Biography

Songwriter ("It Was a Very Good Year", "I Believe", "Tico Tico", "Perdido", "Quando Quando Quando"), composer, author and producer, educated at Juilliard, City College of New York, BSS. He edited the college magazine "Mercury". For the Broadway show "What Makes Sammy Run?", he wrote the stage scores and song lyrics. Joining ASCAP in 1958, his other popular-song compositions include "Come to the Mardi Gras", "A Room Without Windows", "When You Cry, When You Laugh", "Sonata", "Good Morning, Heartache", "Castle Rock", "Made for Each Other", "The Friendliest Thing", "Some Days Everything Goes Wrong", "A Tender Spot", "One God", "Beloved Be Faithful", "My Hometown", "Something to Live For", "Longing", "The Rickety Rickshaw", "I Wuv a Wabbit", "Street of Thirty Three Steps", "Father of Girls", "Meet Mr. Callaghan", and "My Friend".
- IMDb mini biography by: Hup234!

Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983.

His brother Milton Drake was the lyricist of "Mairzy Doats" and other popular songs in the 1940s, and his other brother Arnold Drake became a noted comic book illustrator.

He began writing music when he was 12. While attending the City College of New York, he hung out at the offices of music publishers. His breakthrough came in the early 1940s, when he accepted a job that more-experienced tunesmiths turned down: supplying English words to Latin American melodies.

He graduated in 1940 from City College of New York where he had majored in art, hoping to pursue illustration if music fell through. A bad heart kept him from military service in WWII.

My father said to me that he did not want to aid and abet me on the road to hell, and he insisted I come into his business [wholesale furniture]...I had a feeling I never would have been in the furniture man's hall of fame. [in an interview with the New York Times upon his induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983]