TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Highlands Today

Who Was That eBay Bidder?

ADVERTISEMENT

By Norm Cukras | Highlands Today

Published: February 28, 2009

I'm an eBayer. EBay, that's the Internet's garage sale. In fact it's the largest garage sale known to mankind, although the company is actually considered an auction house.

EBay was founded in September 1995 as AuctionWeb.com. The name was changed to eBay, a shortened form of "echo bay" two years later. That, of course, was at least a billion transactions ago.

Anyway I was trying to increase that stimulus-sized number with an item of my own when I received a question from an interested buyer. After we had exchanged a few e-mails this bidder made a sort of an unusual comment. At least it was something that piqued my interest. My curiosity was aroused enough that not only is this person now in my address book, he is a Ramblings reader.

In turn my interest in Dr. Seuss has been rekindled beyond the annual offering of the Boris Karloff narration of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." As it turned out my new ePal is Dr. Charles D. Cohen, a nationally respected authority on Theodor Seuss Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Suess.

What makes this particular eBayer even more interesting is his obsession with his various adoptive hobbies. For example: Following his initial encounter with wines he became a connoisseur by sampling 600 of them in the first year. He is a movie aficionado who, prior to embarking on his quest for the real Dr. Seuss, he watched 300 films a year. Now it's Dr.Seuss.

All Things Being Seussical

Cohen's passion for things Seussicle started simply enough. "Basically," he wrote to me, "I just wanted to learn a little bit about what Ted Geisel did outside of his children's books, expecting that there would be a great deal of information about such a famous author. But there proved to be a dearth of information about him when I started trying to learn and most of what was around turned out to be wrong. In the digital age, misinformation gets passed around so quickly and widely that it becomes accepted 'fact,' so I decided to try to correct some of the mistakes before it was too late."

So he wrote a book: "The Seuss, the Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Seuss." It was released in 2004 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Geisel's birthday. He followed that in 2007 with, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas! A 50th-Anniversary Retrospective" and the year after that, "Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories: A 50th Anniversary Retrospective." And by June of this year the manuscript for his fourth book will be at the publishers so it can be released next year.

The research data gathered for the books form the basis of a collection that is displayed around the practicing dentist's home in South Deerfield, Mass., a town of about 2,000 residents who are easily outnumbered by the uncounted "thousands" of objects Cohen keeps in his home/office. Most of his Seuss memorabilia he bought on eBay and are "the accidental byproduct of doing research," the 48-year-old remarked.

"The important part is the information contained in the collection, not the collection itself," he said explaining why there was no accurate count of all his accumulated stuff.

Maybe Another Time

Unfortunately the non-Seuss item I had up for sale on eBay did not end up in the good doctor's house. He was tending to a patient at the time the bidding entered into its final stages. Regardless, we both ended up with another reader; although I probably got the larger side of the wishbone.

In the next week or so the tooth doctor will be pulling into Florida to visit friends in Tamarac. I wonder if he realizes that he will be about 150 miles from this eBayer by Whoville Seussmobile? If we did by chance meet it would be something he never did with Dr. Suess, which according to Cohen is not all that bad for a biographer, especially when writing about someone like Geisel who "during interviews, was much more concerned about telling a good story than he was about communicating the truth."

However, now that Cohen has the facts all sorted out he confesses that he now would like to meet the children's book author because he would have, "a lot of questions for him."

And I can't even speculate on what those questions might be because Charles D. Cohen seems to be a man of unfathomable depth. In his own words he speaks thus of himself: "My mind wants to learn and do far more than my body and my allotted time will allow. But it keeps me trying."

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT