Dr Demento is retiring

I came across the news that Dr Demento is retiring. It of course made me think of my dad.

I have (blurry) memories of listening to Dr Demento shows in the mid 1970s with my dad. I have no memory of how he found out about that radio show; perhaps he heard about it from one of his students at the college. Or perhaps I somehow heard about it from somewhere and figured out how to play it on our home radio? Certainly dad didn't listen to radio very much. He didn't even listen to music very much, although we had a nifty record player at home with a selection of LPs. But dad only played Bach, if he played anything.

Since I was 12 or 13 years old at the time, I mostly liked the silly novelty stuff that was played by Dr Demento: They're Coming To Take Me Away, or Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.

And, of course, Weird Al Yankovic; I knew everything by Weird Al by heart back in the 1970s. Though back then I had no idea that Weird Al was barelay a year older than me, and lived almost right next door in Downey. Maybe he didn't want people to know that fact back then; Downey was certainly not a very funny place.

My dad, as I recall, was considerably more highbrow, and favored performers like the Firesign Theater, the Marx Brothers, Victor Borge, etc.

Dad was particularly fond of Tom Lehrer, and knew a lot of his songs. I have no idea how dad came to know about Tom Lehrer; it must have been back in his college days, or soon afterwards, as Dad mostly knew the really early songs (The Elements; New Math; Poisoning Pigeons in the Park; that sort of thing).

Although, looking closely at the Wikipedia page for Lehrer, the timelines match up, as Lehrer was apparently hanging around MIT at the same time my dad was, in the mid 1960s.

In 1960, Lehrer returned to full-time math studies at Harvard. From 1962 he taught mathematics in the political science department at MIT. In 1965 he gave up on his mathematics dissertation on modes in statistics, after working on it intermittently for 15 years.

So perhaps dad met him, even knew him then, though Lehrer was a decade older and I don't remember my dad saying anything specific about meeting him. I feel sure I'd remember if dad had shared any memories of that guy who "taught mathematics in the political science department".

I see Tom Lehrer is still alive! Amazing. I believe he was still actively teaching mathematics at the University of California Santa Cruz when I was accepted there. But I did not attend UCSC. I'm sure I would have enjoyed having a singing professor in my math classes (legend has it that Lehrer indeed had a piano in his classroom and would often open his lecture with a song).

(Side note to these side notes: my brother-in-law Dante Amidei, who teaches physics at the University of Michigan, for several years taught an introductory physics class targetted at liberal arts majors, which he used to refer to as "Atoms for Architects", riffing on Lehrer's lifelong love for teaching mathematics to non-mathematicians, a joy which my father also shared.)

I think I stopped listening to Dr Demento about 45 years ago, but it was fun to talk about him with my dad, who would sometimes think back on those years happily.