When Peter Yarrow co-wrote the song, "Puff the Magic Dragon," nearly 50 years ago during a break from college exams, he never dreamed it would become one of the most beloved, enduring children's songs of all time. But endure it has, and it is now being introduced to a new generation of children in picture book format. Complete with a four-song CD that includes the title track sung by Yarrow and his daughter, Bethany, Puff the Magic Dragon (Sterling, 2007) brings Puff, Jackie Paper and the land of Honalee alive once more.

What's special to Yarrow about this book was the opportunity to work with his daughter, a respected singer and musician in her own right. The theme of the song is about losing the innocence of childhood, and Yarrow felt that poignancy in re-recording his famous song with Bethany.

"Working on this project with my daughter makes this an intergenerational statement that has a lot of meaning for me that wouldn't have existed otherwise," Yarrow says. "It's especially true since my daughter has a little girl of her own, my granddaughter, Valentina, who is 6 months old. When we recorded these songs, my point of view was guided by them and my feelings for them."

Yarrow was just a child himself, about 7 or 8, when his mother took him to see Isaac Stern in concert. Yarrow fell in love 'Äì with the violin, with Stern and with the idea of making music. He begged his mother for violin lessons, and that summer began studying under the tutelage of the wife of the great violinist Misha Mishakoff. He says that back in those days, and in his neighborhood, a cultural education was something everyone took for granted.

"I was already taking art lessons, which I'd been doing since age 6," Yarrow says. "If you grow up as a Jew in New York in that era you're going to take music, art and learn how to play ball. It's about developing all your interests and talents with an emphasis on achievement."

Yarrow's achievements led him to attend the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art as an art student. At the same time, he became interested in folk music, as were virtually all of his friends at the time. He went on to attend Cornell University where he majored in experimental psychology and served as president of the folk music club. That latter position allowed him to produce concerts and meet working folk musicians.

It was about this time that Yarrow started dabbling in writing his own songs. He says he doesn't think he was particularly talented, and wrote only two songs during that period. The first he wrote by himself, a song he called "Talking Cornell Coed Blues." The second he co-wrote with his friend, Leonard Lipton.

"Lenny had been coming to my apartment during exams, and had been meeting the poet Ogden Nash and was very inspired by Nash's work," Yarrow says. "He had typed out the first part of 'Puff the Magic Dragon' and I was delighted by what he had so far. I put in the second part and put a tune to it."

After graduating with his degree in psychology, Yarrow decided to pursue his love of music. At that time, Greenwich Village was teeming with young, creative people who shared Yarrow's musical passions. He joined up with two of them, Noel "Paul" Stookey, an aspiring stand-up comic, and Mary Travers, a tall, attractive blond who was already an emerging folk singer. Their first album, the self-titled Peter, Paul and Mary, was an instant success in 1961, with such classic songs as "If I Had a Hammer" and "Where Have all the Flowers Gone?" Within three years, they had three top 10 albums of folk music.

Puff made his first appearance on the second album. Yarrow recalls that they had put a couple of children's songs on their first album and, in an attempt to make their music accessible and enjoyable for everyone, decided to put at least one children's song on every album. When it came time to record the second, Yarrow suggested the song he and Lipton had written in college. At the time, it didn't seem to make much of an impression.

Then, somewhere in the state of Washington, a disc jockey played "Puff the Magic Dragon" on the air, in conjunction with a contest where the station invited kids to send in drawings of their idea of what the dragon might look like.

"Within a week they had 5,000 responses," Yarrow says. "No contest response had ever been so profound and it made the news all over the country. That led Warner Bros. to put Puff out as a single and it just exploded."

Peter, Paul and Mary are still together and still perform, 46 years after their first hit album. Yarrow, always an activist for social causes, has long used his music to help make a positive difference, and now devotes most of his time and energy to Operation Respect (www.operationrespect.org/index.php), an organization he founded to encourage compassionate, safe environments for children.

It's all in the spirit of Puff and in Yarrow's belief that we should protect and preserve the innocence of childhood. "Children need to be able to sing together and to know that they are safe and respected," Yarrow says. "There is nothing more precious or more important than that."