The Rest Of The Story

“Who are those people”?, you may well be asking. The man in this photo is called Robert Sherman. The little boy is his son, Jeffrey. They are a part of a story that very possibly touched your life as it has ours.

Robert Sherman and his brother, Richard, were the first and only staff song writers hired by Walt Disney himself to write musical numbers for the studio’s musical movies. In 1963 they were working on a film that was to star Julie Andrews. The film was Mary Poppins. They had written and completed all the music by the time she was hired to play the lead role.

She loved their work, save one song she wasn’t keen on (it also happened to be their favorite). Walt Disney agreed with Miss Andrews and asked the Sherman brothers to write something else that more embodied “the spirit of Mary Poppins”.

Though they tried again and again, nothing was coming to them. The songwriters had a hit a wall. Jeffrey Sherman recalls, “Dad was depressed by this, came home very early. I was surprised to find him home before 5:30 with the curtains all drawn. He asked me how my day was. I told him that at school they had given us the polio vaccine. My dad was surprised I let someone give me a shot at school.
‘Didn’t it hurt?’ he asked.
I responded, ‘No. They dropped the medicine in a sugar cube and you just ate it.'”
Dad stared at me a long time, and then said, ‘thank you,’ and went to the phone to call my uncle. The next day they wrote the song.

Regardless your age it is very likely you have seen this movie and sung this song. If you are like we are, you’ve sung it over and over and over again. The message is as appropriate and timeless today as it was in 1964 when Mary Poppins first sung on screen:
(click where it says Watch on YouTube)

“In every job to be done, there is an element of fun.
You find the fun and….snap! The jobs a game.
And every task you undertake, becomes a piece of cake,
A lark…a spree…it’s very clear to see….that…
A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,
The medicine go down…the medicine go down.
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way.”

Just remember, whatever difficulty you are facing, look for the good. The hard stuff, the “bad” stuff, will go down much easier if you do. As Mary taught us all, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” 🙂