Anecdotes

Both his parents were Jewish immigrants; his father, Samuel Juster, was born in Romania and his mother, Minnie Silberman, was of Polish Jewish descent.

He had a tendency for jokes and pranks.

He received a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and studied city planning at the University of Liverpool in England.

Served in the United States Navy for three years and was stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

His book "The Hello Goodbye Window" won the Caldecott Medal.

His book "The Phantom Tollbooth" won the George C. Stone Centre for Children's Books Award.

Between 1970-1992 he taught architecture and planning at the Pratt Institute in New York and was the professor of design at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Children's author best known for his books "The Phantom Tollbooth" and "The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics." He also wrote "Alberic the Wise," "Otter Nonsense," "As: A Surfeit of Similes" and "The Hello Goodbye Window.".

Juster enlisted in the Civil Engineer Corps of the United States Navy in 1954, and rose to the rank of lieutenant junior grade.

Although Juster enjoyed writing, his architectural career remained his primary emphasis.

Juster co-founded a small architectural firm, Juster Pope Associates, in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, in 1970. The firm was renamed Juster Pope Frazier after Jack Frazier joined the firm in 1978.

While serving in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, he made up a non-existent military publication called the Naval News Service as a scheme to request interviews with attractive women. It worked so amazingly well that a neighbor asked to come along as his assistant.