The point of all this is proving something completely different anyways. I want to show that for spaces $X,Y$ with chosen points $x_0,y_0$ such that $(X,x_0)$ and $(Y,y_0)$ form good pairs, $p_{X}^{*} \oplus p_{Y}^{*}: H^{k}(X ; R) \oplus H^{k}(Y ; R) \rightarrow H^{k}(X \vee Y ; R)$ is an isomorphism, where $p_X$, $p_Y$ are the collapse maps from $X \vee Y$ to $X$ resp. $Y$.
The problem is basically that an isomorphism in the other direction is easy to get via the LES of a pair, and in principle I just gotta concatenate this with the sum of the collapses and see that it yields the identit…