Tuneful Dentist

The first thing any seasoned Penn alumnus does at a Mask & Wig show is to consult his program to see who wrote the music. Last week's audience at Philadelphia's Erlanger Theater looked, and was reassured. The Philadelphia dentist who has written the music for the University of Pennsylvania's last eleven shows had done it again.

This year's show, called John Paul Jones, closed after 14 performances. Reason: the chorus boys had to return to their classes, which are still on a wartime speedup schedule. The 1946 tour was one of the shortest, but its music was some of the best in the Mask & Wig Club's 58 years.

The man who wrote the show's music is Dentist Clay Aloysius Boland, class of '26. Unlike most college shows, where the undergrads write their own songs, Penn students see their Philadelphia dentist once a year for their tunes. Dr. Boland, an athletic-looking man, learned dentistry at Penn, but music by himself. In 1924 the University offered a prize for an original prom song; Boland won with one called Dreary Weather. Fred Waring, a Penn State man just starting to fame, recorded it. Boland has been grinding fillings and tunes ever since.

Last week he showed that his musical inlays were as sound as ever. The audience laughed indulgently at cracks about the nylon shortage, had a good time watching the hefty heifers of the chorus line, and did their dutiful best to follow the show's 18th-Century plot. But they went away humming Old Grad Boland's latest hit, It's Spring.*

Even the idea for John Paul Jones came from Dr. Boland. He got it last spring, as a commander in the Naval Dental Corps, when he visited the crypt at Annapolis where Jones is buried. He worked out the tunes between extractions and impactions and while "waiting for the Novocain to work." Several of Old Grad Boland's songs have sold well (The Gypsy in My Soul and I Live the Life I Love in 1937; Stop Beatin' 'Round the Mulberry Bush in 1939). He is considering several offers to turn Tin Pan Alley pro, but dentistry pays him too well. "Someone else will have to make up my mind," says Dr. Boland. "It's a hell of a spot to be in."

* Not to be confused with two other current tunes, It's Anybody's Spring; It Might As Well Be Spring.

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