Most icons have humble origins. Take Mickey Mouse. He emerged after Walt Disney lost the rights to his original long-eared creation, Oswald the Rabbit. Or Superman: his creators originally cast him as a bald-headed villain bent on destroying the world, a character so dark nobody paid attention. The Cat in the Hat? He was the response by Theodore Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) to a challenge that he couldn't write an entire book without using adjectives. So it should come as no surprise that a certain dragon who lived by the sea and frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah-Lee was the product of a homesick freshman, a long walk down State Street, and a broken dinner date.

"A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys . . ." That was Lenny Lipton's story nearly four decades ago in the spring of 1959. A Brooklyn native, he was away from home for the first time. While lamenting the end of his childhood, he stopped in the library at Willard Straight Hall and came upon a poem by Ogden Nash about a "Really-o-Truly-o-Dragon." I can do better than that, Lipton thought to himself. From the Straight, he walked down the hill to 343 State Street, where he was to meet his friend Peter Yarrow for dinner. In a moment that proved fateful for both, Yarrow wasn't home. So Lipton sat down at a typewriter, banged out a poem he had dreamed up on his walk, and left it there.

When Yarrow got back, he saw the poem and loved it. The aspiring folk singer set it to music, added some more words, tweaked it a bit. Yarrow graduated in 1959 and eventually teamed with two fellow singers he met in Greenwich Village, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers, to form a folk trio. In 1962, after Yarrow tracked Lipton down and added his name as co-writer, Peter, Paul & Mary made a studio recording of their co-authored song. "Puff the Magic Dragon" sold half a million copies in its first month after being released, rising to Number Two on the charts.

Peter, Paul & Mary became stars, producing eight gold and five platinum albums in the Sixties alone. Lenny Lipton moved on to other things. "It took me three minutes to write," he says. "It's the least effort I've put into anything I've created." After graduating with a physics degree in 1962, Lipton went on to produce twenty-five independent films (most of them documentaries about the Sixties counterculture movement in the Bay Area) and write four books. His first, Independent Filmmaking, stayed in print for twenty years. "There are probably more people who know I did that than who know I wrote 'Puff,'" he says. Lipton is also the primary inventor of the modern stereoscopic display used on computer workstations, and has twenty patents to his credit. But perhaps nothing he's done has had quite the impact of his magic dragon. "It's a song we sing at virtually every concert," says Yarrow, who estimates he's told Puff's story as many as 10,000 times over the years. "I think if we had to sing it to each other in a room we'd go stark-raving mad. But what gives it vitality and life is the way it's been embraced by the general public."

The very general public. There's a German version, a Yiddish version, a Japanese version, a Hawaiian version. There was a series of animated features for CBS in the Seventies, a popular children's book that greatly extended the story, and hundreds of versions by various performers. But you can't leash a dragon. The song became such a significant part of Americana that it entered the language, spawning countless parodies, some of then not for children. The name, Puff the Magic Dragon, has been appropriated for everything from a Dungeons & Dragons plot book to a roller coaster in Utah to a World Wide Web site devoted to political rants. Much to the chagrin of its co-authors, it was also the name of a bomber used extensively in Vietnam.

The song has even entered the realm of urban legend because of the long-lived rumor that it is actually a loosely-coded reference to marijuana (puff . . . drag-in . . . Jackie Paper . . . autumn mist). "That's imbecilic. Certainly, 'Puff' has a subtext, but the idea that it's a drug song is ludicrous," says Yarrow, who points out that even the"Star-Spangled Banner" could be misconstrued.

"It's a real simple story," says Lipton, who still speaks to Yarrow nearly every day. "It's 156 words. A little boy meets a dragon, they have an adventure, and the little boy leaves. The dragon gets depressed and goes into a cave." In fact, years later he realized the story is a lot like that of Peter Pan. There are those who think Puff represents an imaginary friend and others who think Puff is a toy or doll. The people of Hanalei, Hawaii, sell (unauthorized) Puff memorabilia and offer Magic Dragon tours of their caves. Lipton and his family make the trip there from their home in California's Marin County every few years. "I feel like it's my place," he says.

Though the lyrics began only as an homage to the distance between Brooklyn and Ithaca, between childhood and college, from the manual typewriter on State Street arose a folk classic, the Sixties, childhood, and the young at heart. "It may not have originated by intent with the song, but history has brought it into focus," Yarrow says. "So when people hear 'Puff the Magic Dragon' now, they respond to it as if it's a call to remember that as adults we still have our hopes and dreams. They realize that a dragon does live forever."

-- Brad Herzog '90

Published in Cornell Alumni Magazine. Used by permission.