On this date in 1925, songwriter Robert Bernard “Moose” Sherman — who coined the 34-letter word “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” for the film “Mary Poppins” — was born in New York City to Rosa and Avrum “Al” Sherman. Robert’s brother Richard, three years younger, typically composed the music while Robert wrote the lyrics after they later teamed up.
Al Sherman was born in Kiev, then in the Russian Empire, into a musical Jewish family and moved with them in 1909 to New York, where he organized and led a small orchestra and worked alongside George Gershwin and Vincent Youmans. He married the actress Rosa Dancis when he was 26. He rose to become one of Tin Pan Alley’s most sought after songwriters in the vaudeville era, with stars like Rudy Valee and Eddie Cantor recording his songs.
The family’s peripatetic lifestyle for several years stopped in California in 1937. At Beverly Hills High School, he took violin and piano and wrote and produced radio and stage programs. He joined the U.S. Army at age 17 and in 1945 was with the troops that liberated the Dachau concentration camp, the horrific images of which he was never able to erase from his mind. He had been shot in the knee earlier, a wound that forced him to walk with a cane for the rest of his life.
He enrolled at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., where he edited the campus newspaper, wrote two novels and graduated in 1949, majoring in English and painting. He and Richard started writing songs after a challenge by their father and founded Music World Corp. to publish them. In 1959, their first Top Ten hit was “Tall Paul” by Annette Funicello, a Disney Mouseketeer and budding teen heartthrob.
The song’s success attracted Walt Disney, who hired the Shermans to write for his studio. “It’s a Small World (After All)” became the most translated and performed song on Earth. The brothers won two Academy Awards for “Mary Poppins” (1964). Their numerous other Disney and non-Disney top box office film credits include “The Jungle Book” (1967), “The Parent Trap” (1961 and 1998), “The Aristocats” (1970), “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971), “Charlotte’s Web (1973), “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” (1977) and “Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989).
The Shermans were eclectic in their prolific composing of over 200 works, using diverse influences from Tin Pan Alley, jazz, Dixieland, barbershop, blues, tango, parlor songs and even operetta. “Richard wrote more of the music and sat at the piano, but there were porous boundaries between lyricist and composer.” (The Conversation, May 28, 2024)
After his marriage in 1948 to Ilse Hayes that was annulled in 1950, Sherman married Joyce Sasner in 1953 and they were together until her death in 2001. He moved from Beverly Hills to London the year after she died. They had four children: Laurie Shane (b. 1955), Jeffrey Craig (b. 1957), Andrea Tracy (b. 1960) and Robert Jason (b. 1968).
He and Richard were awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in 2005 were elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame. They were estranged in other aspects of their lives, however, due to personality and professional differences.
When asked if Judaism was practiced in his home, Robert’s son Jeffery said: “Mom was more religious [while I was] growing up than Dad. I shared that with her. Dad honestly stopped believing there could be a God after he witnessed what he did liberating Dachau. He loved the Jewish traditions and culture though.” (Jewish Journal June 19, 2024)
Sherman died in London at age 86. His son Robbie edited Sherman’s autobiography “Moose: Chapters From My Life” and published it posthumously in 2013. (D. 2012)
