At Cornell University in 1959, a nineteen year old student named Lenny Lipton sat in the library at Willard Straight Hall and read a poem by Ogden Nash about a “realio, trulio, little pet dragon“. As anyone who has ever been nineteen knows, it is a serious and sentimental age. Lenny later found himself thinking about dragons and lamenting the end of his childhood as he walked down the hill to the city of Ithaca to meet a friend for dinner. No one was home at his friend’s apartment, so he just let himself in (remember, this is 1959) and while he was waiting, sat down at a typewriter that belonged to his friend’s roommate, Peter. Lenny wrote down his own poem about a dragon and lost childhood fantasies and left the sheet in the typewriter.
Peter, a performer and concert organizer at Cornell, found the poem, added some words, and set it to music. A few years later, when Peter joined the emerging folk music scene in Greenwich Village, he founded a group with two other friends and that piece quickly became part of their repertoire. Peter tracked Lenny down to give him co-writer credit before the group recorded and released the song on vinyl. By early 1963, their record reached #2 on the popular charts and has been sung thousands of times since. Why, you probably know most of the lyrics yourself…