion of whether a dog character should have “two tears or three tears” falling from his eye, she says.
After what seemed like hours of monitoring this tedious debate, Mrs. Geisel asked if she “wanted to go out.” June McKie replied, “Woof! Woof!” in the affirmative, she remembers with a laugh.
• At 91, McKie looks back in amazement at a career that offered him a very good life, despite his family’s initial misgivings.
The Boston native attended the former Vesper George School of Art, on what is now the campus of Boston University. He recalls his grandfather telling his mother, “Marian, the boy’s never going to get a job in that kind of business.”
But McKie did. Right out of art school he worked in a commercial art studio in Boston. After a few years, he went to work at N.W. Ayer & Son advertising agency in Philadelphia, living in New Hope. Then it was on to doing freelance work in New York art market while living in Connecticut. For a time, he also lived and worked in London.
His colleagues at various times included Charles T. Coiner and children’s author Leo Lionni. Books bearing his name and art have been translated into many foreign languages.
Here on the home front, he’s just pleased that the local library has 16 of his books on its shelves.
“I often go into bookstores around here” he said, to check whether they, too, have his books in stock. “An author told me, ‘Go in and take them out. Make sure they’re at eye level.’ It’s fun getting away with it,” he joked about surreptitiously rearranging shelves so his books have a chance to catch the eye of potential buyers.
All in all, “it’s nice to have a book,” reflected McKie, who recommends it to everyone. “It doesn’t change. People will find [books] 100 years from now. Books won’t go away, I think.”
And neither will the memory of their authors and illustrators. Including that one whose birthday readers are still celebrate – 109 years from his birth, to be precise.
