By Clint McElroy
HQ 117 | SPRING 2022
Lately, my granddaughter Cooper has been asking me a lot of questions about my dad. Recently she wanted to know what kind of person he was, what he enjoyed doing and what he looked like. Her 4-year-old brain couldn’t understand why I didn’t have a whole bunch of pictures of him on my phone, even though I tried to explain that he passed away about 50 years before we had mobile phones with built-in cameras.
In addition, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately while promoting a children’s book I recently wrote — Goldie’s Guide to Grandchilding — and I’m frequently asked what motivated me to write the book. The answer is my dad. The strongest memories I have of Clint McElroy Sr. are sitting on his lap while he read Dr. Seuss to me. We covered the entire Seuss oeuvre: Green Eggs and Ham; One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish; and, of course, The Cat in the Hat.
But we didn’t stop there. We read Yertle the Turtle (a book every world leader should be required to read), The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (a strong indictment of vanity) and Horton Hears a Who! which has the most important message of all — a person’s a person, no matter how small.
When I say, “We read,” it was Dad reading to me at the start, gradually transitioning to my reading to him, which subsequently morphed into my reading to myself. THAT’S what these books are designed to do — build readers. And that’s why I wanted to write Goldie.
Dr. Seuss is the perfect writer for that effect. His books are funny, imaginative and just a bit subversive. There’s always an important message hidden away in the book, if the heart can dig it out. Seuss books have important messages about ecology, war and, of course, the culinary arts (Scrambled Eggs Super!).
And that’s also Goldie. As drawn by the wonderful Eliza Kinkz, Goldie is funny, imaginative and just a teeny bit subversive, with a grandfather by Goldie’s side who adores her. She is an amalgam of my seven grandchildren, with traits that are good and maybe just slightly less good. That’s a very “grandparenty” way of putting things.
I answered a lot of Cooper’s questions about my dad by emulating him: reading Goldie’s Guide to her. She wanted to know what I remembered about my father, so I showed her. Now my hope is that she reads it to her grandchildren and thinks about her “Peeps” every now and then.
