Tom Lehrer, My Secret Dad
An homage to the musical genius whose voice became my proxy parent
Tom Lehrer, my secret dad, died on July 26, 2025, at the age of 97.
Tom LeBleu, my real dad, died in 1974 at the age of 38 after being involved in a hot air balloon accident.
Being “involved” means he was a passenger in the hot air balloon when it hit some power lines, shearing the basket from the balloon and sending him and two other men plunging to Earth. But he didn’t die instantly. He was alive for two weeks until an aortic aneurysm got him.
Legend is he was singing opera to the nurses when he died, mid-aria. Not a bad story to leave behind. What he also left behind was a cornucopia of books and records. Over the years, I picked them up like puzzle pieces that could be assembled into the personality of the father I never knew.
There was the lewd, puffing pink face on the cover of The Vulgarians, still vivid in my mind. In junior high, I got my hands on his copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. And I artfully finagled his full set of Great Books of the Western World after I left for college—it sits next to my desk as I type.
But because he died before I could read, his books weren’t immediately accessible. Thankfully, his records were.
My father’s record collection lived in an octagonal cabinet in the corner of our living room, where my older brother and I would occasionally set up camp. The intense desert sun would stream in as we spent languid hours pawing through my father’s musical legacy.
The cadence of his collection went something like this: opera, opera, opera, opera, opera, NOT OPERA! And Julie London’s alluring, cut-diamond face would emerge. Then more opera, until Errol Garner’s Concert by the Sea bubbled up like a tonic through the classical oeuvre. But it was Tom Lehrer’s recordings that put a hard stop to our analog scrolling. He wasn’t operatic, classic, or jazz-ic…Who was this strange, smirking creature lurking in the land of my father’s record collection?
My brother would carefully unsheathe his record and set it spinning, catapulting us from the monochrome of childhood into the beguilingly garish world of adults. Listening to Lehrer was like pretending to fall asleep under the table during a grown-up cocktail party while secretly absorbing all the scandalous, perplexing language of adulthood. There were words I didn’t understand, but his voice, bemused and a bit leery, made their meanings easy to catch.
On highest rotation was a live recording entitled An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer. It starts off with a bang (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, a light and airy pean to avian homicide) and ends with a banger (the cheerful ode to nuclear annihilation, We Will All Go Together When We Go).
What really stuck with me, though, was the patter in between songs—his deadpan delivery and nasal tone melted like wax into the fabric of my childhood. And somewhere in my little kid brain, Tom Lehrer’s voice became my dad’s.
Looking back as an adult, the idea is laughable. Outside of music, the two men had little in common—my father grew up in a traditional Christian household of modest means in Corpus Christi, Texas, while Tom Lehrer was an erudite product of Manhattan’s Upper West Side Jewish enclave. But in my little kid brain, it made a certain sort of sense. While I didn’t think Tom Lehrer truly was my father, he came to life in my mind as a kind of proxy parent. He made me laugh during what must have been a scary and confusing period of my childhood. His songs made me feel a part of something my father had been a part of.
And as far as proxy parents go, damn, did I choose well. His political satire lodged in the landscape of my psyche and laid the groundwork for my sense of humor.
Tom Lehrer poked merciless fun at life’s unending supply of daily idiocies. He slyly articulated the absurdities of the world without ever being mean or crude (though his tongue-in-cheek lewd streak was legendary). He was a brilliant jester, in a constant state of chagrin at humanity's inability to look in a mirror every now and then.
Consider his delightfully droll deadpan intro into National Brotherhood Week:
“During National Brotherhood week various special events are arranged to drive home the message of brotherhood. This year, for example, on the first day of the week, Malcom X was killed, which gives you an idea of how effective the whole thing is. I’m sure we all agree that we all ought to love one another, and I know there are people in the world who do not love their fellow human beings and I HATE people like that.”
That cracked my brother and me up every damned time. Still does.
I know most of what I know about Catholicism to Vatican Rag and was probably the only first-grader to entertain/mortify the nuns at my private Catholic school with my favorite song and dance:
First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect and…
Genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect!
And my favorite part:
Two, four, six, eight
Time to transubstantiate!
The wordplay! The rhymes! They rhythm! From Poisoning Pigeons:
When they see us coming
The birdies all try n’ hide
But they still go for peanuts
When coated with cyanide
There’s a line from his faux-nostalgic college tune, Bright College Days, whose imagery will live with me until the end:
Oh, soon we’ll be out amid the cold world’s strife
Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life
OUCH.
As a parent now, I have tried (unsuccessfully) to pass down some of my musical tastes to my kid. The only one that landed was The Beastie Boys, and that has morphed into something my son listens to called, I don’t know, Shitty Murder Rap? It’s as melodious as a melee of crack-addled raccoons. But I digress.
My dad gave me Tom Lehrer, and Tom Lehrer gave me a connection to my dad. He wrote songs that brought me joy then and still do now. (He’s also the reason that anyone under 60 knows who Wernher von Braun is.)
Cheap sentimentality was not in Tom Lehrer’s repertoire, so I’ll stop before a whiff of the maudlin pervades this piece. Instead, I’ll leave you with a classic Tom Lehrer love song.
Farewell, fake dad. Thanks for sharing your twisted mind and impeccable rhymes. You will be missed.
*From Smut…Tom Lehrer’s itching, morbid, lewd and lascivious take on free speech.
Beautiful reflections Thanks for sharing details. I am not a balloon pilot, but I have quite involved with balloons here in New Mexico. Way too young to pass. Peace