[continued from previous message]   
      
   they sacrilegious, suggestive or just plain perverse, must have had at   
   the time.   
      
   As Mr. Lehrer told The Washington Post in 1982, “I was often accused of   
   bad taste in the ’50s and ’60s, but the songs which prompted that   
   accusation seem positively genial today.”   
      
   He was a peculiarly 1950s figure — a well-mannered iconoclast, the   
   antiestablishment figure operating within the establishment. Lean and   
   bespectacled in a suit and tie, Mr. Lehrer was his own straight man;   
   much of his music’s appeal lay in the deadpan introductions that   
   accompanied his jocose delivery.   
      
   The professorial mien evinced at Mr. Lehrer’s performances was no   
   put-on. He demonstrably loved academia: He began teaching mathematics   
   when he was still a teenager and continued to do so after he (mostly)   
   walked away from show business in 1960.   
      
   In addition to teaching at Harvard, Wellesley College and the   
   Massachusetts Institute of Technology — at one point concurrently — he   
   spent 16 years pursuing a PhD that he never completed, and remained a   
   familiar campus figure even during his brief stint in the limelight.   
      
   Sometimes the pedagogue and the songwriter collided, as in “New Math,”   
   “Lobachevsky” or “The Elements” (in which Mr. Lehrer recites every   
   element in the Periodic Table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I   
   am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General”).   
      
   Mr. Lehrer’s nonacademic jobs were few but colorful — and proved to be   
   excellent songwriting fodder. In the summer of 1952, he worked at Los   
   Alamos for the Atomic Energy Commission, and he was employed as a   
   theoretical physicist for Baird Atomic the following year. Rather than   
   wait to be drafted, he enlisted in the Army (inspiration for his tune   
   “It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier”) and worked for the National   
   Security Agency from 1955 to 1957.   
      
   In the years that followed his military service, Mr. Lehrer undertook a   
   series of concert performances, recording his second album — twice — in   
   1959. “More of Tom Lehrer” was recorded in a studio, while “An Evening   
   Wasted With Tom Lehrer” featured the same songs recorded live.   
      
   Afterward, he abruptly abandoned show business and once again took up   
   his doctoral studies. Mr. Lehrer was famously ambivalent about   
   performing, and many factors influenced his decision to quit: He   
   eschewed the “anonymous affection” offered by audiences and took a   
   cynical view of his function as an entertainer. “I wasn’t preaching to   
   the converted,” he frequently said, “I was titillating the converted.”   
      
   Mr. Lehrer became nearly as famous for stepping out of the spotlight as   
   he had been during his brief period in it. “I’ve always considered him   
   the J.D. Salinger of demented music,” Yankovic once said, referring to   
   the recluse author of “The Catcher in the Rye.”   
      
   Yet Mr. Lehrer’s songwriting skills remained in demand. In 1964, he was   
   hired to write topical tunes for the short-lived NBC program “That Was   
   the Week That Was.” He did not perform on the show, whose regulars   
   included David Frost, Buck Henry and Alan Alda; his songs were sung on   
   the air by folk singer Nancy Ames.   
      
   Mr. Lehrer complained that the show’s producers took out all the best   
   lines and replaced them with “something vapid,” so the following year he   
   performed them himself on his third and final album, “That Was the Year   
   That Was.”   
      
   Many of his most trenchant songs hail from this period: “The Folk Song   
   Army,” “Send the Marines” and “National Brotherhood Week.”   
      
   Mr. Lehrer’s career took an unpredictable turn in 1970, when his Harvard   
   friend Joe Raposo tapped him to write 10 songs for the Children’s   
   Television Workshop show “The Electric Company.” Today the best-known of   
   these is “Silent E” (Who can turn a cub into a cube?/ Who can turn a tub   
   into a tube?).   
      
   He said afterward that his authorship of “Silent E” was the only one of   
   his achievements that truly impressed his college students.   
      
   Around this time, Mr. Lehrer — who never married and ascribed the fact   
   to his short attention span — began to divide his time between Cambridge   
   and Santa Cruz, California, where he joined the University of California   
   at Santa Cruz faculty.   
      
   He spent January through June in California, teaching, among other   
   things, mathematics to liberal arts students, a class he jokingly   
   referred to as “Math for Tenors.” He also taught a popular workshop in   
   the history of musical theater.   
      
   He evaded the limelight until 1980, when theater impresario Cameron   
   Mackintosh (later of “Cats” fame) mounted “Tomfoolery,” a four-person   
   musical revue of Mr. Lehrer’s compositions, in London. The production, a   
   modest success that was later performed in New York, occasioned a burst   
   of “Where Is He Now?” press coverage — a burst that was repeated in   
   2000, when Rhino Entertainment released a comprehensive three-disc box   
   set of Mr. Lehrer’s works wryly titled “The Remains of Tom Lehrer.”   
      
   Mr. Lehrer’s reflections on his own career were mostly limited to   
   denying that he’d had one.   
      
   “Thirty-seven songs in 20 years is hardly what I’d call a career,” he   
   quipped. He did wax philosophical on the subject at least once.   
      
   Writing in the liner notes to the 1997 compilation “Songs & More Songs   
   by Tom Lehrer,” he said, “If, after hearing my songs, just one human   
   being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to   
   strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.”   
      
   ©1996-2025 The Washington Post   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)