Mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer has died at the age of 97:
Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in Manhattan on April 9, 1928, one of two sons of James Lehrer, a successful tie manufacturer, and Alma (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.
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.
In 1964 and 1965 he wrote several songs for “That Was the Week That Was,” the short-lived satirical NBC television series. 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.
Lehrer lived so long that the Times had to admit that the obituary's author died two years ago: "Richard Severo, a New York Times reporter from 1968 to 2006, died in 2023. Alex Traub contributed reporting."
Yascha Mounk has a remembrance:
[I]t was on my second visit to the United States...that I first came into contact with a piece of comparatively obscure American culture which would go on to shape my sense of the country that has since become home. In my aunt’s living room in Morningside Heights, she and her friends were reminiscing about the late 1960s when, freshly expelled from Poland, they had first arrived in New York. Somebody put on a CD called “That Was the Year That Was” by Tom Lehrer....
The album also features Tom Lehrer skewering supposedly progressive educational fads which only succeed in making things unnecessarily confusing in “New Math”; him poking fun at America’s over-reliance on military might in “Send the Marines” (For might makes right, / And till they’ve seen the light, / They’ve got to be respected, / Till somebody we like can be elected); and him making light of fears about nuclear proliferation in “Who’s Next?” (Egypt’s gonna get one, too / Just to use on you know who. / So Israel’s getting tense, / Wants one in self-defense. / “The Lord’s our shepherd,” says the psalm, / “But just in case, we better get a bomb!”)
Lehrer was not a builder of legacies. His style of musical comedy has mostly died out. He does not appear to have been interested in family; asked whether he had ever married or had children, he quipped that he was “not guilty on both counts.” Nor did he ever aim to maximize the financial profit he would draw from his fame; a few years ago, he declared that all of his lyrics and melodies would henceforth be in the public domain (which is one reason why I’ve been able to quote so liberally from his songs.)
But, perhaps despite himself, Tom Lehrer did leave a lasting legacy: He deeply shaped the way I—and many others—see the country he skewered so lovingly in his unforgettable songs.
He will be missed.