The King of ‘Kindergarten’ : Call it common sense, but millions of Americans can’t seem to get enough of what Robert Fulghum says we all learned as children.

He is a man who profoundly hates dogs. So much so that he brags he still loves Lyndon Johnson “for picking up his beagles by their ears and swinging them around while the dogs bayed.”

Up there with the very holiest rituals in his life is a daily afternoon nap.

His books have been trashed by reviewers in some of the country’s most respected journals.

A retired Unitarian minister, he may be the only clergyman willing to admit he is awed by the eloquence of Mother Teresa’s life--and that her beliefs and naivete also drive him crazy.

And during a recent lecture, he succeeded in getting a convention of bankers to put their fingers together and belt out “The Eency Weency Spider Went Up the Water Spout.” (Just as he expected, everyone knew all the words and all the finger movements.)

Meet Robert Fulghum, the world’s latest and most unlikely folk hero.

His goofy-titled collections of essays, “All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” and “It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It” are ranked Nos. 2 and 3, respectively, on the national best-seller list, having been 1 and 2 earlier in the month. “Kindergarten” is also the No. 1 book on the paperback bestseller list. Clearly the publishing phenomenon of the year (and possibly the decade when the final tallies are in), the books have been published in 16 languages in 62 countries--and counting.

Paperback rights alone on “Kindergarten” fetched Fulghum a $2.1-million advance.

It hasn’t done much for his life style, though. A native of Waco, Tex., who extracts philosophy from such subjects as cuckoo clocks and chicken-fried steak, Fulghum still lives on his tiny houseboat on Seattle’s Lake Union.

The place doesn’t even have a bedroom, just a sleeping loft over the kitchen. Fulghum and his second wife, Dr. Lynn Edwards, a family physician, chose the houseboat because it reminded them of a camp where they’d been the happiest, because it offered great neighbors and because it would demand that they live simply and efficiently.

Fulghum hasn’t rushed out to buy a fancy new car either. He still bombs around town in his shiny, 1952, paneled GMC truck--a “Jimmytruck,” as he says in a sudden attack of Texas good ol’ boy drawl.

“I’m interested in the quality of the ride. You get in this and you know you’re not going anywhere in a hurry,” he emphasizes, while driving a visitor to his only major indulgence since fame and wealth hit--a 10,000-square-foot studio, which allows him the luxury of thinking and writing and painting in big, open spaces.

Fulghum, 52, prefers to go slow and not miss what’s right in front of his nose. And he acknowledges the warp speed at which he’s been moving lately is hardly his style.

Since “Kindergarten” popped onto the hardback bestseller list just three weeks after it was published last year, Fulghum has promoted his books in 52 U.S. cities--and missed a lot of naps. Earlier this month he taped a rowdy yet unabashedly heartfelt special for PBS, complete with a cowgirl quartet he calls “one of the great tavern bands of all time.”

He’s hot on audiotape, with recorded versions of his essays selling nearly as briskly as his books. And he’s become quite the media star. ABC-TV’s “20/20” has a profile on Fulghum in the works. “NBC Nightly News” recently filmed him in some of the favorite Seattle haunts he hasn’t time to visit lately.

Major television and movie studios have hounded him to let them produce TV series or movies based on his work (he’s turned them all down). But for five days this month, Fulghum--who has never owned a TV set and rarely reads newspapers or magazines--became a TV commentator. Seattle’s KING-TV invited him to talk about the news.

In his classic contrarian fashion, Fulghum told viewers that the news that truly affects their lives isn’t found on TV or in the newspaper. He claims that for most people, “Action Central” broadcasts live from the front doors of their refrigerators. It’s right there in trite sayings, cartoons or personal photos stuck on with cutesy magnets. Refrigerator news, he observes, typically comes in terse little commands: “garbage!” or “toilet paper!” or “From now on, everybody’d better (fill in the blank yourself) !”

Naturally, the station wants him to do more of this and has been talking to him about syndicating his philosophical sound bites. Newspaper syndicates have been after him, too, about writing a regular column.

It seems people can’t get enough of the man called, simply, Fulghum--by everyone, including his wife and children. Even dog lovers are nuts about the guy.

Not to mention his competitors on the bestseller list. Says Wayne Dyer, whose “Your Erroneous Zones” was the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction title of the 1970s and whose “You’ll See It When You Believe It” is currently on the list: “I think it’s wonderful that books like Fulghum’s, with simple, plain, beautiful advice, are selling in such large numbers.”

“Do you have any idea of the odds of having two books on the bestseller list at once? It’s like being first and second in the Kentucky Derby,” says Erma Bombeck, who has written six best-selling books including her current “I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Go to Boise.”

“I met him on a book tour in Houston and he had everyone in the audience singing ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’ to the tune of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy.’ There must be something to the man. He is a nice guy, handles success very well. He also kept me from freezing on a dais when he let me borrow his coat.”

How did all this suddenly happen to a retired minister/art teacher, whose jobs have included folk singer, IBM salesman, artist, bartender and cowboy?

Fulghum attributes the year’s relentless “hoo ha,” as he calls it, to the pre-publicity his book received through that “great underground press” also known as “the refrigerator network.” As he recalls its genesis, his now-famous essay on the wisdom learned in kindergarten originally appeared in a Unitarian newsletter, for which he wrote a biweekly column for several years. It was derived from a personal credo he’s been writing and rewriting every spring for about 30 years.

He points out that people liked the piece, photocopied it at the office, hung it on their refrigerators and sent it to friends, who also photocopied it, hung it on their refrigerators and passed it on. Eventually, former Sen. Dan Evans (R-Wash.) heard Fulghum read the kindergarten treatise, requested a copy and read it into the Congressional Record.

Some of it was reprinted in “Dear Abby” and in Reader’s Digest. Thus, by the time “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” was properly published in a book with the same title, the refrigerator network recognized it instantly. They bought the book in droves, hoping to find more of the soothing, amusing observations that had already been enshrined in their kitchens.

Small wonder. In “Kindergarten,” Fulghum provided readers with a handy antidote to one of the most frightening aspects of modern life: the information explosion.

Fulghum, you see, has practically made a science of avoiding the fast/hot/fax-it-to-me life style of the late ‘80s. (He didn’t own an answering machine until he was bombarded with phone calls about the essay.)

By the time they’re in kindergarten, Fulghum writes, children have been taught “most of what’s necessary to live a meaningful life.” Among other things:

“Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life--learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.”

“Take any one of those items,” he writes, “and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would if . . . all governments had a basic policy to put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.”

Patricia Van der Leun, a Southport, Conn.-based book agent, read that essay in 1987 after her daughter came home from kindergarten with a copy of it in her knapsack. She tracked Fulghum down, found out there was plenty more where that came from (he’d saved his old sermons and columns) and suggested he assemble a collection of his essays into a book.

Van der Leun suspects her client’s appeal stems from the fact that he draws lessons from the most mundane things in life--everything from “playing a cutthroat game of Old Maid with five card sharks under the age of 10” to dreaming up a fitting bumper sticker for the ‘80s: “I May be Wrong.”

“All of Fulghum’s writings have a moment of truth. I also found a wonderful sense of humor,” Van der Leun says. “He’s willing to be honest and unpretentious. . . . His writing makes you realize your life can be wonderful, too, if you can see life for what it is.”

Now that so many people are eager to see life the way he does, Fulghum has done a lot of thinking about whether he wants to satisfy the demand. Though he’s delighted that wealth is allowing him to have many new adventures (he especially likes the adventure of being able to hire someone to take out the garbage), he seems genuinely worried that he could lose the life he had before.

That concern is spelled out in a Bible verse, printed by hand in huge letters on a sign tacked to a wall in his studio: “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?”

“I used to think this (his success) was one of the great pet rock literary stories of all time. I thought the book would go straight up and straight down,” Fulghum says, relaxing in an old, wooden armchair in a corner of the bare studio he calls “the beach” (it looks out on Seattle’s Elliott Bay and has its own fake palm tree).

“This is one of the heaviest existential moments of my life,” he continues in the melodic, compelling tones that have made him a natural storyteller. “I know that I am the steward of something powerful because people want to know what I think and what I have to say. If one is greedy, if one reaches for overexposure. . . . “

He doesn’t finish the sentence. “For my most inner, private self,” he adds, “I would be most content for it to all fade away. . . . “

But a third volume has, in fact, been discussed with the executives at Villard Books, the Random House division that publishes Fulghum’s books. And the author is aware that he’s in a position to be considerably more creative with his contract.

If he decides to do a third book, he says, he wants an agreement that a certain percentage of his royalties will go to a charity of his choice--and that the publisher will donate a matching percentage to charity as well. (Though such an agreement has not been formalized, Fulghum says the notion has been well received by executives at Random House.)

He is already known for giving a big chunk of income to favorite charities: Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood, the League of Women Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union, among others. But at the “beach,” this windy Seattle day, he reveals the really ironic part, that he’s become less generous since he got rich.

“I can only use one cup of gravy,” he says on the practicality of giving. “A 55-gallon can of gravy--what am I going to do with that? . . .I’ve given away a lot, but I’ve always given away a lot. . . . I gave away a larger percentage of my income when I was poor than I do now. . . . My wife and I realized that if anything, we are less charitable than we were before from the percentage point of view.” (His wife, for the record, disagrees.)

Though Fulghum maintains that many areas of his life are too personal to be disclosed, he is remarkably revealing. Asked, for instance, if a painful story in “It Was On Fire” about a father and son was taken from his own life, Fulghum readily admits that it was. (In this “prodigal son” essay, a father seriously considers walking out on his family, and later his son hates him and threatens to run away from home because he thinks the father is a jerk.)

Fulghum, who also has a grown, adopted daughter, says the story was based on real events that happened between him and his two sons--and that the incidents were combined into one story. He periodically uses the device of writing about “a friend” or employs other tricks, he says, when he wants to disguise himself because the information seems too egomaniacal or too uncomfortable to own.

With little prompting, Fulghum then proceeds on a confessional roll and exposes himself as one of his own worst critics. He says that in the essay--the one that begins “A friend doesn’t like the essay ‘All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten’ “-- he is the so-called “friend.” It’s Fulghum dismissing his own work and saying it’s “nice as far as it goes but doesn’t go far enough.”

In response to this concern, “It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It” is not as pleasant as “Kindergarten.” It reveals Fulghum’s periodic bouts with depression (“I get depressions it takes stepladders to get out of,” he told the crowd assembled for his PBS special).

“Anybody who’s manic--and I tend to be--is bound to be depressive, too,” he says, matter-of-factly. “But I have learned--now this is the advantage of being 52 years of age--that when you get down, you just let it happen, knowing that your tank will fill up again and just be patient. So whereas I used to bite my nails and think ‘Why am I so depressed?’ now I think ‘You need 12 hours of sleep, Fulghum.’ And I just comply and go to sleep for 12 hours and the world looks much better.

“That’s why I’m so fierce and serious about napping. I don’t care if people make fun of me for it. Once a day I lie down on my back and calm down and I’m going to live to be an old man because of that.”

Fulghum’s editor, Diane Reverand, vice president and executive editor of Villard, suspects that Fulghum’s awareness, particularly of such vulnerabilities, accounts for much of his appeal with readers.

“You can’t be as reflective as Fulghum without having that dark side,” she offers. “He’s figured out something that worked to get him through (difficult times). For him, it’s all about the way you look at what’s happening in your life.”

But, according to Fulghum’s 41-year-old wife, depression hasn’t gotten much time in her husband’s schedule lately.

“He’s happier than he’s been in a long time,” says Lynn Edwards. “I think it’s largely because he’s been validated as a creative person on an amazing scale. It’s given him a lot of new adventures. . . . The effect of this on Fulghum is he is actually easier to live with than ever before.”

If there is anything that truly satisfies Fulghum, though, it appears to be the depth of his relationship with his wife. He repeatedly writes touchingly of his deep attachment to her. And when the PBS cameras recently rolled in Seattle for the special (to be aired around the country at dates to be announced), Fulghum’s love for Edwards was more than obvious as he read his story about “geek dancers” from the second book.

He defines geek dancers as people who are “ill-builts--kind of fat and homely and solemn and all.” Predictably, they take people and their judgments by surprise when they then “get up on the dance floor and waltz like angels.” To keep himself from judging unseemly people when he spots them on the street, Fulghum often tells himself, “probably dancers.”

In the story, he admits that he aspires to being one of the “king hill champion geek dancers” of all time. And that he and his “geekess” have been busy practicing their routine.

As Fulghum read the part in the story about how he hopes to die close by the geek dance floor (“I don’t want to die quietly in my bed, either--but at the end of the last dance some lovely night, sit down in a chair, smile and pass on”), tears began to fill his eyes.

Though he has told the story countless times before, the emotion with which it was originally written was unmistakably present.

The next day, while driving in his old truck, with his wife’s and daughter’s baby shoes dangling from its rear view mirror, Fulghum explained what had happened. Just as he’d come to the part about how he’d like to die, he had scanned the audience and looked right into the eyes of his beloved geekess: “That’s when I almost lost it.”