When Ted first published McElligot's Pool in 1947, he dedicated the book to his father and memories of fishing trips as a young boy. It had always been a Geisel family joke that whenever they were unsuccessful in catching fish, they would buy trout from the Deegel Hatchery in Springfield and pretend that they had caught them. The book was wittily dedicated to his dad, “the World’s Greatest Authority on Blackfish, Fiddler Crabs and Deegel Trout.”
The story’s main character is a young boy named Marco, who also appeared in Dr. Seuss’s first children’s book, And To think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which, from much evidence, seems largely inspired by his childhood memories of Springfield, MA.