23 August 2025

George C. White (1935-2025)

 

[George C. White (1935-2025), who died at 89 on 6 August, was the founder and president of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and vice president of the American Directors Institute.  He was co-chairman of the Arts Administration Program at the Yale School of Drama (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University), founding chairman of the Sundance Institute and Commissioner of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. 

[White was also on the board of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the Arts and Business Council, New Dramatists, and the International Theatre Institute.  He served as a panelist for the Theater and Opera-Music Theater Program of the National Endowment for the Arts and a member of the Tony Awards Nominating Committee.

[In 1986, White delivered the keynote address at the inaugural event of the American Directors Institute, an organization for stage directors and artistic directors founded in 1985 by Geoffrey C. Shlaes.  Below is the text, somewhat edited for length by me as editor of ADI’s newsletter, Directors Notes.  My report on the symposium for DN follows the transcription of White’s remarks.  See the introduction to that report for more information on ADI.  (The New York Times obituary of George C. White concludes this post after the report.)]

OPENING REMARKS: GEORGE C. WHITE

[As I noted above, this transcript was published in Directors Notes, the newsletter of the American Directors Institute (1.1 [“Summer Issue”: June 1986]).  I edited Directors Notes from 1986 (this was its maiden issue) to 1988 and I covered the symposium, “The Changing of the Guard in the American Theater,” which was ADI’s first event.  While reading White’s comments here, keep in mind that the theater to which he’s referring existed 39 years ago.]

The guard is changing and if one looks through the current malaise, there are rough waters ahead.  But like any such trip, riding rapids can he exhilarating and exciting.  George C. White

. . . . From Max Reinhardt to today, the director’s task . . . is to take his materials, which are actors, “in place of paint and canvas and shape and form his group using principles of art and with reason . . . coordinate conception and form,” as Alexander Dean [1893-1939; director, professor of theater at Yale School of Drama, director of YSD; author of Fundamentals of Play Directing (1940)] has written.

Since the mid-sixties, however, a new duty has evolved, for if the director so chooses, he or she can become the artistic director of a theater and thus enter the lists with entrepreneurs, PR men, fundraisers, marketing specialists, accountants and management consultants.

It was not enough to have the Babes in Arms approach of putting on a show, so these directors changed from being employees to being employers.  With the heady trappings of artistic power came the corresponding responsibilities of fundraising, which meant marketing and PR concerns for budgeting and costs, as well as a board of business, financial, and society figures.  None of these things were part of the Yale School of Drama’s MFA in directing.

[Babes in Arms is a 1937 Broadway musical by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart.  It was made into a 1939 film starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.  It’s the original “Hey, kids, let’s use the barn to put on a show!” show—which I think was the point of White’s reference.  (In 1959, playwright George Oppenheimer created a “sanitized” version, revising some political and anti-racism material and changing the motivation for putting on the show to something more innocent.)]

. . . .  We have seen the rise of the theater administrator, expertly trained in the requisite techniques which support the art form.  This has allowed the artists to abdicate their entrepreneurial responsibilities to their managing directors on the easy excuse that they can thus pay more concerted attention to their art. . . .

Today, major regional theaters, at last firmly entrenched in their communities with multi-million-dollar budgets, languish for want of new blood at the top.  Boards of directors, unqualified and uninformed, are left to the task of selecting successors to the old guard.  Their quest is made particularly difficult because the well of able candidates is very low indeed. . . .  [For a further examination of the issue of replacing a theater’s leader, see Theatrical Continuity (21 August 2009).]

Some younger directors with a sense of adventure and evangelical spirit have founded alternatives theaters where much of the ground-breaking work is being done.  These people do not wish to leave the excitement of exploring their own artistic visions for what they perceive to be the inhibiting chains of established institutions.  This is also true of the free-lance director who, for all the possible fame and fortune associated with large regional-theater directorships now, would rather have the artistic freedom and geographic flexibility of the employee status.

. . . .  Obviously, artistic leadership is in a crisis state in this country and directors must be willing to take more reins to hand. . . .

. . . .  One burning question remains: Are there enough qualified directors, not only capable of taking up the torch, but simply of directing a play, let alone lead an institution of any size?  Are theatrical directors a vanishing breed?  Of late, the cry seems to be, “Where are the new directors?”

Why is it that in a new era when there is more diverse theatrical activity than at any time in our history, there seems to be a dearth of talent and a lack of directing opportunities?  Has this been the result of having more productions than is possible for the directing craft to service?  Are the producing-directors so jealously guarding their turf that they will not allow new talent to be seen?  Or is there some basic flaw in the system that not only does not allow the cream to rise to the top, but doesn’t even provide the possibility for any cream at all?

. . . .  The age of specialization has hit the theater and though you still hear jokes about everyone wanting to direct, stage managing, production and administration have become separate disciplines and individuals entering these fields generally wish to concentrate on a specific area, leaving no place for the fledgling director to come up through the traditional ranks.

This then puts the onus on the training institutions and the industry to provide the instruction and developmental opportunities to refill this growing void.  At present, we are only at the point of debating how to train directors and ADI [i.e., the American Directors Institute, the organization hosting the symposium] is one the few fundamental programs that actually has begun actively to address the issue.

We must continue to address and redress this situation.  But in order to do so effectively, we must stop the endless quibbling about how to do it and begin actively initiating projects that do the job.  We must cease the knee-jerk sense of competition, which is endemic to the theater, and work as an industry to change the status quo. . . .

The time has also come to question some “basic truths” that have grown up during the last generation:

Can we afford specialization in the current theater?

Are good directors born or trained?

Can artistic directors afford to give over all administrative reins to their managing directors?

And should we not reexamine the entire concept of the non-profit theater?

This last question has haunted me of late because we have . . . forgotten the economic incentives that help bring artists into the profession. . . .   Rather than only breast-beating over the difficulty of raising funds, and the onset of Gramm-Rudman, why not at least consider the centuries-old economic possibilities of the art form? . . . . Is this heresy, or painful truth?

[The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation consisted of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 and the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Reaffirmation Act of 1987. (The legislations were often referred to as “Gramm-Rudman-Hollings I” and “Gramm-Rudman-Hollings II” after U.S. senators Phil Gramm [b. 1942; R-Texas], Warren Rudman [1930-2012; R-New Hampshire], and Fritz Hollings [1922-2019; D-South Carolina], who were credited as their chief authors.) The original 1985 act was the first binding federal law to set automatic deficit reduction targets, while the 1987 act was a revised version that addressed constitutional concerns with the original law’s automatic spending cuts, extending the deficit-reduction timeline.]

. . . . .   We are, once again, on the threshold of a revolution.  Theater professionals in their thirties will inherit an entirely new world by the time they’re fifty.  The guard is changing now, and we have a marvelous opportunity to insure [sic] that theater at the turn of the century will be all it can be and not a dusty museum of theatrical artifacts.

[In addition to the brief bio of White in the introduction to this post above, following my report on the symposium below is the New York Times obituary of Mr. White, which includes a great deal of detail on his life, career, and background.]

*  *  *  *
A.D.I. SPONSORS DIRECTING SYMPOSIUM

[This report ran in the same début issue of Directors Notes as George C. White’s keynote remarks above.  I was present for the symposium, which, as I state below, took place on 21 April 1986 at 2 Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan, the building which then housed the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.  (New York City’s DCA is now located in the Civic Center neighborhood of Lower Manhattan.)

[“The Changing of the Guard” was held in the auditorium in the basement of the DCA building, referred to as the Mark Goodman Auditorium.  (In 2008, the building became the home of the Museum of Arts and Design and the basement space became the Mark Goodson Theatre.)

[ADI was founded in 1985 by Geoffrey C. Shlaes (1951-2016), a director and theater manager, as an organization intended to inform both theatergoers and members of the theater fraternity who aren’t directors what directors do, and to facilitate networking among directors and artistic directors, and give them a forum for exchanging ideas about and techniques for directing.  ADI was dissolved in 1992.]

On Monday. April 21, the American Directors Institute had its public debut with a day-long Directing Symposium at the Mark Goodson Auditorium in the New York City Visitors Center, 2 Columbus Circle.  The subject of the conference, the premiere in what ADI’s directors hope will be a long run of public events, was “The Changing of the Guard in the American Theater.”  Keynoted by George C. White, President of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and divided into three panels, the symposium addressed the question, Where will the new opportunities for directors come from?

From Mr. White’s opening remarks [posted above] through the final panel, the thrust of the discussion was the paucity of opportunity for old and new directors.  Participants also agreed that the path of the emerging director is a hard one—more so, perhaps, than in the past.

Mr. White attributed this difficulty to a combination of theater economics and, indeed, general economics.  Additional problems arise from the ever-strengthening tend[e]ncy for theater professionals to specialize.  The rigid categorization of skills for managing director, artistic director, stage manager and so on, according to Mr. White, has eliminated the old route a young director could use to “come up through the ranks” and gain experience.  The fear of taking chances has made it difficult for neophyte directors to try their wings.

Taking Mr. White’s cue, the members of the artistic directors’ panel acknowledges that they had taken over or started their own theaters because of the lack of directing opportunities.  Moderated by Jean Passanante of the New York Theatre Workshop, the panel consisted of Margaret Booker of Hartman Theatre in Stamford, Connecticut; Robert Falls of the Goodman Theatre Center, Chicago; Jack Garfein of the Harold Clurman Theatre, New York; Margot Lewitin of the Interart Theatre, New York; and Arthur Storch of Syracuse Stage.  Many of the members having begun their careers as actors, all were active stage directors before heading theaters around the country.  The frustration of a freelance career drove them to settle down where they could control their own artistic lives.  Few declared, however, that they are ready to hire a director whose work they do not already know.  Taking such a chance is too risky.

The two freelance directors’ panels echoed this same plaint from the reverse perspective.  Not wanting to be tied down to the responsibilities of an artistic directorship, the panelists opted for the peripatetic life of a freelancer.  Listening to moderator Roger Hendricks Simon question freelance drama panelists Susan Einhorn, William Partlan, Steven Robman, Amy Salz and Hal Scott, it was clear that the choices open to young directors without a track record are few and hard to come by.

These panelists also found cause for concern for the lack of deep understanding by other theater professionals of what a director really does.  All the freelance directors complained that, out of ignorance, producers and playwrights frequently dismiss the contributions of the director of a successful production.  There was the sense of a brewing conflict similar to the recent unpleasantness between actors and playwrights in the showcase arena.

[In August 1975, Equity Council released a code for union-sanctioned showcase productions that garnered strong criticism from both the Off-Off-Broadway producers and Actors’ Equity Association actors alike.  Code requirements and restrictions were seen as onerous to both the theaters and the actors.  On 18 August, Off-Off Broadway producers held a huge rally at the Public Theater, threatening to ban union actors from their productions unless Equity revised the code.  

[On 25 August, angry Equity members assembled at the Majestic Theatre for over four hours and the Equity membership voted overwhelmingly to suspend the code “until a new agreement is discussed by authorized representatives of Off-Off Broadway and AEA.”  Talks resumed in 1978 and, after four years of debate and disagreement, a new code for New York City showcases was issued in 1979.  (The code was eventually replaced in the ’80s by the Funded Non-Profit Theatre Code and the Approved Showcase Code.)]

The freelance musical theater panel, moderated by Maggie Harrer of the National Music Theatre Network, included Martin Charnin, Richard Digby Day, Miriam Fond, Alan Fox, Thomas Gruenewald and Dennis Ross.  Though they, too, echoes the sentiments of previous participants, the concern among these directors was for the disparate reins of a musical production, and who should hold them.  The consensus was that it should be the director, but often getting the other artists to acquiesce is difficult—especially when stage-directing opera.

The solution, as for all the other problems raised during the symposium, is two-pronged.  For the director on the job, the answer is tact, patience and perseverance.  In the long run, however, for the craft of directing as a whole, the call was for more open discussion, public forums and networking.

Finally, ADI has answered a crying need in the theater and has a real job to do.  The number of those both in the audience and on the panels who pleaded for more such meetings was impressive.  During every panel and every question-and-answer session, this need was voiced.  It was concretely demonstrated by the number of directors who gathered in the Goodson’s small lobby to talk and share ideas between, and sometimes during, the formal discussions.

This is precisely what ADI is for, and what it intends to encourage and sponsor in the future.  If “Changing the Guard” is any indication, ADI is a hit.  It should run a long, long time.

The art of the director is not sufficiently understood.  But we don’t get together and talk about it enough.  It’s a very important thing to be talking about.  —Susan Einhorn (b. 1948)

[Among its other events in subsequent months, ADI planned a three-day Touchstone Retreat at the O’Neill Center on 10, 11, and 12 September 1987.  (As editor of the newsletter, I attended this event, as I did all ADI activities.)  Though we were in his backyard, so to speak, George C. White was not a participant of the retreat—though I daresay his spirit was present.

[I bring this event up here because Touchstone was a different kind of encounter—a term I use advisedly—and I found it exhilarating.  “The Changing of the Guard in the American Theater” and most other ADI meetings were designed for the directors to confront ideas, issues, or disciplines with which they were familiar, but Touchstone was the opposite.  As ADI Artistic Director Geoffrey C. Shlaes put it, this was a chance for directors to “fill our own pitcher.”

[The retreat weekend brought together a group of theater folk—actors, directors, and playwrights—with a select team of experts from diverse, mostly non-theatrical fields.  The idea came from Amy Saltz, freelance director, and Mr. White, who proposed that “stage directors need exposure to new developments in fields outside the theater.”  ADI’s Touchstone Retreat was conceived to focus not on theater, but on the ideas that feed the theater.]

*  *  *  *
GEORGE C. WHITE IS DEAD AT 89;
FOUNDER OF A PLAYWRIGHT RETREAT
by Clay Risen 

[George C. White’s obituary appeared in the New York Times on 21 August 2025 (Section B [“Business”/”Sports”]).  It was also posted as “George C. White, Founder of Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Dies at 89” on the Times website on 13 August.]

His summer conferences gave budding playwrights a chance to try out new works, many of which went on to success in New York.

George C. White, whose Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, on an idyllic waterfront estate in Connecticut, gave generations of budding playwrights a chance to try out their latest works — many of which went on to success in New York and elsewhere — died at his home in Waterford, Conn., on Aug. 6, 10 days before his 90th birthday.

His children, Caleb White, George White and Juliette White Hyson, said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Since its first summer conference for playwrights was held in 1965, the O’Neill, named in honor of the playwright [1888-1953] who spent much of his life in nearby New London, has helped incubate generations of new talent, including John Guare [b. 1938], August Wilson [1945-2005] and Sam Shepard [1943-2017], all of whom made the trek to eastern Connecticut.

There, on a sprawling property that rolled down to Long Island Sound, they lived, ate and worked together, far from the pressure exerted by producers, critics, actors and everyone else who, for better or worse, shape the public presentation of a play.

Mr. White, the child of an artistic, semi-patrician Connecticut family who founded the center when he was in his 20s, called himself its “innkeeper.” He spent most of the year in New York, raising funds and running the admissions process, and migrated north in the summer to run the O’Neill’s day-to-day operations.

“There have been plays here over the years that I think are pretty awful,” he told The New York Times in 1982. “But I stand behind the selection of the playwright every single time. We really are looking for the playwright who shows promise, more than the play that can be a hit.”

Though Mr. White was an accomplished director in his own right, he relied on Lloyd Richards [1919-2006], the longtime head of the Yale School of Drama [1979-91], to act as the center’s artistic director [1968-99].

Together they developed an unerring eye for new talent. Famously, they accepted an unsolicited script from Mr. Wilson, who was still unknown at the time; the work, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” was nominated for the Tony Award for best play in 1985 and established Mr. Wilson as one of the great American playwrights of the 20th century.

Other noted plays and musicals (which got their own, similar conference in 1978) that originated at the O’Neill included Mr. Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves” (1966), Wendy Wasserstein’s [1950-2006] “Uncommon Women and Others” (1975) and Robert Lopez [b. 1975], Jeff Marx [b. 1970] and Jeff Whitty’s [b. 1971] “Avenue Q” (2003).

Mr. White cultivated a reliable network of actors to perform staged readings of each play. They, too, were drawn from the ranks of the young and promising, and many were destined for fame: Michael Douglas [b. 1944], Charles S. Dutton [b. 1951], Meryl Streep [b. 1949] and Al Pacino [b. 1940], among others, did time at the O’Neill early in their careers.

“He took his privilege and used it to share the goodies for a wide community,” Jeffrey Sweet [b. 1950], the author of “The O’Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater” (2014), said in an interview. “And he did it with just enormous heart and enthusiasm.”

George Cooke White was born on Aug. 16, 1935, in New London, not far from Waterford, where he grew up. He came from a long line of noted landscape painters, including Henry C. White [1861-1952], his grandfather; Nelson C. White [1900-89], his father; and Nelson H. White [b. 1932], his brother.

His mother, Aida (Rovetti) White [1897-2002], came from a working-class family and was a seamstress before she met his father. She later served on the O’Neill’s board.

George studied drama at Yale. After graduating in 1957, he spent two years in the Army, stationed in Germany, where he met Elvis Presley [1935-77], who was already a singing sensation but wanted to do more acting. He asked Mr. White for advice, and they spent an afternoon running through a monologue.

After his discharge, Mr. White studied at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, and then returned to Yale to get an M.F.A. in drama. He graduated in 1961 and moved to New York, where he worked for the television producer and talk-show host David Susskind [1920-87; the talk show was Open End/The David Susskind Show, 1958-86].

Mr. White married Betsy Darling in 1958. Along with their children, she survives him, as do his brother and 10 grandchildren.

One afternoon, Mr. White, an avid sailor, was tacking past the Hammond Mansion, an empty seaside home that was slated to be used for firefighting practice by the town of Waterford.

He was already thinking of starting his own theater in honor of O’Neill, and he asked the town if he could lease the estate. Happy to help a local boy, the town gave it to him for $1 a year. The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center opened there not long after [1964].

Mr. White initially wanted to stage full productions at the site, drawing on the connections he had built under Mr. Susskind’s tutelage. But even with his prodigious people skills, the task proved daunting, and in the interim he held his first summer conference for young playwrights.

The conference was a hit, and he soon abandoned his original plans, focusing instead on cultivating new talent. He also began hosting similar conferences on theater criticism and musicals — Lin-Manuel Miranda [b. 1980] workshopped “In the Heights” at the O’Neill [2005] before taking it to New York [2007 (Off-Broadway); 2008 (Broadway)].

Mr. White retired in 2000 but remained involved with the O’Neill, and with theater generally. He was particularly active with other organizations that took the O’Neill as their model. Robert Redford [b. 1936], for instance, used it as a template for his Sundance Institute [formed in 1981], focused on young filmmakers, and Mr. White agreed to serve on the Sundance board.

He also served in the United States Coast Guard Auxiliary as a flotilla commander; in 2014, the Coast Guard gave him its distinguished public service award.

Like many theater programs around the country, the O’Neill has struggled in recent years. This year, the federal government clawed back some of its funding, and the O’Neill has had to slash its budget and employment rolls in response.

But Mr. Sweet, the author of “The O’Neill,” said that Mr. White’s legacy had put the O’Neill in a better place than other endangered programs.

“It’s going to be belt-tightening for a while,” he said. “But I think there’s such a huge community of people who view the O’Neill as one of their homes, and a lot of them are famous and rich. A lot of them owe a lot to it.”

[Clay Risen is a New York Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.  He also writes about spirits—whiskey in particular—for the Food section and was a senior editor on the 2020 politics team, and before that an editor on the Opinion desk, most recently as the deputy Op-ed editor.  He’s been at the Times since 2010 and previously worked at the New Republic and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

[Risen’s written eight books, some about U.S. history, some about whiskey.  They include American Rye (Scott & Nix, 2022) and The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century (Scribner, 2019).  His most recent is Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America (Scribner, 2025).]


18 August 2025

The ID Bracelet


For some time, I’ve been working on a long, long project based on my parents’ World War II correspondence.  My mom, Judith, and dad, Eugene, met on New Year’s Day 1945 when Dad was home in New York City on leave from the army for the holidays.  

Mom’s parents were married on 1 January 1920, so they held a combination New Year’s Day/anniversary party every year at their home in Trenton, New Jersey.  It was mostly for my future grandparents’ friends and my grandfather’s business associates, but Mother was encouraged to invite a friend of her own so she wouldn’t be the only young person in the house.

Mom, who’d graduated from college in September 1944, was doing social work out of the Trenton Chapter of the American Red Cross with servicemen and -women who were far away from their homes.  At a naval air field in Trenton, she met a young WAVE ensign from New York City named Clarice, known as Kris.  Kris and my mom were only a month apart in age, and they became friends.     

Mother invited Kris to be her guest at the party.  A few days before the party, Kris called her friend and explained that her big brother was home from the army and had nowhere to go on New Year’s Day and asked if she could bring him to the party.  My mother and her parents gladly agreed.

When Kris arrived at my grandparents’ house in Trenton, she was accompanied by a nice-looking young man with blue eyes and wavy blond hair (although, being on active duty at the time, he probably had his hair cut pretty short). 

Do I have to say that Kris’s brother was, in fact, my future father?  That party, Monday afternoon, 1 January 1945, my future grandparents’ 25th wedding anniversary, was when my parents met.  My mother-to-be had turned 21 on 7 April 1944; my future father had celebrated his 26th birthday on 5 November 1944. 

Well, Dad was smitten immediately—and Mother reciprocated.  They spoke by phone over the next week, Dad in New York City with his parents and Mom in Trenton with hers, until Dad left on Sunday, 7 January, to return by train to duty as commander of the headquarters battery of an artillery battalion at Camp Hood in Killeen, Texas.

On a stop-over in St. Louis the next day, he began writing to Mom and the letters continued until Dad got out of the army and came home at the beginning of December.  (Mom and Dad were married in January ’46.  I came along 11 months later.) 

They both kept the letters they received and after they were married, Dad had them mounted and bound.  (I don’t know this, but it’s fun to imagine that Dad presented Mom the bound letters on their first anniversary—the “paper” anniversary.)  I reread the letters—there are 182 pieces of correspondence in the two leather scrapbooks—after my mother died in 2015 (with long breaks for other activities) and began writing about them. 

Most of what’s interesting to me in reading the letters is what they reveal about my family and what was going on on the home front at the end of the war (Mom, the Red Cross volunteer social worker in Trenton), and in the army and at the European battle front (Dad, of course, the combat artilleryman).  To reflect this, I’ve entitled the project “Letters from the Fronts.”

In one instance, however, I did make a little, private discovery I hadn’t expected.  Now that I’ve set the circumstances, I’m going to relate the surprise discovery I made maybe a fourth of the way into the collection.  For me, it’s one of the most remarkable coincidences of which I can conceive.

In mid-March 1945, I came to an undated letter Mom had sent Dad.  He’d sailed for Europe with his artillery battalion on 27 February—almost two weeks earlier—but Mom didn’t know that.  She knew that Dad’s deployment was imminent, but the battalion’s departure was kept classified until after it arrived in France on 11 March.  The unit had been restricted to camp and no passes were issued in the last week before the troop ship sailed, and communication with the civilian world had been cut off. 

Dad’s unit had traveled from Texas to New York by train between 2 and 7 February and then they were billeted in a transit camp in Rockland County, New York, for almost three weeks.  For most of that time, my future parents were able to meet in New York, 27 miles south, or Trenton, 88 miles southwest, whenever Dad wasn’t occupied with duties, which were few most of the time as the battalion waited to board their ship for Europe.

Mom had planned to see Dad off at the ship when the time came, to have a farewell at dockside.  That never happened.

In the March letter, Mom said she’d spent the weekend, the 10th and 11th, in New York City, visiting with her “uncles, aunts, and cousins.”  (My mother was born in New York—as were her parents—but her family moved to Trenton when she was little.  There were still a lot of relatives in the city, however, so my mom and her family often used to travel there for entertainment, shopping, family events and visits, and holidays.)

While in the city, Mom took the opportunity to take care of “something I’d wanted to do long ago”: buy Dad “a ‘farewell’ gift.”  She explained that she’d wanted to give Dad the gift in person—I imagine at that unrealized parting on the dock—“but there were so many confusing mix-ups connected with your leaving I never was able to attend to anything.”  So, she sent it to him, not yet knowing—though she suspected by then—that Dad had been shipped out. 

Mom elucidated:

I noticed you weren’t wearing one of those identification bracelets – because you didn’t like them or because you just never had one I don’t know.  However, I like them, particularly the one I sent to you.  Too, you won’t hold against me my sentimentality, expressed on the back-side – please, sweet?  All in all, it’s merely a little remembrance I wanted you to have – and you will remember me because of it, won’t you? 

Well, here’s the little surprise—and the unveiling of a minor mystery.

Mom had a box of various family keepsakes—graduation programs, diplomas and certificates, photos, some letters, and so on.  Among them was a little gift card, still in its original envelope; Mom had written a note on the card, addressed to Dad in the army. 

I’d gone through that box scores of times, sifting through the odds and ends, but I had no idea what the card had been for—whatever the gift had been wasn’t specified in the note—until I reread that letter.  I had just left the card in the box and filed it away in my memory. 

When I read Mom’s letter again, I immediately recognized that the little card was connected and ran right off to the memento box and pulled it out.  I still don’t really understand why I had kept it!

The tiny envelope for the card was addressed to “Capt. E. M. K*****, 0-1165639.”  The note said essentially the same thing in nearly identical language as Mom’s letter (except it didn’t say that the gift with which it was enclosed was the bracelet), closing with: “Lots of luck, sweet – Hope you don’t mind wearing this – Love – Me.” 

Apparently, ID bracelets for men were very popular at that moment, and Dad didn’t have one.  (I don’t know if Dad wore the bracelet while he was overseas, but he did confide to me years later that he didn’t really like wearing one.)

I also had the bracelet, itself.  It had been in Dad’s jewelry case when he died in 1996 and it was one of the mementos Mom gave me from Dad’s tchotchkes (such as a pair of silver tie clips I made for him at summer camp when I was maybe 9 or 10).  It’s sterling silver with a “curb chain” band; on the front of the identification plate, Mom had “GENE K*****” inscribed and on the back, she put “JUDY 1 - 1 - 45,” the date they met.

Mom, by the way, didn’t actually say she’d put the date of the party on the back.  That’s what she called “my sentimentality, expressed on the back-side.”  I’d forgotten that she had “JUDY 1 - 1 - 45” engraved on the back of the ID plate.  (Of course, I knew to what that referred; that was no mystery.)

(Half a century later, when Dad got Alzheimer’s, Mom had their telephone number engraved below Dad’s name on the front of the bracelet.  Dad had started wandering off, mostly within the apartment building, but not everyone knew who he was, so Mom had him wear it again.)

Now, I knew that the bracelet had been a gift from Mom to Dad, though I either never knew or had forgotten that it was something she’d sent him when he was deployed to Europe during the war.  I also never connected the gift card to the bracelet until I reread that letter. 

In an 8 April letter, in reference to Mom’s March note, Dad wrote: “As for the bracelet, I anxiously await its arrival.  Not at all for its intrinsic worth, but rather because it comes from you.”  In response, Mother wrote back nine days later: “Further about the bracelet; you ought to be receiving it sometime soon – I hope so – & also that you will like it.”

In a letter of 30 April, a month-and-a-half after Mom sent her letter announcing the coming gift, Dad reported that he’d received a backlog of a bunch of letters from home . . . and one package:

The package was, of course, your bracelet which is most attractive physically but priceless sentimentally.  The name and the date on the back (such a momentous date) should have been placed on the front and fitted with neon lights so that they partially burn as brilliantly (but never as contin[u]ously) as they do in my mind and heart.

(It’s irrelevant for two reasons—one, it has nothing to do with the point here; two, Dad wouldn’t have known of it until the next day—but 30 April 1945, the date of Dad’s letter above, was the day that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker.  The news wasn’t released worldwide until 1 May.)

In a letter dated 8 May, Mom exclaimed that “today is V-E day!!”  (That’s “Victory in Europe Day” for you youngsters out there.  It marks the official surrender of Germany for the Western allies; in the former Soviet nations, VE Day is marked on the 9th because of the time difference between western and eastern Europe.) 

In the letter, Mom also addressed Dad’s receipt of the belated gift:

Delighted to know you got the bracelet; and more, that you enjoyed receiving it!  I had hoped it wasn’t against your principals [sic] to wear such ornaments – and now am hoping that you’re not wearing it merely as a favor to me.  (Say no more!!)

The surrender of Germany ended the war in Europe, signaling the imminence of Dad’s return stateside—except that he became involved in the Occupation as a Nazi-hunting Counter Intelligence Corps officer.  (He spoke German and had received intelligence training at Camp Ritchie, the Military Intelligence Training Center; see Ritchie Boys: The Secret U.S. Unit Bolstered by German-Born Jews that Helped the Allies Beat Hitler’” by Jon Wertheim [19 May 2021].) 

Dad returned to his artillery duties on 8 June and was sent to Marseilles on 28 July to oversee the loading of the battalion’s guns and heavy equipment for transshipment to the Pacific.  He waited there, detached from his battalion, until 22 August—through the atomic bombings of 6 (Hiroshima) and 9 (Nagasaki) August and the 15 August surrender of Japan, ending the war in the Pacific. 

That meant his Liberty Ship was no longer bound east, and he landed in New York on 7 September.  He never rejoined his artillery unit, which came home after he’d left France, and he never saw any of his former comrades, who were sent somewhere else, again.

After a two-month leave at home, he reported to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on 1 November to wait out his final weeks of active service until he was separated on 4 December.  Dad returned home and, having proposed to his girl when he’d been there on leave, married my mother in Trenton on 6 January 1946. 

After a honeymoon in Miami and Havana, the newlyweds settled in Washington, D.C., where Mom’s father had gotten Dad a job in his newest acquisition, District Theaters Corporation.  Except for a five-year stint with the United States Information Agency in Germany in the early and mid-’60s (see “An American Teen in Germany” [9 and 12 March 2013]), my parents lived the rest of their lives and raised a family in the Nation’s Capital.

The bracelet discovery—discoveries—was really just dumb luck more than any thoroughness on my part.  (The dumbest luck was not having thrown away the gift card, since I’d had no idea what it was; I just let it sit in the box!) 

It’s not so astonishing that I connected Mother’s letter to the bracelet I had in my jewelry box—her description of the gift was a pretty broad clue.  It could have been a different bracelet, I suppose, so I guess it was a bolt of inspiration—or realization.  That I linked the letter to the note card was serendipitous, however. 

Sadly, both my parents were gone by the time I made this find, so I was never able to tell them about it.  I did tell some family members and close friends, mostly from my generation (I’m the oldest member of my family left—on both my father’s and my mother’s sides), but none of them seemed quite as excited as I was at the little discovery.

In any case, Mom’s March 1945 letter, the gift card, and the identification bracelet are now all together again after maybe more than 70 years (calculating to 2016, when I started the work on the letters project).  Figuratively speaking, of course.  I’ve clipped the gift card to the page in the scrapbook with the letter, but the bracelet is in my jewelry box now.  Still, now they’re all where someone—me—knows where they are—and what they are—for the first time since Dad had them all in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, in April 1945.

[I made many small discoveries from rereading my parents’ wartime letters, but the others were all merely facts; this is the only one that involved artifacts.  For instance, I always thought Dad was in Germany and at the Rhine when the Bridge at Remagen (the Ludendorff Bridge) collapsed into the river.  But that was on 17 March 1945, just six days after his unit landed in France.  His letters don’t mention this momentous event—and his battalion didn’t cross the Rhine until 12 April.  The next day, it was 60 miles northwest of Remagen.

[I also thought that Dad’s artillery battalion had orders for the Pacific after Germany surrendered, but that the atomic raids and Japan’s surrender occurred while Dad, alone with the guns and heavy equipment, was en route to the PTO and that his ship was redirected to the States, where he cooled his heals waiting for his separation orders.  (Family lore had it that Dad’s mother quipped that the Japanese heard that her son was on the way to the Pacific and that’s why they surrendered.)

[It turned out that orders for the Pacific Theater were never cut and Dad, who was alone on the ship with the unit’s equipment, didn’t depart Marseilles until after all the events ending combat with Japan had occurred, and sailed directly for New York.

[As for my mother, I knew she’d wanted to go overseas, the reason she graduated early from college and joined the Red Cross.  That she never did, I always believed was because her father had put the kibosh on Mom’s plans.  It turned out that when she was accepted for overseas duty, Mom, herself, backed out—her father had not raised an objection—because Dad was on the verge of leaving Europe, and she couldn’t accept the likelihood that he’d return to the States (or be shunted to the Pacific Theater) just as she was heading abroad for who-knows-how-long.

[Speaking of Mom’s early graduation from college, which I’d known about forever—but I didn’t know all the details.  I didn’t know, for instance, that she didn’t get her diploma in September 1944, when her degree was conferred.  (My masters degree was awarded in September instead of the previous May due to a credit malfunction, so I didn’t attend the September ceremony.  The diploma was mailed to me, however.)  

[Mom obviously got her sheepskin because it’s among the family papers I have, but what I hadn’t known until I reread the letters was that she made a special trip, with her folks, to Elmira, New York—a 250-mile, 7½-hour train ride from Trenton—for the graduation ceremony of her senior class in May 1945 to collect the certificate (and celebrate with her classmates). 

[Outside the letters, but pursuant to my work on them, I did some research on Mom’s studenthood at Elmira College.  According to the Elmira College Bulletins of 1943-44 and 1944-45, Mom majored in sociology-psychology, and graduated as a “Scholar of the Second Rank” with an 86-89% grade average (equivalent to a 3.44-3.56 GPA on a 4-point system).  I never knew either of those factoids.

[There’s one similarity between this discovery and one other that I made after Mother’s death so I wasn’t able to tell her about it.  As I reported above, Mom was a native New Yorker but moved to New Jersey with her family when she was very young.  They still used to drive into the city often for visits, family events, and holidays.  One of those occasions was Thanksgiving and they drove in through the Holland Tunnel in lower Manhattan.

[Mom said she remembered seeing kids downtown—in lower Greenwich Village—all dressed in costumes like Halloween, but she couldn’t remember what it was all about.  I had no idea what Mom could have been recalling and I also had no idea how to look up something like that. 

[Well, I was reading the New York Times in October 2016, in an “F.Y.I.” column, a feature that fielded questions from readers about the New York metro area, responded to a question about this very activity—and the answer was all about “Ragamuffin Day.”

[I now had something to look up, so I did, and I found that this was precisely what Mom had been remembering.  I blogged about Mom’s query and the discovery in “Ragamuffin Day” (26 November 2016), but I was disheartened that, like the ID bracelet find, I couldn’t call Mom, who’d died a year-and-a-half before, and tell her I’d found the answer to her mystery.]


13 August 2025

A Tribute To Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist

 

[Tom Lehrer, one of the funniest—and wittiest, not to mention most irreverent—satirical songwriters and singers ever to grace an American stage (or record album), died at 97 at his home in Boston on 26 July 2025.  I was a fan, and so was my friend Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to Rick On Theater, who composed a tribute to the comical math teacher.  (Now, there’s an unlikely label!) Kirk, it should be noted, is a composer, musician, and songwriter. 

[If any reader doesn’t know Tom Lehrer, who stopped performing in 1967, check him out on one of the many videos posted to YouTube and other platforms (Kirk has included links to some of them in his homage), and, if you can catch it when it airs occasionally, PBS has a recording of Lehrer’s 1967 concert in Copenhagen.  (It was airing in the past weeks, but it may no longer be in the schedule.  It returns from time to time for multiple broadcasts, however.)

[Following Kirk’s profile of Lehrer, I’ve appended the New York Times obituary of Lehrer.  It’s pretty comprehensive in the background and biographical details of the songwriting college professor.  (There’s a link to another obit in Kirk’s tribute as well.)]

TOM LEHRER AND THE COMIC SPIRIT
by Kirk Woodward

Are you a Tom Lehrer (1928-2005) enthusiast, or had you not heard of him until you read his obituary earlier this year? Not everyone knows about him, but Tom and I go a long way back.

My first encounter with his music occurred decades ago in Louisville, Kentucky, at the house of my best friend, Jay Paradis. One afternoon in the early 1960s, when his parents weren’t home, Jay opened the big record cabinet in the living room and showed me and a few others his parents’ collection of “party records.”

Today that might mean “dance music.” In those days it was the name for record albums that were considered off-color or at least disreputable, like those of Redd Foxx (1922-1991). One of those records showed a side view of an audience in an auditorium, with a spotlight singling out a distant figure on stage at a piano.

The album was An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer (Lehrer Records, 1959). At first listening I was a fan for life. There was nothing “dirty” about the songs; but there was plenty of parody, sardonic humor, cheerful melodies played cheerfully on the piano, and funny, perfectly crafted lyrics.

One of the things that impressed me most was that although I didn’t know much about the types of songs he parodied, I knew immediately what those songs had to be like. As it turned out I was right.

Oxford Languages defines a “cult figure” as “a writer, musician, artist, or other public figure who is greatly admired by a relatively small audience or is influential despite limited commercial success.” In this sense Lehrer is a cult figure, but he’s a major cult figure, if there is such a thing.

Fairly often I’ll mention him in conversation, and either the other person has no idea what I’m talking about, or we begin a vigorous round of quotations from Lehrer’s songs:

            “Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?
            “That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.

            He loved to burn down houses just to watch the glow,
            And nothing could be done, ‘cause he was the mayor’s son.

            Hurl that spheroid down the field, and fight, fight, fight!

That last quotation is from the football song “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” which Lehrer wrote while he was at Harvard (he was admitted at the age of 15), one of numerous times he combined the popular and the highly intelligent. Just thinking about the song’s title makes me laugh.

Although he rated a lengthy obituary in the New York Times (see below) Lehrer still falls, barely, in the “cult figure” category, a fact he doesn’t seem to have minded much. He estimated a few years ago that he had sold about two million records in his career, not a shabby number for a performer who introduced only three albums of original material (in six different releases) containing 36 songs.

Altogether as far as we know he wrote around 50 songs. His music is regularly re-released in some form or other. The most comprehensive collection, if one can get one’s hands on it, is the three CD collection The Remains of Tom Lehrer issued in 2000 by Rhino Entertainment, which includes four songs Lehrer wrote after his performing career was basically over.

That performing career was brief. Fortunately he can be seen on YouTube. A YouTube channel called “Silly Songs with Lehrer” provides a number of interviews with Lehrer.

Lehrer can also be seen in concert, ironically enough performing not in the United States, but in Copenhagen (the availability of the full concert is erratic, but individual songs from it are also there).

He was nearly at the end of his performing career when he gave that concert (1967); he accepted the invitation because he’d always wanted to see Scandinavia.

What is it about those songs of his, then? Why is it that we’re still listening to and enjoying them (I am, anyway) some seventy years or so after they were first performed, and that few of them have “dated?”

Lehrer’s songs can be categorized, loosely, as jolly mockeries and novelty numbers. His mockeries often take the sentimental songs of yesteryear and give them new and often grotesque contexts. They are not parodies in the sense that they put new words to existing melodies like Allan Sherman (1924-1973); his parody, or perhaps more accurately his “burlesquing” of the originals, lies in the lyrics, not necessarily in the music.

An example is the song “The Old Lamp-Lighter” (1946, music by Nat Simon, lyrics by Charles Tobias), an allegedly nostalgic look at a still earlier era. Lehrer, not very subtly, wrote “The Old Dope Peddler” “with his powdered happiness.”

(I mention this song because, as he has acknowledged, when he wrote it “dope” was not a major factor in most lives. Today the drug culture is much more prevalent, and the song now has an unintended resonance.)

Another song, “The Masochism Tango,” mocks a kind of song best represented perhaps by “So in Love,” a ballad by Cole Porter (1891-1964) from the great musical Kiss Me Kate (1948):

            So taunt me, and hurt me,
            Deceive me, desert me,
            I’m yours till I die . . .

Lehrer’s song, again not terribly subtly, piles up the number of things the singer will allow the loved one to do:

            Bash in my brain,
            And make me scream with pain,
            Then kick me once again,
            And say we’ll never part . . .

There are songs about college, an Irish ballad (in which things go very, very badly), a Western number, a number about the Old South, about the Army . . . whatever caught his attention.

The novelty numbers are varied and imaginative. The best known, perhaps, is “The Elements,” a rearranging of the periodic table that Lehrer set to “A Modern Major General” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance:

            There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
            And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium . . .

(Lehrer said his one experience on stage was playing the Pirate King in a production of Pirates in high school. The music of Gilbert and Sullivan was always important to him.)

(Arthur Sullivan (music; 1842-1900) and W. S. Gilbert’s [libretto; 1836-1911] The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty is a comic opera in two acts. Its official première was in New York City in 1879, where it ran 100 performances and was well received by both audiences and critics. Its 1880 London début ran for 363 performances.)

Also in the novelty category are the songs he wrote for the United States version of the satirical TV show That Was the Week That Was (National Broadcasting Company, 1963-1965), and the ten songs he wrote for the educational TV program The Electric Company (Public Broadcasting Service, 1971-1977), devoted to helping children learn to read. (Lehrer remarked that he never found out if it worked.) The variety of his output is impressive, considering the relatively small number of songs he wrote.

I never met Tom Lehrer, although I wrote him a fan letter, and I’ve only met one person who did, an actor in the revue Tomfoolery (1980 in London, 1981 in New York City). I asked the actor what Lehrer was like, and he said, quoting Lehrer, “There’s a ‘p’ in ‘park.’”

For a person with a disapproving world view, Lehrer appears to have been good-humored and sociable. In interviews he speaks of friends and parties. He put his home address on his first albums, so people could write him for additional copies.

His number was in the Boston phone book for years after he became known. His stage persona was convivial, if sardonic. He was hardly a recluse or antisocial.

Instead, it seems clear that he was what the psychological approach Family Systems Therapy calls “self-differentiated,” that is, he knew what he was and what he wasn’t, and acted accordingly.  He lived his life pretty much the way he wanted to and didn’t feel compelled to behave in the ways that some celebrities feel they must.

And he was a teacher most of his life, a profession that by necessity involves working with people. There is a definite element of teaching in his material. In a way every good artist is a teacher, introducing us to aspects of the world that we may not have been aware of before.

He taught undergraduate mathematics at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. At the latter school he also instituted and taught a class on musical theater, because he found that students didn’t know who Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) was. He considered Sondheim the greatest lyricist ever. (Curiously, he and Sondheim attended the same summer camp as children from 1937 to 1939.)

Sometimes Lehrer makes the connection with teaching explicit. Two of his songs are “That’s Mathematics” and “New Math.” And any comedian in some way wants to teach us about life. Lehrer was – as much as he was a mathematician – a comedian.

I called this article “Tom Lehrer and the Comic Spirit,” and what I have in mind is a comment by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) that “comedy is disruption.” Not all disruption is comedy – tragedy is disruption, too, but its rhythm is different. In comedy the disruption comes suddenly.

(For more on Shaw, see “Bernard Shaw, Pop Culture Critic” by Kirk Woodward [5 September 2012], “Two Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival, 2006)” [25 September 2012]. “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw” by Kirk Woodward [3 December 2015], “Re-Reading Shaw by Kirk Woodward [3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September 2016], and “Shaw versus Shakes” by Kirk Woodward [8 September 2023].)

Lehrer’s songs often set up expectations and then disrupt them. I wonder if the songs above, as described, struck anyone as cheap or facile. It’s a fact that, particularly at first, Lehrer often got his effects by taking a subject and introducing murder or death in it, to disruptive effect.

This kind of disruption of expectation would certainly get a laugh at parties, which is where he first performed his songs. But does it have anything to do with art, or is it just a way of getting cheap laughs?

There are two answers to this question. The first is that Lehrer’s lyrics are invariably matched by lilting, pleasurable melodies that give the songs a higher dimension. Lehrer is in control of this matchup because he almost always writes both words and music.

In an interview he notes that he and the composer and singer Randy Newman (b. 1943) both “take some sardonic attitude and set it to very pleasant music.” It’s notable that a major influence on his songs was the jaunty group of patter songs of Noel Coward (1899-1973), who does much the same thing.

He began playing piano when he was eight. He had a vigorous, percussive style and he knew his way around a keyboard. For proof, visit the song “(Oh, My Darling) Clementine” (traditional, with 1884 lyrics attributed to Percy Montrose [fl. 1880s]) in which he plays that chestnut in the styles of Cole Porter, Mozart (1756-1791), bebop jazz (flourished, 1945-1955), and Gilbert and Sullivan. Note in particular how well he understands the bebop style.

His lyrics too, regardless of the subject, are skillfully crafted. I learned more about writing song lyrics from Lehrer’s songs than from any other place. They set a high standard; they fit their melodies, they move along smoothly, they suit their subjects perfectly, and they are funny.

The songs he wrote for The Electric Company are practically a textbook in lyric writing, for example in his demonstration of “Silent E:”

            Who can turn a cap into a cape?
            Who can turn a tap into a tape?
            A little glob becomes a globe instantly,
            If you just add Silent E.

            He turned a dam – Alikazam! – into a dame
            But my friend Sam stayed just the same.

(In “Tomfoolery” he added:

            Once I had to hop, now I can hope,
            And of course my pop is now the Pope.)

A second answer to the question about the ultimate value of his work is that by his approach Lehrer calls into question the comfortable, comforting nature of earlier songs and, by implication, of earlier social conditions.

Some of his songs directly challenge staples of Fifties life – Christmas (“A Christmas Carol”), segregation (“I Wanna Go Back to Dixie”), nuclear armament (“We All Will Go Together When We Go”). Others simply raise a little hell.

In effect, then, his music is an event on the way to the consequential change that begins to flower in the 1960s. Just by their disruptive nature, the songs helped set the stage for attitudes of rebellion that are now commonplace.

I don’t know if he thought so; usually he talks about his songs as pure entertainment. Very little in entertainment is pure, though, and his songs provided an alternative way of looking at a lot of things for people like me, huddled around a record player in the Fifties.

Lehrer has said that his aim with his songs was not to change anyone’s mind, since anyone who heard him perform agreed with him already. He just “titillated the audience,” he said.

Two comments, again, on this way of thinking: it leaves out the effect of his work on people like me who heard it for the first time, and it ignores the way that art can change perceptions not as much by what it says as about how it says it.

When he turned his songwriting attention to political affairs, writing for That Was the Week that Was, he demonstrated that at a minimum he could raise awareness:

            If you visit American city,
            You will find it very pretty.
            Just two things of which you must beware,
            Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.

A common misconception about Lehrer is that he hated performing. He didn’t, as long as the performing was for a purpose. He wanted people to hear his songs, and as he pointed out, after a while everyone at Harvard had heard them “ad nauseam,” so he began to perform them more widely, also, in the process, polishing them so they were ready for recording, another way of getting people to hear them.

But he didn’t see the point of performing for people who already knew his music. He accepted some tour dates in Europe because he wanted to see Scandinavia, but once his fundamental purpose had been met – to introduce his music to people – he mostly stopped performing.

A similar misconception is that he stopped writing songs. He didn’t; he has said in interviews that he continued writing occasional pieces, including verses for friends. In the Remains collection are four songs that were written after the original six albums.

A YouTube video provides several examples, as well as a cheerful look at the man himself.

But it’s true that 1965 saw his final original album release. Why no more? He has said it’s because he had nothing else to say, but I would guess there’s more involved. David Byrne (b. 1952), formerly the lead singer of Talking Heads and a remarkable artist, gives a clue in his book How Music Works (Three Rivers Press, 2012/2017). Byrne writes that

context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed. . . . We unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit pre-existing formats. Of course, passion can still be present. Just because the form that one’s work will take is predetermined and opportunistic (meaning one makes something because the opportunity is there), it doesn’t mean that creation must be cold, mechanical, and heartless. Dark and emotional materials usually find a way in . . . . Opportunity and availability are often the mother of invention.

Lehrer’s performance career illustrates Lynch’s point clearly. The musical culture in the early 1950s, and society at large at that time, provided the context for many of his songs. That culture and that society changed, and with it the “formats” he had drawn on for his songs changed as well. The material for his music was no longer there.

Mathematics, he said, provided a continuing way of looking at the world, it was his first interest, and he enjoyed spending his time there. He continued to listen to music, or try to. I am happy to report that he admired the Beatles.

Wikipedia’s article on Lehrer reports a wonderful episode in his later years:

In 2012, rapper 2 Chainz sampled Lehrer's song “The Old Dope Peddler“ on his debut album, Based on a T.R.U. Story. In 2013, Lehrer said he was “very proud” to have his song sampled “literally sixty years after I recorded it”. Lehrer went on to describe his official response to the request to use his song: “As sole copyright owner of 'The Old Dope Peddler', I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?”

“Fun” is a word he often uses, and we see why. It’s an interesting choice of a word for a man who purported to believe that people mess up just about everything they touch, but he made his own place in that world and wasn’t obsessed with what others did, mostly using it as material for comedy.

What is Lehrer’s rank among American composers? High, I think, because of his lyrical and melodic skill and his unstoppable sense of humor. There are things, we should note, that he does not attempt. For example, there are no love songs in his work, and remarkably little about sex. “I Got It From Agnes” is about as close as that gets, and only inferentially:

        She then gave it to Daniel,
            Whose spaniel has it now.
            Our dentist even got it,
            And we’re still wondering how.

Lehrer cast a cold eye on romance, patriotism, religion, many things that we hold dear or claim to. That’s what comedians do – they disrupt our pretentions. When armed with weapons of music and lyrics, they are all the more potent. Thanks to Tom Lehrer for keeping us alert, and for helping us to laugh.

And we mustn’t forget the song about the Boy Scouts, which got Lehrer in a bit of trouble during a tour to Australia in 1960:

Be prepared!
That's the Boy Scouts' solemn creed
Be prepared!
And be clean in word and deed
Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice
Unless you get a good percentage of her price

Be prepared!
And be careful not to do your good deeds
When there's no one watching you
If you're looking for adventure of a new and different kind
And you come across a Girl Scout who is similarly inclined
Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared
Be prepared!

*  *  *  *
TOM LEHRER, 97, SATIRIST WHOSE
PEPPY MELODIES LEAD DARK VERSE, DIES
by Richard Severo and Peter Keepnews 

[Above, I embedded a link to an obituary of Tom Lehrer in Kirk Woodward’s profile of the comic songwriter.  I used the notice from Variety, the renowned daily entertainment newspaper, because I think coverage if Lehrer’s death in a show business publication would be apt.  Since, however, Kirk specifically mentions the New York Times obit further down in his article, and the notice is particularly comprehensive, I decided to run it following Kirk’s report.

[The obituary notice below appeared in the Times on 28 July 2025, in the front section.  It was also posted as “Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97” on the New York Times website on 27 July and updated on 7 August.  (Richard Severo, a New York Times reporter from 1968 to 2006 and cowrote the Lehrer death notice, died in 2023, two years before his subject.  I’m sure ROTters know how and why this happens in the newspaper business, but if anyone doesn’t, check out “An Obituary Written From Beyond the Grave? Not Quite.”)]

A mathematician by training, he acquired a devoted following with songs that set sardonic lyrics to music that was often maddeningly cheerful.

Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by David Herder, a friend.

Mr. Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic, sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful. Accompanying himself on piano, he performed in nightclubs, in concert and on records that his admirers purchased, originally by mail order only, in the hundreds of thousands.

But his entertainment career ultimately took a back seat to academia. In his heart he never quit his day job; he just took a few sabbaticals.

He stopped performing in 1960 after only a few years, resumed briefly in 1965 and then stopped for good in 1967. His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.

As popular as his songs were, Mr. Lehrer never felt entirely comfortable performing them. “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “If they buy my records, I love that. But I don’t think I need people in the dark applauding.”

Mr. Lehrer’s songwriting output was modest, but it was darkly memorable. In the tasteless world he evoked, a seemingly harmless geezer turned out to be “The Old Dope Peddler” and spring was the time for “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”

In “The Masochism Tango,” which the sheet music instructed should be played “painstakingly,” he warbled, “You can raise welts/Like nobody else.” In “Be Prepared,” his “Boy Scout marching song,” he admonished, “Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice/Unless you get a good percentage of her price.”

Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in Manhattan on April 9, 1928, one of two sons of James Lehrer, a successful tie manufacturer, and Anna (Waller) Lehrer. Young Tom was precocious, but his precocity had its limits. He took piano lessons from an early age, but balked at learning classical music and insisted on switching to a teacher who emphasized the Broadway show tunes he loved.

He also developed a fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan; one of his early songs, “The Elements,” was a list of the chemical elements set to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from “The Pirates of Penzance.” (Years later “The Elements” would be performed by the young scientist played by Jim Parsons on the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”) [Actor Daniel Radcliffe also sang the song on TV in 2010; here’s a video of the performance.]

After graduating early from the Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut, Mr. Lehrer went to Harvard, where he majored in mathematics and received his bachelor’s degree in 1946, at 18. He earned a master’s from Harvard the next year and then pursued doctoral studies there and at Columbia University. (He continued his studies on and off for many years, but he never completed his Ph.D. thesis.)

While at Harvard, Mr. Lehrer began to write songs for his own amusement and that of his fellow students. He told his friends that the songs simply came to him and that he wrote them down in just about the time it took him to brush his teeth, but they quickly found an audience on campus. One of his earliest efforts, written in 1945, was a parody of football songs called “Fight Fiercely, Harvard,” in which he exhorted:

Fight, fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless we have the will.
How we shall celebrate our victory?
We shall invite the whole team up for tea!

In 1952, as he looked forward to becoming a researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, N.M., he wrote “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be,” whose lyrics suggested that he was not to have a fruitful career in atomic research: “’Mid the yuccas and the thistles/I’ll watch the guided missiles/While the old F.B.I. watches me.”

By that time Mr. Lehrer had begun performing his songs in Cambridge, Mass. He did not want to abandon research and teaching, but he saw the possibility of combining the contemplative life with an entertainment career.

In 1953, encouraged by friends, he produced an album. To his surprise, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” cut and pressed in an initial run of 400 copies, was a hit. Sold through the mail and initially promoted almost entirely by word of mouth, it ultimately sold an estimated half-million copies.

The cover contained a drawing of Mr. Lehrer seated at the piano, with horns coming out of his head and a devil’s tail emerging from his formal attire. (His follow-up album, “More of Tom Lehrer,” used the same image.) The 11 songs lived up to that image, among them “My Home Town” (where the “just plain folks” included the pyromaniacal son of the mayor and the math teacher who sells dirty pictures to children after school) and the necrophiliac ballad “I Hold Your Hand in Mine.”

The record’s success led to nightclub engagements in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. His performing career was interrupted by a two-year Army hitch [1955-57]; when he returned to civilian life in 1957 he hit the road again, giving concerts in Canada and overseas as well as in the United States.

In 1959, in an unusual move, he simultaneously released a new studio album, “More of Tom Lehrer,” and a live album, “An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer,” which contained concert versions of the same songs. (He later also rerecorded the songs from his first album in concert.) But after another year of touring, he stopped performing and returned to the Harvard faculty.

In 1964 and 1965 he wrote several songs for “That Was the Week That Was,” the short-lived satirical NBC television series [1963-65]. He did not appear on the show, but he did return to the road for a while, recording his new songs at the hungry i in San Francisco for the 1965 album “That Was the Year That Was” — not a do-it-yourself effort this time, but released on Reprise, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Records.

His new numbers, in which he focused on political and social issues, included “A Song for World War III” (“So long, Mom/I’m off to drop the bomb”), which was sung on “That Was the Week That Was” by Steve Allen [1921-2000; television and radio personality, comedian, musician, composer, writer, and actor; in 1954 became the first host of The Tonight Show, the first late-night television talk show], and “Wernher von Braun,” about the German scientist [1912-77] who designed weapons for the Nazis and later worked for NASA: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”

The album also contained what may have been the most controversial song Mr. Lehrer ever wrote: “The Vatican Rag,” his response to the Second Vatican Council’s [1962-65] attempt to, in his words, “make the church more commercial.” The lyrics begin:

First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect!

The song was condemned by clergymen and school administrators. When Channel 13 [WNDT until 1970, when it became WNET], the New York public television station, played it as part of a [1967] fund-raising drive, the station received hundreds of calls and letters of protest.

Mr. Lehrer gave up performing again after a concert in Copenhagen in September 1967. This time he stuck to his decision. The rest was almost, but not quite, silence.

His last sustained burst of songwriting came in 1971, when he contributed “Silent E” and other educational ditties to the PBS children’s series “The Electric Company.” The next year he performed at a rally for the presidential campaign of Senator George S. McGovern , [1922-2012; politician, diplomat, and historian; served as a representative (1957-61) and three-term senator from South Dakota (1963-81), and was the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election]. But there were no more nightclub or concert performances, and no more albums.

By 1981 he had fallen so far off the cultural radar that, he told The Harvard Crimson, some people thought he was dead. (“I was hoping the rumors would cut down on the junk mail,” he said.)

A new generation was introduced to the Lehrer songbook in 1980 when the British impresario Cameron Mackintosh [b. 1946] presented “Tomfoolery,” a revue of his songs, in London. The show was a hit there and was later produced in New York [Village Gate (Off-Broadway), 1981-82], Washington [Kreeger Theatre (Arena Stage), 1982], Dublin [Gates Theatre, 1981] and elsewhere.

With characteristic self-deprecation, Mr. Lehrer attributed the show’s success to a shortage of new songwriters. “It was inevitable,” he said, “that someone would peer into the almost empty barrel and notice me down there.”

When “Tomfoolery” played at the Village Gate in New York in 1981, Mr. Lehrer explained to The Times why he had stopped writing. “The Vietnam War is what changed it,” he said. “Everybody got earnest. My purpose was to make people laugh and not applaud. If the audience applauds, they’re just showing they agree with me.” On another occasion he famously offered another explanation: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger [1923-2023; German-born diplomat and political scientist; United States Secretary of State: 1973-77 and National Security Advisor: 1969-75 under presidents Richard Nixon (1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74) and Gerald Ford (1913-2006; 38th President of the United States: 1974-77)] was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize” [1977].

In October 2020, Mr. Lehrer announced on his website that “all the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else” — in other words, that he was relinquishing the rights to all his songs, except for the melodies of those few that used his words but someone else’s music.

He expanded on, and formalized, this announcement two years later, stating among other things that “permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.” Adding that he planned to shut down his website “in the not too distant future,” he concluded: “In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.” (His website, and the notice, were still online at his death [and still yet at this posting].)

It was a highly unusual move, Abby North, the chief executive of a music rights management company [North Music Group], told the public radio show “Marketplace” [airs on many public radio stations during the last segment of the NPR program Morning Edition], because for many songwriters, royalties “have been sustaining multiple families for multiple generations.”

Mr. Lehrer divided his time for many years between Cambridge, where he taught at both Harvard and M.I.T., and Santa Cruz, where he taught courses on mathematics and musical theater at the University of California from 1972 to 2001.

When a fan once asked Mr. Lehrer if he had ever married or had children, he replied, “Not guilty on both counts.” He leaves no immediate survivors.

Reflecting on his bicoastal life in a 1981 interview for Newsday, he said he planned to keep his Massachusetts home “until my brain turns completely to Jell-O, at which time I will of course move to California full time.”

[If I had to pick a favorite Tom Lehrer song, it’d be a hard assignment.  “Be Prepared” tickles me endlessly—I was a Boy Scout before I was in high school, though I doubt that’s why the song gets me—and “The Vatican Rag” makes me laugh—maybe because I’m not Catholic. 

[But if I were forced to make a choice, sort of like Stephen Colbert’s question on his “Colbert Questionert,” except restricted here to “You get one Tom Lehrer song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it?"  As Colbert might explain, “It’s not that it’s playing in your head endlessly, or on a loop.  It’s just that whenever you choose to listen to Lehrer’s music for the rest of your life, that’s the only song you’ll hear.”

[In that case, I’d have to choose “Alma” (1965).  The only reason I can figure for that is that its references are so obscure—how many people recognize the names Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Walter Gropius (1883-1969), and Franz Werfel (1890-1945) off the tops of their heads?  (Well, maybe Mahler--if you’re into classical music.)

[Then, the rhymes are sooo . . . I don’t know—surprising.  A little forced, perhaps—pairing “Alma” with “embalma,” for example (though I love “Bauhaus” and “chow house”!)—but very chuckleworthy.  It’s just not anything anyone—well, me, anyway—would imagine.  Not even from Tom Lehrer. 

[Just for my own amusement, then, here are the lyrics:

The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well
Once you picked her up on your antenna
You’d never be free of her spell

Her lovers were many and varied
From the day she began her beguine
There were three famous ones whom she married
And God knows how many between

Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
Which of your magical wands
Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?

The first one she married was Mahler
Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav
And each time he saw her he’d holler
“Ach, dot is de fräulein I must have”

Their marriage, however, was murder
He’d scream to the heavens above
“I’m writing ‘Das Lied von der Erde’
Und she only wants to make love”

Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
You should have a statue in bronze
For bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz

While married to Gus, she met Gropius
And soon she was swinging with Walter
Gus died, and her tear drops were copious
She cried all the way to the altar

But he would work late at the Bauhaus
And only came home now and then
She said, “What am I running, a chow house?
It’s time to change partners again”

Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
Though you didn’t even use Ponds
You got Gustav and Walter and Franz

While married to Walt she’d met Werfel
And he too was caught in her net
He married her, but he was carefell
’Cause Alma was no Bernadette

And that is the story of Alma
Who knew how to receive and to give
The body that reached her embalma
Was one that had known how to live

Alma, tell us
How can they help being jealous?
Ducks always envy the swans
Who get Gustav and Walter
You never did falter
With Gustav and Walter and Franz

[Just for the record, Alma Mahler-Werfel was born Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler (1879, in Vienna – 1964, in New York City).  She was married to composer Gustav Mahler from 1902 to 1911, architect Walter Gropius from 1915 to 1920, and novelist and playwright Franz Werfel from 1929 to 1945.


[Richard Severo was a science journalist who wrote for the New York Times from 1968 to 2006.  During that time, he won a George Polk Award from Long Island University in 1975, as well as a Meyer “Mike” Berger Award from the Columbia School of Journalism. 


[Peter Keepnews, formerly of the New York Post, Soho Weekly News, and Jazz Magazine, is a veteran music journalist and an editor at the Times.


[Alex Traub contributed reporting.]