Shel games

The great children's poet and adult entertainer Shel Silverstein did it all -- singing jazz songs, hanging with Lenny Bruce, writing plays, drawing cartoons, and living at the Playboy Mansion.

By Lisa Rogak

Read more: Books, Childhood, Books Features

April 20, 2005 | When I was growing up in the suburban New Jersey of the '60s, going to diners with my father was my favorite thing in the world. Once we settled into the red Naugahyde banquette, I'd order a cheeseburger (regardless of the time of day) and he'd sit across from me, one hand around a cup of Sanka, the other holding a Kent cigarette.

For other kids, the highlight of the meal came with the chance to stand slack-jawed in front of the brightly lit glass carousel that displayed a variety of colossal desserts. But for me it was the moment when my father would slide a quarter across the greasy Formica and say I could pick any song I'd like from the chrome jukebox at the end of the booth. I'd grab the coin, spin it into the slot and stand up on the banquette in my Buster Browns, reaching for the wheel that flipped each page of selections with a metallic click.

After years of camping out in establishments along Routes 4 and 17, we had the ritual down pat. We went through the motions at every diner, even though we both knew there was only one song I wanted to hear: "The Unicorn" by the Irish Rovers. At five plays for a quarter, I'd punch in the same letter-number combination -- E-2 or D-4, just like bingo -- five times in a row. My job done, I'd settle back down into my seat and wait for the song to begin, my pulse racing until I'd heard my favorite line from the song: "humpty-backed camels and some chimpanzees."

A few of the patrons would inevitably start grumbling around the third or fourth time the song played, but I didn't care. I'd sit with a big grin on my face, my heels kicking the booth to keep time while my half-eaten burger grew cold. All the while, my father sat drinking and puffing, gray tendrils of smoke gathering in patchy clouds above his head.

When I learned that Shel Silverstein had written "The Unicorn," I felt vindicated. Since I was born in 1962, I had always considered myself to be gypped out of the best that American culture had to offer its youth. I was too young for Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers but too old for "Sesame Street" when it debuted in 1969. I and other kids who could already read were presented with the choice of the anemic Electric Company -- Sesame's target audience got Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster while we got a shrill Rita Moreno shrieking Hey you guys! -- or Zoom, the highlight being when Bernadette did her helicopter-arm trick.

Shel Silverstein's children's books seemed to fall into the same missed-the-boat-again category for me. His first book for kids, "Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back," about a lion who takes revenge on hunters, was published in 1963. "The Giving Tree," which tells the story of a tree who gives everything to a boy to help him through his life until she is no more than a stump, appeared the following year. I was too young, and it was too far off the post-JFK assassination radar for most parents to care or even notice. When "Where the Sidewalk Ends," his famous classic of children's poems and doodles, came out in 1974, I was too old.

But in 1969, when "A Boy Named Sue" dominated Top 40 radio, and when Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show first appeared in the early '70s, I was the right age. Silverstein wrote both the infamous Johnny Cash song as well as the majority of Dr. Hook's songs. At the time, they were so obviously different from anything else on the radio that they were impossible to ignore.

It seems the ease of traveling between different worlds was the overriding theme of Silverstein's life. Just look at his repertoire: 19 books, 800 songs for adults, 400 published poems for kids, 18 plays, nine original albums, four movie scores and a monthly gig in Playboy that lasted right up until his death. Throughout his life, Silverstein mixed with celebrities from across a broad spectrum of the arts and politics. In fact, he had a kind of Forrest Gump-like gift for being present during some of the most important events of the last half of the 20th century. His career and personal life cut across ethnic and other cultural divisions, and he moved freely between the music, literary, theater and cinematic worlds. In the 1950s, he hung out in the folk music scene in Chicago with Bob Dylan, and he was a close friend of comedian Lenny Bruce's. In fact, he was present at the Chicago folk club called the Gate of Horn when Bruce was arrested in 1962 on obscenity charges.

Next page: Shel was living on the top floor of Hugh Hefner's mansion, churning out cartoons for Playboy