Get your own Free Home PageMeader launched his trademark act by accident. The regular comedy act he performed in New York clubs featured caricatures of political archtypes -- i.e., a southern senator. But one night in November 1960, while Meader was trying to support himself and his German-born wife he met while in the military in West Germany, he casually added some remarks about the president-elect and jumped into a brief "Let me say this about that" as Kennedy.
The audience loved it and Meader expanded the routine the next night. A manager soon signed him and 18 months later booked him on "Celebrity Talent Scouts," a summer replacement where celebrities introduced rising performers they had ostensibly found. Jim Baccus was Meader's sponsor.
Record producer Earle Doud, who had been wanting to do a Kennedy album, called the next day and after struggling to find a company willing to try the concept, lined up Cadence Records, a company with a reputation for boldness.
Despite his year in the sun for "The First Family," music is Meader's primary talent -- and great it is. Friends said he can extemporaneously compose parody songs on any topic.
Shirley Williams of Louisville, Ky., who lived one block from Meader in the early 1970s, said he frequently played her piano for hours at a time, often composing short songs, such as one Williams recalls him writing after she tried to shoo him away so she could work on a speech she was to deliver at Berea College.
"He sat down at the piano and started writing funny lyrics about me making a speech at Berea," she recalled. "He was very good at it.... I very much enjoyed having the house full of music."
Williams and Meader have dropped out of touch, but nearby residents Bob and Paula Watson still greet Meader during his Kentucky Derby visits, when he plays honky-tonk music in clubs around Louisville. The tunes bring back memories of Meader's regular playing 25 years ago, Bob Watson said.
"It was a mixture of music and comedy and poetry," he recalled. "He could be pretty funny. Then, later in the evening he would do some poetry that he had written... He was the best entertainer I ever saw. I don't think there was ever anybody who could entertain a crowd in so many ways."
Watson, who was -- and still is -- an accounting and typing teacher at a high school, said he and Meader partied frequently and sometimes discussed the sudden collapse of Meader's career a decade earlier.
"It was an amazing story, what he had been through," Watson said. "He never has gotten over that... A comedy career was gone because he couldn't be funny."
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