Great Bend Public Library staff celebrated the 110th birthday of Dr. Seuss on Monday with a party for children. “Miss Amanda,” as children’s librarian Amanda Moran-Jones is known, read the Seuss book “Green Eggs and Ham,” and then The Cat in the Hat invited the children to sample the same dish — scrambled eggs with green food coloring.
In the story, Sam-I-Am tries to convince the narrator to try the strange dish, but is repeatedly told, “I do not like green eggs and ham.”
Miss Amanda asked her young audience what they thought.
“You should always try it before you say don’t like, right?”she said.
At the end of the story, the narrator gives in and tries the food, and proclaims: “I do so like green eggs and ham. Thank you. Thank you, Sam-I-Am.”
With an intro like that, it wasn’t hard to get the children to sample the library’s green eggs and ham. The staff sweetened the deal by handing out cupcakes and letting the children decorate them with green frosting.
Dr. Seuss was the pen name for Theodore Seuss Geisel. The Dr. Seuss National Memorial is located in Sprinfield, Mass., where the writer was born. According to the website (www.catinthehat.org,) “At the time of his death on Sept. 24, 1991, Ted had written and illustrated 44 children’s books, including such all-time favorites as Green Eggs and Ham, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, Fox in Socks, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. His books had been translated into more than 15 languages. Over 200 million copies had found their way into homes and hearts around the world.”