In the early 1950’s my father was head of the architecture department at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and a colleague of Bob Schmertz. Our family lived in faculty housing across Forbes Avenue from the C.I.T. campus and our first floor apartment was a gathering place for fellow professors at the end of many a day. Bob never went anywhere without his banjo and when he stopped in to visit my parents my brothers and I always waylaid him in the house’s large common vestibule. He would sit with us on the long oak bench and begin to play his repertoire of children’s songs. The banjo echoed up the stairwell and the two Pekruhn kids on the second floor (another architect family) would run down to join the chorus until the grown-ups dragged Bob away with them for martinis, cigarettes, and boring faculty politics.

The annual Schmertz Christmas parties were legendary. Bob on the banjo, his own family members, fellow musicians and friends joined the inevitable musical extravaganza. And all the kids came along with their parents to be underfoot and under piano and generally adding to the raucous atmosphere.

I have no doubt that those other Schmertz-inoculated boomer babies did the same thing as my brothers and I when we went out into the world; we carried with us cassettes copied from our parents’ overplayed Schmertz albums, scratchy pops and clicks with the addition of the tape recorder’s hiss. I presume that those fellow Schmertz-o-holics have passed along Bob’s music to their own children, singing Angus MacFergus and Quack Quack Paddle-Oh as bedtime lullabies.

The topics of Bob’s songs and poems encompass his varied passions: architecture, history, river lore, religious subjects, creatures great and small … all seen through his unique prism reflecting the comedy and tragedy of the human condition.

Now that we are in the 21^st century and a fifth generation is appearing on the horizon, it seems a shame that only the original group of people who bought his albums and Songbook can enjoy and pass along Bob Schmertz’s joy of music and his talent with words.