Dr. Seuss’s story If I Ran the Zoo, published in 1950, is an imaginative children’s story where the young narrator Gerald McGrew creates a new zoo filled with fantastically strange creatures.
Given Ted’s close connection to zoo animals in his youth, this story is most probably rooted in Ted’s childhood memories of trips to the Forest Park Zoo with his father, who eventually became Superintendent of Parks and actually ran the zoo. Ted noted that he also wrote the story in memory of his mother, who had been inspired by the idea of a story about the zoo.