They made their way from Spain to Portugal and to New York, where George was quickly snapped up by Houghton Mifflin publishers. Their pockets were stuffed with monkey manuscripts and other writings. The Reys fled Paris on bicycles just hours before Hitler’s troops marched into the city. “We had never dreamed of children’s books,” Margret Rey said. The first was “Raphael et les Neuf Singes,” or “Raphael and the Nine Monkeys.” One of the monkeys, Zozo, grew up to become George.

“It made me immune to all commercials for life,” she told The Times.Ī French publisher was so taken with Hans’ animal cartoons that he suggested they do a children’s book. They settled in Paris where he drew newspaper cartoons and she wrote advertising copy, in particular some singing commercials for margarine. After Margret studied art at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, and the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf, Germany, she went to Rio de Janeiro where she began working as a photographer.Īgain she encountered Hans Rey and they married in 1935. He was then 18 and courting her older sister.

She met her future husband in Hamburg when she was 10 and slid down a banister right into him. Rey celebrated her 90th birthday in May by donating $1 million each to the Boston Public Library and to Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital Center for Alternative Medicine for Research. The carefully monitored merchandising of Curious George books, puzzles, filmstrips, stuffed animals, children’s clothing, wristwatches and lunch boxes was lucrative. “Then, by pleasant coincidence, the children liked what we liked. That may just be the stuff of science fiction, but scroll on to find out if any of these mind-blowing Mandela effect examples got you too.“We wrote for ourselves,” Margret Rey told The Times last May. Needless to say, no one is exempt from being stumped by the strange occurrences, and some even go so far as believe them as some sort of proof of alternate realities. Other people related to her in remembering things not exactly in the way that they happened, from spellings of your favorite snack brands all the way to important events that happened the year they were born. And it was named by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, who wrongly recalled that late South African president, Nelson Mandela, had died in the 1980s after his imprisonment, when in fact, he passed in 2013.Īpparently, misremembering events and facts isn’t just exclusive to Broome.

This eerie phenomenon where people collectively misremember events, historical facts and other famous pop culture moments is called the Mandela Effect. And as shocking as this discovery may feel in this very moment, you are actually not alone. If you remember Dorothy’s famous line in The Wizard of Oz as, 'Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore,” you would, in fact, be wrong.

List of curious george books