Sometimes what we think will be our proudest moments can impact our lives in ways we couldn’t possibly expect; even when those moments ultimately humiliate us, they can inspire us to make history
This is the Forgotten History of Teddy Roosevelt and the Shy Teenager.
Ted was a shy boy who mostly kept to himself. He had friends, sure, lots of them in fact. But he was always quiet and reserved. He was in many respects the polar opposite of his father, an avid outdoorsman who was so good with a gun that he became an internationally known marksman. He also loved to party and turned that into a career, becoming a brewmaster.
Ted grew up listening to his father’s fantastical tales of life in the wilderness, and they inspired him to join the Boy Scouts. The shy young boy grew more confident with every merit badge he earned and every camping trip he went on.
When the United States entered World War I, Ted’s Boy Scout troop helped out the war effort by selling war bonds door-to-door. Ted started to come out of his shell and found that he was something of a natural salesman. His troop sold dozens of war bonds. Then hundreds. And shy Ted led the way. He sold so many war bonds, in fact, that the Boy Scouts planned to award him with a special medal…given to him by none other than former President Teddy Roosevelt.
Ted was overjoyed and his father was ecstatic. Roosevelt, the ultimate outdoorsman, was a hero in Ted’s household and his family counted down the days until the ceremony. Ted was brimming with pride and a newfound confidence.
At the ceremony, Ted and nine other Scouts sat onstage as Roosevelt spoke about the great work they had done. But when it came time to give the boys their medals, there was a problem. There were ten boys, but because of a communications snafu, there were only nine medals.
Ted was the last boy onstage, and as President Roosevelt went to grab his medal, he found that there was none, so he assumed that all of the boys who were supposed to be awarded had already gotten their medals.
“Why is this boy up here?” he asked with a laugh.
Organizers of the event quickly whisked Ted offstage and didn’t provide an explanation to the crowd. Ted was humiliated. All of his self-confidence evaporated and he retreated even further into his shell.
A few years later, the beginning of Prohibition ended his father’s career as a brewmaster, so he went to work as the superintendent of Forest Park in Springfield, Massachusetts, and ran the park’s famous zoo. Ted loved it. He avoided people who could humiliate him and instead spent his days with the animals. He had always loved drawing, but now did it nearly constantly, filling notebook after notebook with drawings of his animals.
After graduating from high school, Ted was accepted to Dartmouth College and then continued his studies at Oxford University. But he wasn’t happy and dropped out. His time there wasn’t wasted, though, as he met the woman who would become his wife after she noticed him drawing during one of their classes.
"Ted’s notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals,” she said. “So I set to work diverting him; here was a man who could draw such pictures; he should be earning a living doing that.”
He did. After the two were married, Ted found work in advertising, and a number of companies used his artwork in their print ads, but he still wasn’t happy. His wife encouraged him to use his animal drawings to start writing books, children’s books.
So he did. And the shy teenager who retreated to the zoo after a disastrous encounter with President Teddy Roosevelt became a famous author that the world now knows as Dr. Seuss.
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