The Gad About Town

I know it’s very bad form to quote one’s own reviews, but there is something the New York Times said about me [in 1958], that I have always treasured: “Mr. Lehrer’s muse [is] not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.”—Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer is 88 today. From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, he was an in-demand nightclub performer whose droll and sometimes dark songs (“Pollution,” “We’ll All Go Together When We Go”) were sung cheerfully by an bespectacled man at a piano. He retired from performing live in the early 1960s, then wrote and sang satirical songs for television (“That Was the Week That Was”), then retired from performance altogether to become a math professor at UC Santa Cruz.

In 1971, PBS debuted a children’s television show called “The Electric Company,” and there a new generation (mine) learned about the alphabet and some of its many entanglements from droll cartoons illustrating concepts like the “silent E” accompanied by clever songs sung by a cheerful voice and piano. I did not know who Tom Lehrer was when I was 4, but I did know this song by heart (below the fold):
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… It is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron. … And for the first time in a long time, that poker face in Aaron shows the tremendous strain and relief of what it must have been like to live with for the past several months.—Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, April 8, 1974

Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hit the 715th home run of his career in Atlanta in the fourth inning of a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on this date in 1974. The number broke a record for career home runs that had been set when Babe Ruth hit his final home run in 1935. (Aaron’s final record of 755 homers stood until 2007.)
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