Last week, I told myself that I would only write about issues that touched on peacebuilding starts at home in my blog. There was plenty of work to be done there, enough to keep me going for the rest of my life.

Six days later, I had to violate more own rule.

Tom Lehrer died on Saturday.

He was a defining figure for many in my generation and for me personally. So much so that I couldn’t let his passing at 97 go unnoticed.

The Tom Lehrer Basics

Not even his wonderful obituary in the New York Times did justice to his career or his impact.

Lehrer was born in 1928 to a well-off, assimilated Jewish family in New York City. A musical and math prodigy, he was sent off to prep school and Harvard where he graduated at age 18 which meant that he was too young to have been drafted into World War II. He then stayed in Cambridge to begin working on a PhD in math (which he never completed), taught math and statistics (in political science departments) and started writing satirical songs which he performed at grad school parties attended by people like my uncle who was getting a PhD of his own in American Studies.

The songs were, well, hysterical. “Fight Fiercely Harvard.” “The Old Dope Peddler.” “I Hold Your Hand in Mine (sung by a murderer who literally held his ex-girlfiend’s hand and nothing else).” And, my favorite from that era, “The Elements,” which sets the names of them all to the absurdly raucous tune, “The Modern Major General” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.

Elements

https://youtu.be/AcS3NOQnsQM?si=OXm83xVKp0Ajn3kS

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the word got out about Lehrer’s brilliant piano style, satire, and dreadful puns. Two albums were produced and sold through the mail. They did so well that he recorded two live albums featuring the same songs (An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer and Another Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer).

I brought them home while I was in high school, much to the shock and horror of my parents. They were still scandalized when my aunt and uncle said that they had hung out with Lehrer a lot in the old days in Cambridge.

One didn’t hear much from Lehrer until the middle of the 1960s when some of his new songs began being sung (usually by others) on the short-lived satirical show that helped set the stage for Saturday Night Live a decade later, That Was the Week That Was. Some of these songs made the big time if not the top 10 list, including:

“So Long Mom,” his song about World War III (which had to be written before the war started)

https://youtu.be/yrbv40ENU_o?si=lvw5OzCv83YV3mWV

And  “The Vatican Rag,”  his outrageous “reflections” on the the controversial reforms in the Catholic Church

By the mid-1970s, Lehrer had stopped performing. He split his time between Cambridge where he still taught statistics to political scientists and Santa Cruz where he also taught math and seminars on musical theater which was, of course, his first love.

All of his albums as well as a live concert he did in Copenhagen are available for free on the Internet.

His Impact on My Generation and Me

I first fell in love with Lehrer’s songs when I was in high school. He wasn’t for everyone then. After all, it was the days of doo wop and Elvis since the Beatles only arrived in the US when I was a junior. Still, for a nerdy kid who didn’t fit in all that well and didn’t dare rebel, Lehrer was a perfect fit—a point I was planning to raise with my therapist tomorrow before the news broke anyway.

That Was the Year That Was peaked at #18 on the Billboard list in the middle of my freshman year, a few months before acid rock hit Oberlin (and the rest of the country). Because it also has a Conservatory of Music, Oberlin had a vibrant musical as well as political community to the point that I occasionally sat in as second jug in the National Liberal Freedom Now Jug Band Front (I was that bad).

As the Vietnam war escalated, Lehrer literally provided us with comic relief but also something we could share across ideological lines. To cite but one example, my good friend Ron Rapoport and I disagreed on the key issues of the day (should military recruiters be allowed on campus) but we both loved Tom Lehrer.

And still do—in fact, I’m going to talk about this post with his daughter (who is also my publisher) as soon as I finish writing it.

But then Lehrer hit home. During the summer between my junior and senior year I started seeing my first serious girlfriend. It got serious my senior year. By the end of the first semester, we were inseparable.

All of that was lovely but would have been irrelevant for this post except that her name was Iris von Braun.

Yup. Her father was Wernher von Braun, architect of the German and American rocketry programs and pilloried in a lullaby on That Was the Year That Was.

So far, not a problem. But Iris’s father was going to come visit her at the end of the semester, and she wasn’t sure if he had heard the song and was pretty sure he wouldn’t like it. Yet, I felt honor bound to play it. Luckily, I dodged that bullet. He had heard the song. He hadn’t hated it. He even seemed to like me.

https://youtu.be/QEJ9HrZq7Ro?si=vqLc7W9B426S9KpM

Above and beyond her father’s (in)famous lullaby, Iris had a huge impact on my life, helping turning me into the cross-disciplinary intellectual I am today. Of course, she dumped me the following summer, but all of that is a story for another time.

His Legacy Lives On

Lehrer and I never met.

Once, when I wrote an article about systems theory, I needed his permission to quote a line that he used as an introduction to one of his songs, “Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on you put into it.” Once he finally got my copyright request at his office in Santa Cruz, he was so perplexed that I would use his words in that context that we waived any usage fees.

Apparently he did that for anyone who asked for permission.

To this day, I find myself returning to Lehrer’s music a lot sixty years after I first discovered it.

I played “The Elements,” “New Math,” and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” for my grandchildren as soon as they were old enough to appreciate the humor.

I also occasionally run into adults younger than me, including my therapist, who had never heard of him and end up getting enlightened by the only person in the world who can rhyme confessional with processional and abdomen with Roman in the same song. And I suspect that we will talk about Lehrer’s more important impact on my life at our session tomorrow.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.