Today is Richard Scarry's 92nd birthday, born on June 5, 1919 in Boston, Massachusetts. He lived through the Great Depression by publishing over 300 books with total sales of over 100 million units worldwide.
He is well known for his children books including Best Word Book Ever.
He died at the age of on April 30, 1994 in Gstaad, Switzerland.
For more about Richard Scarry, see his Wikipedia page.
I should also note that the inside pages of Google have a different version of the logo, it looks like this:
Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help and Google Blogoscoped Forums.