Another Tom Lehrer interview clip (1994, age 65), http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html GEO: I was surprised to lea

Another Tom Lehrer interview clip (1994, age 65), http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html GEO: I was surprised to learn that you enlisted in the Army back in 1955. TOM LEHRER: That's one way of putting it, but probably not the appropriate verb. The point is that they were drafting people up to the age of 35. So I dodged the draft for as long as anybody was shooting at anybody. And then when I realized that I would have to go -- there was really no way out of it except getting an essential full time job, which I didn't really want to do -- I waited until everything was calm and then surrendered to the draft board. I wouldn't call it "enlist". "Enlist" means that you have to spend another year. I allowed myself to be drafted. I was 27 at the time and there were a lot of graduate students who were like me who had gotten deferred as graduate students and now had to pay up. So it was a kind of an odd group there, a lot of educated people in my "outfit", I believe is the word. And we had a lot of fun. So I did that for two years in Washington DC and had a great time -- especially since there was no war -- though vice president Nixon was trying to get us into one in Indo-China even then. So there was that little threat. And there was Suez and a few other little things that looked a little tricky. But it didn't look like there was going to be a real war. So it seemed to be safe to go in. And I'm sure that a lot of my cohort felt the same way. GEO: And what did you do? TOM LEHRER: It was NSA. I think I'm allowed to say that now. I asked around before I surrender to be sure that I would not be in special services or something playing volleyball with the troops in Korea. I wanted to make sure that I got a nice cushy job. We were called "The Chair Borned". And I found out that they were hiring mathematicians. So I arranged to be hired. GEO: Do you find that your training as a mathematician influenced your song writing. Writing a song seems to me to be like creating a puzzle. TOM LEHRER: Not Mathematics itself, but the kind of mind that likes mathematic. Stephen Sondheim has that kind of mind. He was a mathematics major in college, too. Having that kind of a mind, you look for organization, and rhyming, and pattern, and prosody -- all those things that are fun to do in a song, rather than -- which is what a lot of comedy songs are -- just couplets. Working all that out, if not "mathematical", is at least "logical". GEO: As a mathematician did you ever make any brilliant discoveries? TOM LEHRER: Oh,nonono. I have no desire to extend the frontier of human knowledge; retract them, if anything. I like to teach it and I like to think about it, but that's about it. https://tomlehrersongs.com/it-makes-a-fellow-proud-to-be-a-soldier/ https://tomlehrersongs.com/it-makes-a-fellow-proud-to-be-a-s...