I guess it won't surprise anyone here if I be the pedantic person and answer this bit of trivia!

The poem was apparently written by Hughes Mearns:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_Mearns


I first ran across it in a brilliant mystery novel written by Fredric Brown in 1950, "Night of the Jabberwock". In it, the main character refers to that poem a number of times, and relates it to a sort of archetypal name, "Yehudi" or "Yehudi Smith". "Yehudi" is apparently a name used to represent an anonymous anyman - someone that no one knows, and no one remembers.

I ran across this site which poses a believable history for a once-common phrase, "Yehudi did it", which also mentions the relation to the "man who wasn't there" poem:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-yeh1.htm

Anyways, if anyone reading this is thread is interested in reading a really entertaining murder mystery by a writer who influenced a lot of sci-fi writers in the past, you couldn't do better than to read "Night of the Jabberwock". It's brilliant and bizarre - a murder mystery all set around Lewis Carroll's famous poem, Jabberwocky.

Yehudi in the Semetic languages refers to the Jews.

Perhaps a reference to the Wandering Jew...