Tom Lehrer didn't quite make it to his 100th birthday, and I'm sure he could have written a song about that.
I discovered him when I was in junior high school, and his album That Was the Year That Was is one of the few records I owned before marriage. I can't say as my parents approved of all of the songs—in retrospect I can see why—but they generally put up with my adolescent idiosyncracies.
Here's a great obituary for Lehrer from The Economist, cleverly interwoven with lines from his multitudinous satirical songs. You can read it for free, but you have to jump through a bunch of hoops that may or may not be worth the trouble. You need to enter, not just the usual name and e-mail address, but also your profession and industry. Worse, you have to fit your life into their limited boxes, which has never been easy for me. "Retired" and "Homemaker" are not options. On the other hand, writing homeschool reports has made me pretty good at stuffing whatever it was we were doing into conventional terminology.
His childhood had been a breeze of maths and music, with a preference for Broadway shows. He entered Harvard at 15 and graduated at 18, the sort of student who brought books of logical puzzles to dinner in hall, and, on the piano in his room, liked to play Rachmaninov with his left hand in one key and his right a semitone lower, making his friends grimace. He seemed bound for a glittering mathematical career, but then the songs erupted, written for friends but spreading by word of mouth, until he was famous. He wrote each one in a trice and performed, increasingly, in night clubs. By contrast his PhD, on the concept of the mode, vaguely occupied him for 15 years before he abandoned it.
Oh fame! Oh accolades! He had toured the world and packed out Carnegie Hall. Yes, they really panted to see a clean-cut Harvard graduate in horn-rimmed glasses pounding at a piano and singing: sometimes stern, sometimes morose, but often joyose, as he twisted in the knife. [Is that a typo for joyous, or a deliberate portmanteau of joyous and morose?]
When he suddenly stopped, and the output dropped, he was presumed dead. No, Tom Lehrer replied. Just having fun commuting between the coasts, teaching maths for a quarter of the year, ie the winter, at the University of California in sunny Santa Cruz, and spending the rest of the time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, being lazy. Never having to shovel snow; never having to see snow. And, being said to be dead, avoiding junk mail.
I wonder how he managed the last. We're still getting junk mail for Porter's father, who has been actually dead for six years.
Did he ever have hopes of extending the frontier of scientific knowledge? Noooooo, unless you counted his Gilbert & Sullivan setting of the entire periodic table. He would rather retract it, if anything. He still taught maths, along with musical theatre, and that was his career. He had never wanted attention from people applauding his singing in the dark. His solitary, strictly private life made him happy; to fame he was indifferent. In 2020 he told everyone they could help themselves to his song rights. As for him, he returned to his puzzle books, as if he had never strayed.
Requiescat in pace, Tom Lehrer. Thanks for all the fun.
