Big Truffula

Chapter 1: Gazump

Enough ink has been spilled over the rise and fall of Onceler Thneeds that it could fill Humming Fish Pond three times over. The story of the fragile Onceler supply chain in New Jersey and the firm’s utter dependence on a nepo-crony workforce is such a part of the American story that it’s been popularized in everything from childrens’ books to major motion pictures. There’s even an app for that.

Deeper in the Grickle-grass, some people say, lies the story of the firm’s pivot to China in the late ‘90s, the story of botched retail expansion built on a policy of tariff avoidance, and the story of the existential struggle to deliver a win with Whisper-Ma-Phone before Big Smartphone muscled into the key Onceler market in amalgamated knit goods.

The fairy tale version of this story usually begins with a covered wagon, a brightly colored Truffula tree, and an ax. Where exactly in New Jersey this copse was matters little — it’s long gone if it ever existed at all. The point of the story is really to untell the story of Neil Lorax sufficiently well that an entirely new one can be spun from whole cloth. Indeed, where does he come from? Gazump. From out of nowhere. From behind a tree trunk. Maybe even from the tree trunk itself in Theodore Geisel’s telling.

The court reporter’s clatter captured an entirely different story, in hours of uncovered depositions shared here for the first time. That story begins in the spring of 1964, when Onceler and Lorax were undergraduates sharing a loft space in a soon-to-be-former woollen mill near Philadelphia. Onceler’s path was set — his research in knit blends of the then-new miff-muffered moof had cost him a finger to the hungry looms but it had earned him a fellowship to a prestigious polymer science graduate program near Syracuse, NY.

For Lorax, graduation meant a return to the family’s timber farm in New Jersey. Wood was a boring material in 1964. The nation had certainly consumed enough of it in the breathtaking post-war housing boom but even here the large tract builders were keen to show that ever-smaller sticks could be used to build cookie cutter Cape Cods. The modern hi-rise builders treated lumber as nothing more than a tamale wrapper around the real concrete meal. Almost the sexiest thing you could do with a tree was turn it into rayon fiber. Almost, but not quite. The sexiest thing you could do with a tree in 1964 was make acid tabs from thick, absorbent paper.

So it was on an May weekend that Lorax wove himself into Onceler’s future, at least for a while, with a sheet of blotter paper, a half acre of milkweed, an Omaha Orange Chevrolet van, and a business proposition that no man in their right mind would entertain.