Peter Yarrow (born May 31, 1938) is an American singer and songwriter who found fame for being in the 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. Yarrow co-wrote (with Leonard Lipton) one of the group's best known hits, "Puff, the Magic Dragon". He is also a political activist and has supported causes that range from opposition to the Vietnam War to school anti-bullying programs.
Early life and family
Peter Yarrow was born in Manhattan, the son of Vera Wisebrode (née Vira Burtakoff) and Bernard Yarrow. His parents were educated Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, whose families had settled in Providence, Rhode Island.
Bernard Yarrow (1899–1973) attended the Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland) and the Odesa University (Odesa, Ukraine), before emigrating to the United States in 1922 at the age of 23. He anglicized his surname from Yaroshevitz to Yarrow, obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia University in 1925 where he joined Phi Sigma Delta fraternity, and in 1928 graduated from Columbia Law School. He then maintained a private law practice in New York City until 1938, when he was appointed an assistant district attorney under the then-district attorney, Thomas E. Dewey. In 1944 he was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, where he served with distinction.
After the war, Bernard Yarrow joined Sullivan and Cromwell, the Dulles brothers' law firm. He was a founding board member of the National Committee for a Free Europe, an anti-Communist organization. In 1952 he became a senior vice-president of the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe, an organization he helped to found.
Yarrow's mother Vera (1904–1991), who had come to America at age three, became a speech and drama teacher at New York's Julia Richman High School for girls. She and Bernard divorced in 1943 when their son Peter was five, and Vera subsequently married Harold Wisebrode, the executive director of the Central Synagogue in Manhattan. Bernard Yarrow married his wartime London OSS partner Silvia Tim, and converted to Protestantism.
Peter Yarrow spent the summers of 1951 and 1952 at Interlochen's Music camp. Peter graduated second in his class among male students with a physics prize from New York's High School of Music and Art, where he had studied painting. He was accepted at Cornell University as a physics major but soon switched majors, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology in 1959. Among his Cornell classmates were Lenny Lipton, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Fariña and David Shetzline.
Music career
Yarrow began singing in public during his last year at Cornell while participating in Harold Thompson's popular American Folk Literature course, colloquially known on campus as "Romp-n-Stomp". The course was "a highlight of late-1950s student life at Cornell", Yarrow reminisced, and the ability to sing and play guitar was a prerequisite for enrollment. Thompson would lecture on a topic for 20 or 30 minutes and afterwards a student would sing songs related to his theme. The experience of performing in front of a large audience was a thrilling one for Yarrow, who discovered he loved it. He branched out to lead community sings on weekends.
Upon graduation, Yarrow played in folk clubs in New York City, appeared on the CBS television show Folk Sound USA, and performed at the Newport Folk Festival, where he met manager and musical impresario Albert Grossman. One day, the two were at Israel Young's Folklore Center in Greenwich Village discussing Grossman's idea for a new group that would be "an updated version of the Weavers for the baby-boom generation ... with the crossover appeal of the Kingston Trio". Yarrow noticed a picture of Mary Travers on the wall and asked Grossman who she was. "That's Mary Travers," Grossman said. "She'd be good if you could get her to work." The lanky, blonde Kentucky-born Travers was well connected in Greenwich Village folk song circles. While still a high-school student at the progressive Elizabeth Irwin High School she had been picked out by Elizabeth Irwin's chorus leader Robert De Cormier to sing in a trio called The Song Swappers, backing up Pete Seeger in the 1955 Folkways LP reissue of the Almanac Singers' The Talking Union and two other albums. As well as performing twice with Seeger at Carnegie Hall, Travers had also played a folksinger in a short-lived Broadway play called The Next President, starring satirist Mort Sahl, but she was known to be painfully introverted and loath to sing professionally.