A strong woman named Mary Travers died on Sept. 16 from complications of the chemotherapy given her for leukemia; she was 72.

All the girls in my college had wanted to look like Mary of Peter, Paul & Mary, and many of the guys adored her.  She was a dreamgirl:  pretty, six feet tall, blonde, sexy, sang up a storm, went to all the right demonstrations and never talked.  The appeal of the latter cannot be underestimated.

But she was a very different person than her PP&M persona — as I found out when I opened the show for her in Washington, DC, in the 1970’s, when she was doing a solo act.  A native New Yorker, she was tough as nails, shy as a lioness, talked a blue streak and was just fine to work with.

The gig at the old Cellar Door nightclub started with a bang.  Mary was traveling with a four-piece band and her two daughters; needing more space than a cramped dressing room, she had invaded the office of the head of Cellar Door Productions, which booked most of the large venues in DC.  One of her young daughters kept busy by using a paper punch to make pretty patterns in papers on the boss’s desk; they turned out to be an $11 million Rolling Stones multi-concert contract.  Loud words were spoken — but Mary did not vacate the premises.  She knew how many tickets she had sold and stood her ground.

When Mary found out that I had corresponded with her dad Bob Travers, a writer and public relations executive who had encouraged my writing career, we were instant buddies.  The weeklong gig, culminating in New Year’s Eve, went well from a business standpoint.  Mary’s many political gigs had made her a must-see among Democrats.

Her solo act was not as strong as the group’s, not surprisingly — after all, it’s a criticism that has been leveled at the likes of Dean Martin and John Lennon.  The very best show business teams are greater than the sum of their parts.  Some in the audience — especially the guys — were perplexed at how much she liked to talk onstage after being kept mute for years.   

Her closing number in DC was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the Bob Dylan classic that she, Paul and Peter had sung in front of a nation at a huge civil rights march led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that concluded at the Lincoln Memorial.

As she launched into “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, she asked me to join her onstage, which I did; then she swung into “Blowin’ in the Wind” without skipping a beat, and I looked to exit stage left — but she grabbed me.

“Where ya going?” she whispered between lines.

“I don’t know the words,” I whispered back. 

“Yes, you do,” she said.

I sang the entire song with her.

We met again years later at folksinger Bob Gibson’s farewell performance in Chicago, and she didn’t remember me — which was to be expected, especially under the dreary circumstances (our pal Gibson had developed progressive supranuclear palsy and was showing signs of debility).  I could have mentioned Dad and refreshed her memory, but I left it otherwise engaged.

She had re-united with Paul and Peter, wisely, and they continued to be internationally popular — forever an icon of a time in the Sixties, and a very good trio of performers.  Mary got old, heavy, and then very sick — but when we geezers saw her or heard her on the radio, we also saw and heard the lanky, sexy, socially conscious blonde that all the college girls had tried to look like in the early Sixties.

We will miss Mary — the alluring fictive persona of her youth, and the real showbiz New Yorker who, despite the song she sang, really did have a hammer after all.

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