The Monk Of Santa Cruz

I was saddened to learn yesterday of the death a couple days ago of the satirical songwriter and performer Tom Lehrer at age 97. By coincidence I was watching an interview yesterday with the creator of the website hosting all of Tom Lehrer’s works. The interview was from three weeks ago, when Tom was very much alive. The interview prompted me to check his entry in Wikipedia and I was taken aback to learn he died the previous day.

Tom Lehrer’s songs were very much a part of my childhood in the early 1970s. I don’t know if it was my record-collecting father or my record-collecting brother who brought the recordings home, but I heard his songs often. Judging from the accolades these past couple of days, many other people loved his songs as well.

He withdrew from songwriting and performing in the late 1960s, but his satire remains surprisingly relevant in 2025. The flip side of this is the unfortunate truth that we really haven’t solved any of these issues since then! (E.g. his song “Who’s next” is all about nuclear proliferation.) Starting in 1972 he settled into a quiet career teaching mathematics for non-majors and musical theatre at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Here is a just-posted musical eulogy for Tom Lehrer by the interviewer referred to above, Kira Coviello (aka Honest2Betsy).