Loony Lieder

What kind of songs does a songwriter write when he is writing just for fun? Last week one Tin Pan Alley master gave this question a masterly and very personal answer. Broadway and Hollywood's Harry Ruby, hysterical baseball fan and composer of dozens of song hits from Oh, What a Pal Was Mary to Three Little Words, published a collection of his avocational efforts called Songs My Mother Never Sang (Random House, $2.50). This tunesmith's holiday provides musical America with a richly burlesque little sheaf of songs, including numbers entitled Indelible You and Get Off the Pot, and a fine satire on Gilbert & Sullivan, complete with antiphonal chorus effects, entitled He's Not an Aristocrat. The composer's program notes, to boot, are irresistible.

Among Ruby's gems:

> A song for Father's Day: Today, Father, is Father's Day And we're giving you a tie. It's not much, we know, It's just our way of showing you we think you're a regular guy. You say that it was nice of us to bother But it really was a pleasure to fuss, For according to our mother you're our father And that's good enough for us.

> A couple of student songs for Tannenbaum College (of this institution of learning, Ruby characteristically notes: "A feudal Icrd scattering largess among the peasants as he rides through the village in a coach-and-four is a philanthropist. The fact that the peasants are the source of his ill-gotten wealth makes no difference; he is a philanthropist. Which brings us around to the story of Carlyle Beasley, founder of Tannenbaum College. Beasley, like Huntington, Crocker, Stanford and Hopkins, made his vast fortune out of the railroad business. He was the owner of the Rappaport and Western Railroad, formerly known as the North Dakota and Western Railroad, which was built by Thomas J. North Dakota. . . ."):

Scholastic'lly the school is highly rated, The curriculum is rather complicated, And by the time a student's graduated He hasn't learned a goddam thing Except to clear his throat and sing: Fight on for Tannenbaum! Regardless if you reside in Peru or Guam, Give your might for and fight for One, two, three, four, Five, six, seven, eight, nine, Tannenbaum.

The Composer. Harry Ruby is the Tin Pan Alley prototype of a Horatio Alger hero. Born 48 years ago on Manhattan's East Side, he managed to get through grammar school, took a few music lessons and embarked on a childhood career as a cafe piano pounder and vaudeville actor. At 17 he got a job with Music Publisher Gus Edwards and wrote the first Ruby hit, When Those Sweet Hawaiian Babies Roll Their Eyes.

As the Ruby career moved on, he plugged songs with George Gershwin, played the piano for Irving Berlin, and accompanied Walter Winchell, who was singing at the time in a Woolworth 5-&-10-c- store on 14th Street. His first real break came when he got a job with a baldish music publisher and prestidigitator named Bert Kalmar. With Kalmar as collaborator, Ruby composed so many hits and Broadway musicals (Five O'Clock Girl; Animal Crackers; Helen of Troy, N.Y.; Top Speed) that Hollywood beckoned.

Today Harry Ruby, one of Hollywood's busiest men, has shifted most of his attention from songwriting to comedy scripts, has turned out such slap-happy scenarios as the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, Eddie Cantor's The Kid from Spain.

Fan No. 1. But Harry Ruby's real passion in life is neither song nor script writing--it is baseball. Ever since a day, 22 years ago, when Ruby stopped in New Rochelle to watch a Westchester League sandlot game, baseball has obsessed him to the point of mania. With doglike devotion, he has followed the White Sox, the Giants, the Cubs, and a half-dozen other U.S. Major League teams in training and on the road. Ruby owns and wears the uniforms of all the teams he fools with. He spends most of his time bench-warming.

Groucho Marx has always claimed that if Ruby's father and Joe Di Maggio were in a burning building, and only one could be saved, Ruby would save Joe. "After all," agrees Ruby, "my father doesn't hit 300."

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