Quote of the day:

I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!
—Tom Lehrer

In the second volume of Isaac Asimov’s autobiography, In Joy Still Felt, there is this passage:

I maintained my friendship with Bill Boyd’s assistant, Bernie Pitt, even after he was fired, of course, and one day at his place, he put a record on just as I was supposed to go home, and I listened in puzzlement as someone sang something called “Fight Fiercely, Harvard.” It began:

Fight fiercely, Harvard, fight, fight, fight,
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless, we have the will.

Halfway through I gathered that it was not meant seriously and I begged Bernie to start all over. He did and I listened to the whole record, both sides, and got home an hour late.

The singer was the clever satirist Tom Lehrer, and I have been an ardent Lehrer fan ever since.

On October 9, 1954, I took the Boyds to a nightclub in Boston where Tom Lehrer was performing and I saw him in real life, toothy, wavy-haired, and very charming. He sang all the songs I knew and a number I didn’t yet know, including two that I have never heard at any other time but that one occasion.

In one, he sang very cleverly about Jim getting it from Louise and Sally from Jim; and after a while you gathered the “it” to be venereal disease. Suddenly, as the combinations grew more grotesque, you realized he was satirizing every perversion known to mankind without using a single naughty phrase. It was clearly unsingable (in those days) outside a nightclub.

The other one was useless for general distribution because it dealt with the Boston subway system. He made use of the subway stations leading into town from Harvard. They were Harvard, Central Square, Kendall, Charles, Park Street, and Washington. The song, heard only that once, burned itself into my mind, and here it is, to the tune of the famous Mother’s Day song.

H is for my alma mater, Harvard.
C is Central, next stop on the line,
K is for the cozy Kendall Station, and
C is Charles that overlooks the brine.
P is Park Street, busy Boston center,
W is Washington, you see.
Put them all together, they spell HCKC-PW
Which is just about what Boston means to me.

And what killed me was that when he came to HCKC-PW, he pronounced it quite well enough by clearing his throat and pretending to spit.

I haven’t gone to nightclubs often, but of all the times I have gone, it was on this occasion that I had by far the best time.

Stephen Sondheim was a life-long friend of Tom Lehrer’s (they were at summer camp together), and it’s quite possible that he was influenced to some extent by Tom’s lyrics, because when he got around to writing his own bawdy songs, he also managed to do it without recourse to any “naughty” words.

Here is Stephen introducing Tom at a concert honoring Cameron Macintosh in 1998:

Being a fan of Asimov and Sondheim and, of course, Lehrer, I felt I had to seize the occasion of Lehrer’s death to include a post that mentioned all three of them.

And here is Tom Lehrer singing “I Got It from Agnes”, the song that Isaac references in that excerpt: