Dave Wood

July 28, 2025. I awoke to discover in the Sunday Star Tribune that one of my heroes and in my opinion the greatest satirist of the mid-20th century was dead at age 97: Tom Lehrer. Who’s that? My older cousin Bud Amundson introduced me to him in 1954, when Bud found me a place to live near Eau Claire State, where I hoped to attend come fall. I had just graduated from Whitehall H.S. (Summa Dumb Laude) and was in dire need of some polishing. Bud, my culture hero and 20 years my senior, was taking a stab at the impossible task.

Bud gave me one of the best graduation presents I ever got when he handed me a small LP recording, “Songs by Tom Lehrer” (1953) explaining to me that Lehrer was a math genius who had graduated at age 18 from Harvard and at present was teaching there, but his career there was being threatened by its board because of what he said about his alma mater in the little LP.  One song was a mock anthem called “Fight Fiercely, Harvard!” which I dropped onto the turntable of my portable phonograph to hear Lehrer singing and tickling the ivories about the overt effeminacy of THE Harvard football team, which decided to its Yale opponents “out to tea.”

As a former Boy Scout, I hurried on to the next ditty, “The Boy Scout Marching Song”: “Be prepared!” “ Be prepared, as through life you march along/ Don’t solicit for your sister (That’s not nice!) /Unless you get a good percentage of her price…. And if you should find sister out who is similarly inclined/ Don’t be nervous, don’t be bashful, don’t be scared/ Be Prepared!”

Of course I was impressed with cousin Bud’s savoir faire, and his worldliness. After WWII, Bud had earned an M.A. in journalism and was present at Mexico City’s most notorious bar on the night when avant garde poet William Burroughs accidentally shot his wife between the eyes, which Bud opined was the inspiration for Lehrer’s “The Old Dope Peddler” (“He gives the kids free samples/ Because he knows full well/ Today’s young innocent faces/ will be tomorrow’s clientele!”)

As you might expect, Bud’s gift got played over and over in our dorm, as we discovered the corny humor of Bob Hope who carried his jokes on 3x5 note cards, or of the obnoxious flutterings of his contemporary Red Skelton (remember him?) who was about to be replaced by a flock of truly humorous comics like Allan Sherman, Mort Sahl, Shelly Berman and Lenny Bruce, all of them inspired by that math prof from Harvard. Lehrer occasionally cut a record but continued to teach math at places like UCLA-Santa Cruz and appeared too infrequently on PBS specials.  More recently, he forsook his copyright privileges and thus enabled other aspiring humorists to use at no charge his cutting commentary about air pollution, nuclear war and historical figures like “Whatever Happened to Hubert? Humphrey” And the notorious Middle-European courtesan Alma Mahler-Werfel-Gropius. (“You didn’t even use Pond’s [facial cream] And got Gustav and Walter and Franz.”

Years after Bud’s gift had worn through to side 2, I had the opportunity to teach a class at Augsburg College (now “University,” a trend which would also make meat for Lehrer’s grinder).  The kids loved it, and I overheard one student say to another “Old Woodie is teaching this new comic, named Tim Lerner {sic}. Is he a gas!”)

So that’s who Tom Lehrer was, and yes, I remember him well, especially his send-up of the rage over personal bomb shelters back in the 1960s:

“So long, Mom, I’m off to drop a Bomb,/ So don’t wait up for me,/ And then when you swelter, down there in your shelter, you can see me upon your TV,/ While Brinka-lee and Hunta-lee describe contrapuntalee the cities we have lost…in the agonizing Holocaust!”  

So long Tommy and thanks, Bud, the bittersweet memories.