I thoroughly enjoyed my parents' copy of Lehrer's original recording, as did they. I recall a sitting with a friend on our dock in Maine, dealing with our peeling sunburns and singing, "...and occasional pieces of skin, of skin..."   I was thrilled when he started writing songs for the TV series "That Was The Week That Was."

Back in the summer of 2000, on the occasion of the release of the 3-CD set, the Washington post had a fine article, which I tore out and saved, about Tom Lehrer. The headline is "For Songwriter Tom Lehrer, the Parody's Still Not Over." According to the article, he is (or was then) still a math professor, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaching the winter semester in Santa Cruz, California. A few excerpts: "By all rights, his records should have long since vanished. The core of the collection, after all, was recorded nearly half a century ago in 1953 -- a famously underground 10-inch LP he produced himself and mailed out, copy by copy, from his Cambridge apartment. He's written almost nothing new since 1965.

"But against every possible sort of odds or prediction, his records have remained in distribution in one form or another from the beginning. To his whimsical delight, these have involved fewer than 50 songs selling more or less steadily -- 25,000 to 30,000 albums a year in recent decades -- for nearly half a century. More than 2 million have been sold in all, he says, but at a rate of growth 'more like herpes than Ebola.'" "...he has been deliciously rewarded by his song about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and his Third Reich background.

   Don't say that he's hypocritical,
   Say rather that he's apolitical.
   "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
   That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun....

   'In German or English I know how to count down,
   Und I'm learning Chinese,' said Wernher von Braun.

"Some years ago, Lehrer says, von Braun's daughter applied to an Eastern college, and in the process of her admissions interview, she talked animatedly about her father. 'The admissions officer couldn't wait to call me afterward,' Lehrer remembers with an expression of puckish glee. 'The girl said her father had many interests other than rockets. At the moment he was teaching himself Chinese.'