Pendergast T., Pendergast S. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Volume 1: A-D

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was honored with an award for lifetime achievement at Kennedy

Center in 1989.

—Benjamin Grifﬁth

URTHER READING:

Everson, William K. Claudette Colbert. New York, Pyramid Publica-

tions, 1976.

Parish, James Robert. The Paramount Pretties. New Rochelle, New

York, Arlington House, 1972.

Quinlan, David. The Illustrated Directory of Film Stars. New York,

Hippocrene, 1982.

Quirk, Lawrence J. Claudette Colbert: An Illustrated Biography.

New York, Crown, 1985.

Shipman, David. The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years. New

York, Crown, 1970.

Cold War

Struggle between the Western democracies and the Eastern

Communist nations was probably inevitable from the ﬁrst shot ﬁred

in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Guided by one of the essential

tenets of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist doctrine—

‘‘Capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruc-

tion’’—Eastern nations believed in the eventual worldwide triumph

of Communism and were motivated to help speed the day. The

nations of the West, on the other hand, long regarded Communism

(and those governments espousing it) as a threat striking at the very

heart of the capitalist economies that formed the basis of many

Western democracies. The differences between these two ideological

standpoints produced a state of disharmony that broke into open, if

limited, warfare twice (in Korea and Vietnam), but remained for the

most part a muted conﬂict—a ‘‘cold’’ war.

Historians disagree about the exact point at which the Cold War

began. Some date it from Winston Churchill’s 1946 speech, given in

Fulton, Missouri, in which he declared that an ‘‘iron curtain’’ had

come down in Europe, dividing the Soviet-occupied countries from

those allied with the West. Others argue that the ‘‘long twilight

struggle,’’ as President Kennedy described it, began in 1947 with the

Truman Doctrine—a declaration that the United States would act

decisively to prevent the further spread of Communism in Europe.

There are even those scholars who believe that the Cold War began

when the ink dried on the documents containing the Japanese surren-

der to the Allies in 1945.

If there is a lack of consensus regarding the cold war’s begin-

ning, virtual unanimity exists about its end. In 1991, the Soviet

Communist Party was dissolved, and the Union of Soviet Socialist

Republics reverted to what it had once been—a collection of separate

slavic nations, the largest being Russia. Although China, the world’s

most populous country, remained a Communist state, as did North

Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam, it is generally believed that when Soviet

Communism died, so did the Cold War.

During the approximately 45 year struggle, the opposing nations

battled on many levels: economic, political, scientiﬁc, diplomatic—

and through popular culture. Indeed, there is not an aspect of

American popular culture that was unaffected by the Cold War. The

principal media involved included ﬁlm, both commercial and govern-

mental, television, ﬁction, and to a lesser extent, theater.

While the government eventually found more subtle ways to

communicate anti-Communist messages to the American public, in

the early years of the Cold War the U.S. government contributed

directly to popular culture by producing a number of ‘‘documenta-

ries.’’ These documentaries, produced mostly during the 1950s,

alerted citizens to the dangers of Communism. Some, like The Bell

(1950), took a positive, pro-American outlook, using the Liberty Bell

as a symbol behind which people from all walks of American life

could rally. Most of these ﬁlms—such as Communist Blueprint for

Conquest (1955), The Communist Weapon of Allure (1956), and

Communist Target: Youth (1962), which included an introduction by

then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy—were strongly negative in

tone and made Communism the object of their censure. The most

memorable of these propaganda ﬁlms, however, was not made in the

traditional documentary mode, but rather like an episode of The

Twilight Zone, a television program that would not appear for another

four years. In Red Nightmare (1955), narrator Jack Webb (of Dragnet

fame) presents a typical small-town American family, then shows

what their lives would be like if the Communists took over America.

Religion is forbidden, education becomes indoctrination, and love of

family is made subordinate to party loyalty. When the head of the

household (played by Jack Kelly) protests, he is sentenced to be shot.

Just as the ﬁring squad is taking aim, he wakes up, back in his beloved

America, free from his horrible ‘‘red nightmare.’’ As the movie ends,

the narrator reminds us that it could happen in America, if citizens

ever relaxed their vigilance. Distributed free of charge to civic groups,

Scout troops, churches, and schools, the ﬁlms were even broadcast by

local television stations.

The government also distributed ﬁlms on a related subject: civil

defense. Although the United States had never experienced aerial

attack, serious discussions of the possibility started early in the Cold

War, especially in 1949 when the Soviet Union exploded its ﬁrst

atomic bomb. In response to the perceived military threat, America’s

leaders greatly increased military budgets, and designed a civil

defense program to reassure average citizens that nuclear war could

be survived. While most government experts privately shared the

view that no man-made structure could withstand a nuclear blast, and

that an all-out nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union would produce

American casualties numbering in the tens of millions, they also

agreed that if the public knew the actual dangers, a panic, or worse, an

outbreak of ‘‘Better Red than dead’’ defeatism would threaten the

country. Thus, to preserve public morale, the underlying theme of the

civil defense program became the illusion of safety. The program

conveyed its messages of optimism through pamphlets, posters, and

ﬁlms with titles like Survival under Atomic Attack, Operation Cue,

The Atom Strikes, and You Can Beat the A-Bomb. At least one civil

defense ﬁlm was intended primarily for schools. Entitled Duck and

Cover, it featured an animated character named Bert the Turtle. Bert

taught children that, in case of atomic attack, all they had to do to

protect themselves was crouch down and cover their heads. The

patent absurdity of this ‘‘defense’’ against a nuclear blast would be

illustrated decades later, in the 1982 satirical documentary The

Atomic Cafe, and in a 1997 episode of the ‘‘adult’’ television cartoon

show South Park.

Hollywood ﬁlms also reﬂected, and helped to create, the culture

of the Cold War. Studios eagerly produced anti-Communist ﬁlms in

the 1950s—partly as a reﬂection of the temper of the times, but also

COLD WAR ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

550

A typical bomb shelter built during the Cold War.

because ﬁlmmakers themselves had come under investigation by

Washington’s Red-raiders. During World War II, several Hollywood

studios had made pro-Soviet ﬁlms, such as Mission to Moscow (1943)

and Song of Russia (1944), and these ﬁlms had been made with both

the permission and encouragement of the U.S. government, which

wanted to maintain good relations with its Soviet ally. By the 1950s

however, the House Un-American Activities Committee (known as

the HUAC) came to regard the studios with suspicion. Mindful of the

inﬂuence that motion pictures can have upon the citizenry, and fearful

that the persuasive powers of ﬁlm might be used to advance the cause

of Communism, the HUAC and Senator Joseph McCarthy put the

ﬁlm industry in the thick of the anti-Communist investigations. The

atmosphere produced in the industry by these investigations may

explain the production of such blatantly anti-Red ﬁlms as I Married a

Communist (1950), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), My Son

John (1952), Big Jim McLain (1952), and Invasion U.S.A. (1952).

But by the 1960s, Hollywood’s way of dealing with the ‘‘Red

Menace’’ changed. Because the heat from Washington had largely

abated, and because the propaganda ﬁlms had not been proﬁtable

ventures, Hollywood’s depictions of the Cold War began to diversify.

Some of the 1960s ﬁlms dealt with nuclear brinkmanship between the

United States and the Soviet Union. Fail-Safe (1964), based on a

popular novel, posits a technical glitch that accidentally sends a ﬂight

of American nuclear bombers on its way to a pre-assigned target:

Moscow. The computer has sent its ‘‘war’’ message to the bombers,

and they cannot be recalled. The basic premise of Fail-Safe was

brilliantly but viciously satirized by Stanley Kubrick in his 1964 ﬁlm

Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the

Bomb. It is a thoroughly ‘‘black’’ comedy, as any ﬁlm that attempts

to ﬁnd humor in nuclear war must be. Another ‘‘cold war’’ ﬁlm

released the same year was Seven Days in May, which involves a plot

by the U.S. military to take over the government after the President

negotiates an unpopular arms-reduction treaty with the Soviets.

A separate course for cold war cinema was charted in 1962, with

the release of the ﬁrst James Bond movie, Dr. No. The success of the

ﬁlm, along with the even larger grosses earned by its successors From

Russia with Love (1963) and Goldﬁnger (1964)—with many others to

follow—created a ‘‘spy craze’’ in American popular culture that

lasted into the next decade. The ‘‘Bond’’ inﬂuence was seen in other

ﬁlms, both serious (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; The Quiller

Memorandum; The Ipcress File) and satirical (Our Man Flint; The

Silencers; Murderer’s Row), as well as television programs (I Spy;

COLD WARENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

551

Secret Agent; The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and even men’s toiletries

(‘‘007’’ brand cologne; ‘‘Hai Karate’’ aftershave).

As U.S.-Soviet relations improved, the Cold War gradually

thawed during the 1970s. The temperature dropped again in 1980,

however, with the election of conservative Ronald Reagan to the

White House. In his ﬁrst term, at least, Reagan was frequently given

to tough talk about the Communists. In one speech, he referred to the

Soviet Union as an ‘‘evil empire.’’ On another occasion, just prior to a

radio address, Reagan obliged a request for a sound check by saying,

‘‘This is the President speaking. I have just outlawed Russia. Bomb-

ing begins in ﬁve minutes.’’

In accordance with the Reagan Administration’s bellicose atti-

tude toward the Communist world, a new wave of anti-Communist

cinema came in the 1980s. Red Dawn (1984) portrayed a Soviet

occupation of the United States and focused on the activities of a band

of American teenagers waging guerrilla warfare against the invaders.

Rocky IV (1985) pitted Sylvester Stallone’s gutsy pugilist against the

seemingly unbeatable Drago, the best ﬁghting machine that the

Soviet state could produce. Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) sent

another popular Stallone character to rescue American POWs still

held in Vietnam (and also to kill Communists by the score). The 1984

ﬁlm Missing in Action (along with two sequels) returned Chuck

Norris to Vietnam on a series of missions similar to Rambo’s.

Invasion U.S.A. (1985) featured Norris against a small army of Soviet

inﬁltrators sent to disrupt American society. Rambo III (1988) saw

Stallone’s character battling the evil Russians in Afghanistan. Top

Gun (1986) starred Tom Cruise and extolled the skill and bravery of

the Navy’s ﬁghter pilots (who even got to shoot down a few Russians

in a skirmish near the ﬁlm’s end).

Throughout the Cold War, other forms of entertainment also

showed an awareness of some of the issues involved in the East-West

struggle. Theater was not one of the hotbeds of social activism during

the Cold War, at least until the Vietnam War became a burning issue.

But one notable exception to this observation is Arthur Miller’s 1953

play The Crucible. Nominally concerned with the Salem witch trials

of 1692, the play is based on events and characters from the actual

trials, but few watching the performance at the time could have any

doubt that the play was a commentary on the anti-Communist hysteria

gripping the nation. Miller has since been very clear that he intended

The Crucible as a condemnation of the McCarthy ‘‘witch hunts’’ in

which so many reputations, careers, and even lives were destroyed,

often without any evidence to support the accusations made.

Miller did face some hostility from the Right over this play, as he

had for some of his earlier dramas. Political tensions in the United

States affected many Left-wing writers in the 1950s. Once a writer

had been branded ‘‘subversive’’ by the HUAC, Senator McCarthy, or

some other ‘‘authority,’’ many bookstores would not put his or her

books on the shelves. Blacklisting limited the works of writers like

Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., Howard Fast, and Dashiell Hammett

to a few bookstores dedicated to the writings of the Left.

This did not mean that the Cold War could not be portrayed in

novels. Many books were written about the era while it happened, and

they were often very successful—as long as they had the ‘‘right’’

viewpoint. The Ugly American (1958) by William Lederer and

Eugene Burdick critiqued American diplomacy in Asia, and is

believed to have given John F. Kennedy the idea for what would

become the Peace Corps. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian

Candidate (1958) posited that U.S. soldiers captured during the

Korean War could be so thoroughly ‘‘brainwashed’’ by the Chinese

as to become human robots upon their return home, awaiting only the

right signal to carry out the nefarious missions for which they had

been programmed. This novel of political paranoia was later made

into a successful ﬁlm by director John Frankenheimer.

As with ﬁlm, cold war ﬁction changed as America entered the

1960s. The early part of the decade featured a number of novels about

nuclear brinkmanship. Fail-Safe (1962) and Seven Days in May

(1962) were both written in this period and were soon made into ﬁlms.

Other novels dealing with the possibilities of nuclear war included Pat

Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) and William Miller’s A Canticle for

Liebowitz (1959). The novels The 480 by Eugene Burdick (1964),

Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (1959), Night of Camp David by

Fletcher Knebel (1965), and The Man by Irving Wallace (1964)

explored similar kinds of domestic cold war political tensions found

at the heart of Seven Days in May.

Although these kinds of political novels continued to appear in

the second half of the 1960s, they were far outnumbered by the same

genre that had come to dominate the movie screens by that time: the

spy story. Although Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, died in

1964, the literary trend he started continued long after his passing.

Several of Fleming’s countrymen wrote spy ﬁction that was popular

in the United States, including John Le Carré, who wrote the

bestseller, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963). Another

British writer, Elleston Trevor, used the pen name Adam Hall to write

a series of suspenseful cold war novels featuring a secret agent known

only as Quiller, including The Ninth Directive (1966) and The Striker

Portfolio (1969). Many American authors also used the Cold War as a

background for tales of suspense and adventure, including Donald

Hamilton, who wrote a series of paperback novels featuring ‘‘the

American James Bond,’’ a U.S. government assassin named Matt

Helm. Some of the many titles in this well-written series include The

Ambushers (1963) and The Menacers (1968). Former CIA man David

Atlee Phillips wrote a number of novels under the pseudonym Philip

Atlee, all of them featuring secret agent Joe Gall, who saved the

nation from the Reds in such titles as The Green Wound Contract

(1963) and The Trembling Earth Contract (1969). Even Mickey

Spillane, best known for his ‘‘tough guy’’ private eye novels featur-

ing Mike Hammer, began to write spy novels with Day of the Guns

(1964), which introduced secret agent Tiger Mann.

Television also played its role in the Cold War, through both

entertainment programming and news specials. In the 1950s, a

number of suspense shows with anti-Communist themes debuted,

including Foreign Intrigue, Passport to Danger, I Led Three Lives,

The Man Called X, Soldiers of Fortune, and Behind Closed Doors, but

few of these shows captured audience interest. In the 1960s, television

also participated in the ‘‘spy craze.’’ In addition to ‘‘serious’’

espionage shows, 1960s television offered spoofs of the genre,

including Get Smart (with Don Adams as an inept secret agent) and

The Wild, Wild West (a Bondian satire set in the Old West).

While local television stations made good use of government-

produced short ﬁlms, both those with anti-Communist themes and

those concerned with civil defense, national television stations pro-

duced their own documentaries about the dangers posed by world

Communism. Call to Freedom focused on the history of Austria, to

show how that country was able to free itself from partial Soviet

occupation following World War II. Nightmare in Red was a history

of the Soviet Union that suggested that Czarist rule was better than the

oppression, tyranny, and drudgery of life in the modern Soviet state.

Television also showed the cartoon series The Adventures of Rocky

and Bullwinkle, with its ‘‘villains’’ the bumbling spies Boris Badinov

and Natasha Fatale.

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552

Television provided the American public with one of the clearest

views into the HUAC’s investigations. Many of Senator Joseph

McCarthy’s committee’s hearings were televised live. At ﬁrst, the

coverage proved to be excellent publicity for McCarthy and his Red-

baiting activities. But eventually McCarthy’s bullying, demagoguery,

and carelessness with facts caught up with him. When attorney Joseph

Welch asked McCarthy, live on camera, ‘‘Have you no decency, sir?

Have you no decency at all?’’ millions of Americans found them-

selves pondering the same question about the Senator from Wiscon-

sin—and television made it possible.

—Justin Gustainis

URTHER READING:

Barson, Michael. ‘‘Better Dead Than Red’’: A Nostalgic Look at the

Golden Years of Russiaphobia, Red-baiting, and Other Commie

Madness. New York, Hyperion, 1992.

Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Cul-

ture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley, University of California

Press, 1997.

MacDonald, J. Fred. Television and the Red Menace: The Video Road

to Vietnam. New York, Praeger, 1985.

Whitﬁeld, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore, Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Cole, Nat ‘‘King’’ (1916?-1965)

Nat ‘‘King’’ Cole, pianist, songwriter, vocalist, and actor was

one of the most inﬂuential African American performers from the

early 1940s until his untimely death in 1965. Cole’s warm, open,

liquid, smooth voice was blessed with perfect intonation and diction,

and appealed to a crossover audience, garnering not only acceptance

in America but also worldwide. As a personality, Cole epitomized the

suave sophistication that urban blacks were beginning to aspire to in

the 1940s.

Cole’s date of birth is in question. For his two marriages in 1937

and in 1948, Cole gave birthdates of 1915 and 1919, respectively. For

the selective service he gave the year 1916. James Haskins and Leslie

Gourse, two Cole biographers, accepted 1916 since it was his draft

registration. Born Nathaniel Adams Coles in Montgomery, Alabama

on March 17, Cole was exposed to many types of black music. At the

age of four, the family moved to Chicago where jazz and gospel were

evolving. Cole’s father, Edward James Coles, Sr., was a Baptist

minister. His mother, Perlina Adames Coles, a pianist and choir

director, taught him to play the piano by ear. At 12, Cole played organ,

sang in his father’s church, and studied classical piano. In high school,

his mentors were N. Clark Smith, bandmaster, and Walter Dyett. His

family was indeed musical. His three brothers Eddie, Fred, and Isaac

were jazz musicians.

In Chicago, Cole led the Rogues of Rhythm and the Twelve

Royal Dukes that often played Earl Hines arrangements. In 1936,

Cole left Chicago to lead a band in a revival of the 1921 all black

musical comedy Shufﬂe Along, with music by Eubie Blake and lyrics

by Noble Sissle. When the show folded in Los Angeles, Cole landed a

job as a pianist at the Century Club in Santa Monica. Cole’s playing

was impressive and thereafter, he began a stint at the Swanee Inn in

Nat ‘‘King’’ Cole

Hollywood. Bob Lewis, the booking agent is said to have mused ‘‘Old

King Cole’’ and billed Cole as ‘‘King’’ Cole. The name stuck with

him throughout his career.

While Cole was best known as a vocalist and occasional pianist,

his most musically enduring work can be heard in the trio format.

Cole’s piano stylings and compositions draw from be-bop, among

other inﬂuences. The trio won the coveted Downbeat small combo

award from 1944-1947, and the Metronome Apollo award in 1945-

1948. Initially called King Cole and His Swingsters and later known

as the King Cole Trio, the group was the ﬁrst African American jazz

combo to have its own sponsored radio series, from 1948-1949.

In the trio format, Cole dipped into the wellsprings of black

music. The element of play and rhythmic vocal nuances can be heard

in ‘‘Gone with the Draft.’’ The inﬂuence of jive, folk narratives

appear in the lyric ‘‘cool papa, don’t you blow your top,’’ from

‘‘Straighten Up and Fly Right.’’ In ‘‘Are You Fer It,’’ and ‘‘This Side

Up,’’ Cole delves into the early California blues tradition with riffs

(repetitive phrases) in harmony with Moore’s guitar. The new emerg-

ing style of be-bop is shown to good advantage in ‘‘Babs,’’ while

scatting (the interpolation of non-sense syllables) can be heard in ‘‘I

Like to Riff.’’

Fats Waller, Count Basie, and principally Earl Hines inﬂuenced

Cole’s piano playing and, in turn, Cole’s trio format and piano and

vocal stylings inﬂuenced a number of subsequent musicians. Notable

jazz trios that adopted Cole’s instrumental format were the Oscar

Peterson Trio, Art Tatum’s Trio, and Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers,

among others. Cole also recorded with Lester Young in a session in

Los Angeles in 1942.

COLLEGE FADSENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

553

The Nat King Cole Trio captured the attention of the popular

market and paved the way for Cole to crossover from the rhythm and

blues market to the pop charts, and to launch his successful solo

career. From 1943 on, many of Cole’s songs appealed to popular

taste, beginning with ‘‘All For You’’ (1943), ‘‘Straighten Up and Fly

Right’’ (1944), ‘‘Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You?’’ (1944), and ‘‘Get

Your Kicks on Route 66’’ (1946). It was ‘‘The Christmas Song’’

(1946), however, that squarely validated his crossover appeal. These

standards, with string accompaniment led by arrangers such as

Nelson Riddle, would help to build Capital records, Cole’s principal

recording label. From 1946, Cole became hugely successful as a

popular vocalist and by 1951 had abandoned the trio format. Selected

songs in this format include ‘‘I Love You for Sentimental Reasons’’

(1946), ‘‘Nature Boy’’ (1948), another recording of ‘‘The Christmas

Song’’ (1949), ‘‘Mona Lisa’’ (1950), ‘‘Too Young’’ (1951), ‘‘Pre-

tend’’ (1953), the rhythm and blues ﬂavored ‘‘Send for Me’’ (1957),

‘‘Looking Back’’ (1958), and the country and western tinged ‘‘Ramblin’

Rose’’ (1962). Throughout the 1950s, Cole continued to perform in

clubs while putting on concerts abroad in Cuba, Australia, and Latin

America. Cole also took singing and acting roles in a number of

movies such as Small Town Girl, The Blue Gardenia, and Haija Baba,

with his most effective role in St Louis Blues, where he played W.

C. Handy.

Despite Cole’s enormous appeal he could not escape the racism

rampant in America. When he purchased a house in Los Angeles’s

fashionable Hancock Park, some white neighbors protested. He had to

abandon his series on network television because of the lack of a

national sponsor. Cole compromised by playing to segregated audi-

ences, which drew impassioned criticism from the National Associa-

tion for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Thurgood

Marshall, chief counsel for the NAACP, commented that all Cole

needed to complete his role as Uncle Tom was a banjo. In the 1960s,

with the emergence of the civil rights movement, neither Cole’s

image as a popular vocalist nor his actions adopted the cause of black

pride and consciousness. In spite of these setbacks, Cole’s music

penetrated many boundaries. In his time, Cole was a seminal ﬁgure in

jazz and popular music, and leaves a legacy of enduring music—both

as a vocalist and pianist—that continues to enrich us. Cole, a heavy

chain smoker, succumbed to lung cancer and died on February

15, 1965.

—Willie Collins

URTHER READING:

Cole, Maria, with Louie Robinson. Nat King Cole, An Intimate

Biography. London, W. H. Allen, 1972.

Gourse, Leslie. Unforgettable: The Life and Mystique of Nat King

Cole. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

Haskins, James, with Kathleen Benson. Nat King Cole: A Personal

and Professional Biography. Chelsea, Scarborough House, 1980.

Whitburn, Joel. Top R & B Singles 1942-1988. Menomonee Falls,

Record Research Inc., 1988.

College Fads

Over the course of the twentieth century, each generation of

college students seems to have been identiﬁed in the public mind with

mindless, often madcap fads, perhaps adopted as a silly counterpoint

to the demands of intellectual life. Some of these phenomena have

become iconic markers of their decades: the raccoon-coat craze of the

1920s, goldﬁsh swallowing in the 1930s, panty raids and telephone-

booth stufﬁng in the 1950s, piano smashing in the 1960s, and

streaking in the 1970s.

The goldﬁsh-swallowing era of campus lunacy peaked in the

spring of 1939. Although there were political events unfolding in

Europe that would lead to World War II, newspapers devoted much

space to this college fad. It all began when Harvard freshman Lothrop

Withington, Jr. told friends that he had observed goldﬁsh being

swallowed on a Honolulu beach, and that he had done it himself.

Someone challenged Lothrop, and a $10 bet was made, leading to a

demonstration in the freshman dining hall on March 3, 1939. While

cameras recorded a bit of history, Lothrop picked up a three-inch

goldﬁsh by the tail, dropped the little wiggler into his mouth, chewed,

and swallowed. Whipping out a toothbrush, he ceremoniously cleaned

his teeth. Before sitting down to a dinner of fried sole, he remarked

that the ‘‘scales caught a bit in my throat.’’

During the economic depression of the 1930s, there was no large

annual college-student migration to Florida, and the less expensive

fad of ﬁsh-swallowing sufﬁced for springtime excitement, becoming

at once a kind of intercollegiate sport. Frank Hope of Franklin and

Marshall College topped Withington by salting and peppering three

goldﬁsh and putting them away without chewing. The following day,

a classmate named George Raab swallowed six ﬁsh. Harvard’s Irving

Clark vaulted far ahead by force-feeding himself two dozen of the

little creatures, also announcing his willingness to eat beetles, spiders,

and worms. Subsequent records were soon posted and quickly bested

on campuses nationwide: University of Michigan (28), Boston Col-

lege (29), Albright College (33), and MIT (42). When a student at

Kutztown State in Pennsylvania broke the record by swallowing 43,

he was suspended for ‘‘conduct unbecoming to a student.’’

After a professor of anatomy at UCLA concluded that an

average-size male could safely down 150 live goldﬁsh, the all-time

record is reported to have zoomed to 210 ﬁsh at one sitting, swal-

lowed by an anonymous BMOC (big man on campus) at St. Mary’s

University. Within a month, students were looking for variations on

the theme, but the munching of 78-rpm phonograph records at the

University of Chicago or the masticating of magazines at Lafayette

College never captured the public imagination as did the swallowing

of little live ﬁsh. In the late 1960s goldﬁsh swallowers reappeared

brieﬂy on college campuses, but during that hectic era of student

protests, such meaningless pranks were generally ignored by the press.

In the spring of 1952, an outbreak of panty raids began at the

University of Michigan. When 600 students gathered outside a dorm

to listen to music on the ﬁrst evening of spring, someone shouted,

‘‘To the women’s dorms!’’ Suddenly the mob of male students forced

their way into a dormitory and began dashing into rooms to steal

lingerie. Copycat raids quickly followed at colleges and universities

from coast to coast. To a writer in U.S. News & World Report the fad

seemed inappropriate for a nation at war in Korea, and he asked why

the panty-raiders were not ‘‘in the army if they have so much energy

and so little to do?’’ Some university ofﬁcials tried to resist, but at the

University of Miami panty-obsessed males tore down a heavy wire

fence to get to the girls’ dorms. A wily director of women’s residences

at the University of Indiana took the opposite approach and left a

barrel of women’s underwear in plain view, ready to be conﬁscated

by the ﬁstful. That same spring at Ann Arbor, where the madness had

begun, 500 coeds broke into the men’s dorm in search of Jockey

COLLEGE FADS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

554

An example of the college fad of car stufﬁng.

shorts and other male underwear. Panty raids have not been revived

later, as many fads have been, and one writer suggested a reason:

‘‘Probably because the age of sexual permissiveness has rendered

such symbolic action as this meaningless.’’

Telephone-booth stufﬁng began on American campuses in the

spring of 1959, spreading out from California. At UCLA seventeen

men squeezed like sardines into a conventional seven-foot high

booth, followed quickly by an eighteen-man stufﬁng at California’s

St. Mary’s University. With all their planning and knowledge of

physics, students at MIT could only break that record by one. When

students at Modesto Junior College in California reported thirty-four

men in one booth, the record was investigated and then thrown out

because the booth had been laid on its side, permitting considerably

more horizontal stuffers to be accommodated. The most aesthetic

booth-stufﬁng occurred in Fresno, where coeds in one-piece bathing

suits gracefully wedged themselves into a booth submerged in a

swimming pool. The fad began and ended in the spring of 1959, and

was copied several years later by a brief fad involving students

stufﬁng themselves into Volkswagens.

In 1963 a jangling, cacophonous din rose on college campuses as

students used sledgehammers and axes to shatter full-size pianos.

Students at California Tech did the job in 10 minutes, 44 seconds, but

a Wayne State crew set the ultimate record: 4 minutes, 51 seconds. A

Life Magazine writer called the piano hacking ‘‘Andante on a

Choppin’ Theme,’’ noting that the grand ﬁnale was ‘‘Chopsticks.’’

Since it was a time of student protest, one of the Caltech choppers

called the act a comment on the ‘‘obsolescence of society.’’ One

group of dismemberers called its members by the academic-sounding

name, The Piano Reduction Society.

From late January to mid-March, 1974, when the nation was

suffering through a grim economic recession as well as the pains of

the Nixon impeachment inquiry, there suddenly appeared the most

merrily scandalous of all the college fads: streaking. Beginning in the

warmer climates of California and Florida, nude students began to

leap from behind bushes and dash across campus, parachute to earth

in their birthday suits, and bike through the town en masse and unclad.

Soon the fad spread throughout the country, even to the University of

Alaska, where streakers dashed out in sub-zero weather. The new

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craze was difﬁcult for student governments and town fathers to

combat. The mayor of Dover Township, New Jersey, threatened to

ﬁne streakers one dollar for every pound of ﬂesh they exposed. In

Honolulu a male student streaked through an ofﬁcial governmental

assembly, declaring himself loudly, ‘‘the Streaker of the House.’’

Spring graduations at many colleges and universities were marked by

the shedding of caps and gowns for a short streak. Newsweek

magazine called the fad ‘‘the sort of totally absurd phenomenon the

nation needed after a winter of lousy news.’’

For the most part it was a male phenomena, but Laura Barton, a

freshman at Carleton College, was widely recognized as the ﬁrst

female streaker when she appeared au naturel for a curtain call

following the college production of Measure for Measure. The record

for the largest crowd of streakers is claimed by the University of

Georgia, which mustered 1,543 nude students for a race through

campus. They had been preceded in fame by students at the universi-

ties of South Carolina, Maryland, and Colorado.

The commercial value of the fad soon became recognized, and a

Connecticut jewelry company sold medallions plated with silver and

gold, inscribed for the ‘‘free spirit shedding his inhibitions.’’ Psycho-

logical theorists explained the phenomenon as ‘‘the peaking of the

sexual revolution, which made public nudity, long a taboo, an

annoyance for some and an amusement for others.’’

—Benjamin Grifﬁth

URTHER READING:

Marum, Andrew, and Frank Parise. Follies and Foibles: A View of

20th Century Fads. New York, Facts on File, 1984.

Panati, Charles. Panati’s Parade of Fads, Follies, and Manias. New

York, HarperCollins, 1991.

Skolnik, Peter L., with Laura Torbet and Nikki Smith. FADS:

America’s Crazes, Fevers, and Fancies: From the 1890’s to the

1970’s. New York, Crowell, 1972.

College Football

Until the advent of television, college football was far more

popular than its professional counterpart. From the late nineteenth

century onward, many of the games greatest moments occurred on the

collegiate gridiron. Well before the epochal feats of Jim Brown, Gale

Sayers, Joe Willie Namath, and Joe Montana were being relayed by

television transmission, sport-writers and radio broadcasters had

immortalized Jim Thorpe, Knute Rockne, Red Grange.

Employed as initiation rites beginning in the early nineteenth

century, the ﬁrst college games proved disorderly and were outlawed

by university ofﬁcialdom. After the Civil War, two versions of

football appeared at northeastern schools, one resembling soccer,

with the picking up of the ball prohibited. On November 6, 1869,

approximately 200 spectators watched Princeton and Rutgers battle in

New Brunswick, New Jersey. With 25 players on each side, kicking

prevailed as Rutgers triumphed 6-4. Another brand of football,

similar to rugby, which allowed for the touching of the ball, cropped

up at Harvard. In 1876, the Intercollegiate Football Association was

formed, with representatives from Princeton, Columbia, Yale, and

Harvard. A touchdown counted for only one point, while a kicked

goal was worth four.

Not surprisingly, Ivy League schools dominated college foot-

ball’s early days. Yale’s Walter Camp, deemed ‘‘the Father of

Football,’’ devised many of the initial rules, thereby ensuring its

unique American quality. By 1880, thanks to Camp’s input, ‘‘Ameri-

can football began,’’ according to football historian Tom Perrin. As

beﬁtting broader changes in American life, it also acquired a more

professional cast. The game now featured 11-man lineups, scrimmage

lines separating offensive and defensive teams, and the quarterback at

the center of the offensive action. Soon, Camp had a hand in reducing

the playing ﬁeld in half, allowing the offense to obtain a ﬁrst down

after amassing ﬁve yards in three attempts, devising yard lines, and

initiating a modern scoring schema. The offensive line and backs

lined up apart from one another, and rules prohibited passes beyond

the line of scrimmage. Soon, offensive players were allowed to block

for ball carriers. In 1888, Camp called for tackling below the waist. In

this same period, graduate coaches—who were generally former

players—were often hired; at Yale, Camp served as the adviser to

Yale captains and graduate coaches.

Yale was the greatest team of the era, compiling a 324-17-18

record from 1872-1909 and winning 11 national championships,

three coached by Camp. At the outset, college football’s big games

pitted Yale against Princeton or Harvard. In 1889, Camp began

announcing his All-American teams, which were dominated by

college football’s Big Three for the next decade; Yale’s greatest star

was 5’9’’, 150 pound Frank Hinkey, a four-time All American end

who was proclaimed the top player of his generation. Camp also

wrote a series of sports books, advised other coaches, and watched

Yale alumni teach his methods across the land.

Football served as a unifying force for the increasingly larger

and more diverse pool of college students who almost religiously

identiﬁed with their teams. Pleased university administrators viewed

football as a means to acquire a still larger student body. The Big

Game, greater pageantry, mascots, nicknames, songs, and contests

attracting 40,000 fans to the Polo Grounds or Manhattan Field, all

demonstrated football’s increased popularity. So too write-ups in

newspapers, which increasingly devoted a full-page or more to sports

coverage. Piquing public controversy, however, were injuries and

fatalities that led President Theodore Roosevelt to invite representa-

tives from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton ‘‘to come to a gentlemen’s

agreement not to have mucker play.’’ Led by Camp, promises were

made to avoid excessive ‘‘roughness, holding, and foul play.’’ In late

1905, delegates from 62 universities established the Intercollegiate

Athletic Association, which in 1910 became the National Collegiate

Athletic Association. Rule changes allowing for the forward pass and

requiring ten yards to be gained within a four down set eventually

resulted in a more wide-open game. In 1912, the value of touchdowns

was increased to six points.

Equally important for the sports’s increased popularity were

mythical tales spun about legendary teams, coaches, and players. The

1901 Michigan Wolverines, spearheaded by newly arrived head

coach Fielding H. ‘‘Hurry Up’’ Yost, began a ﬁve-year run marred

only by one tie in ﬁfty-seven games. Scoring 2821 points, Michigan

allowed a mere 40 and shut-out Stanford 49-0 in the ﬁrst Rose Bowl.

In 1905, Michigan’s winning streak was ended by Amos Alonzo

Stagg’s University of Chicago squad, which featured its 5’7’’, 145

pound quarterback, Walter Eckersall. Following his arrival at Har-

vard in 1908, Percy Haughton turned the Fighting Crimson into

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college football’s premier team, winning three national champion-

ships in a four-year span, beginning in 1910. Glenn ‘‘Pop’’ Warner’s

1912 Carlisle Indians employed the single-wing formation to display

the versatility of tailback Jim Thorpe, whose 25 touchdowns and 198

points established a new collegiate scoring record. In 1913, Notre

Dame stunned heavily favored Army, 35-13, relying on the passing

combination of quarterback Gus Dorias and end Knute Rockne; the

previous year’s reduction of the ball’s circumference helped the

aerial game.

In 1918, Rockne became head coach at Notre Dame, which he

guided to ﬁve perfect seasons and a 105-12-5 record over the next

thirteen years. Competing against teams from throughout the land,

Rockne helped to popularize college football nationwide. Notre

Dame’s victory march became the best known, while Rockne ushered

in a wide-open brand of football. Attendance at college games soared,

and universities built great concrete and steel stadiums that could seat

70,000 or more fans. Notre Dame under Rockne featured stars like

All-American fullback George Gipp and the so-called Four Horse-

men, the famed 1924 backﬁeld. On his deathbed in 1920, Gipp

reportedly told his coach, ‘‘Sometime, Rock, when the team is up

against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys,

ask them to win one for the Gipper.’’ After watching the 1924 Notre

Dame-Army contest, Grantland Rice waxed eloquently: ‘‘Outlined

against the blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In

dramatic lore they were known as famine, pestilence, destruction, and

death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher,

Miller, Crowley, and Layden.’’ Playing in its lone bowl game until

1970, national champion Notre Dame defeated Pop Warner’s Stan-

ford team, headed by its great fullback Ernie Nevers, 27-10. The 1929

and 1930 seasons also concluded with Notre Dame as the best team in

the nation, but a plane crash near Bazaar, Kansas, in March 1931 took

Rockne’s life. Rockne left an unsurpassed winning percentage of

.881, the use of shock troops that set the stage for platooning, the

positioning of an end apart from other offensive linemen, and a more

exciting brand of football. Under Rockne, moreover, Notre Dame

acquired a national following, particularly among Catholics and

ethnics in a period that witnessed the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

The greatest individual player during college football’s so-

called golden era was halfback Harold ‘‘Red’’ Grange of Bob

Zuppke’s Fighting Illini. From 1923-1925, the Galloping Ghost used

his blinding speed to top the nation’s rushing charts, lead Illinois to a

national championship, and perform epochal feats on the gridiron. In

the initial twelve minutes of the 1924 contest against Michigan,

Grange scored four out of the ﬁrst eight times he touched the ball, on a

95 yard kickoff return, and on runs from scrimmage of 67, 56, and 44

yards. He later added a 15 yard touchdown and tossed an 18 yard

touchdown pass, leading Illinois to a 39-14 victory. Playing against

Penn in Philadelphia in 1925, Grange, disregarding a sloppy ﬁeld,

scored three times, while gaining 363 yards on 36 carries.

By the mid-1930s, the balance of power in the league was

shifting, and new football powerhouses were emerging. From 1934-

1936, Bernie Bierman’s Minnesota Gophers were considered as ﬁne

as any team in the country; 1936 witnessed the introduction of the

weekly press poll by Alan Gould, Associated Press sports editor.

Overland attacks were prominently featured during the depression

decade, with Alabama, featuring its ends, Don Hutson and Paul

Bryant, beating Stanford 29-13 in the 1935 Rose Bowl. That year,

Chicago’s halfback Jay Berwanger was named recipient of the ﬁrst

Heisman Award handed out by New York’s Downtown Athletic

Club. Jimmy Crowley of Four Horsemen fame constructed a potent

unit at Fordham, relying on the ‘‘Seven Blocks of Granite,’’ a line that

included guard Vince Lombardi, who would later go on to become the

legendary coach of professional football’s Green Bay Packers. In

1938, 5’7’, 150 pound quarterback and Heisman trophy winner

Davey O’Brien took TCU to a national title. In 1939—the year USC’s

Howard Jones won his ﬁfth national championship—Michigan’s

Tom Harmon led the nation in rushing; the following year, he scored

16 touchdowns and won the Heisman.

While Bierman once again won national championships with

Minnesota in 1940 and 1941, followed by Paul Brown’s 1942 Ohio

State Buckeyes, college football, not surprisingly, was soon dominat-

ed by Notre Dame and Army. Frank Leahy, while compiling a record

just short of Rockne’s—107-13-9—won national crowns with quar-

terbacks like Angelo Bertelli and John Lujack, and battled Army in a

series of monumental games. By 1944, Army coach Earl ‘‘Red’’

Blaik boasted an incredibly deep roster, which included halfback

Glenn Davis and fullback Felix ‘‘Doc’’ Blanchard. Eventually, both

Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside won Heismans, while Davis twice

ﬁnished second in the balloting. In 1944, Army, which scored 504

points in nine games, crushed defending national champion Notre

Dame 59-0. In 1945, Army won 48-0, while again leading the nation

in scoring with a 45.8 point average. Blanchard scored 18 touch-

downs, Davis tallied 19 and chalked up an 11.74 yards per carry

rushing average. Leahy’s team, loaded with All-Americans like guard

Bill Fischer, end Leon Hart, and tackle George Connor, rebounded in

1946, battling Army to a 0-0 tie. The Southwest Conference again

offered an exciting brand of football, and terriﬁc performers like

SMU’s Doak Walker, the 1948 Heisman recipient, and Kyle Rote and

Texas’s Bobby Layne. SMU ﬁnished unbeaten in 1947, its record

marred only by ties with TCU—a 19-19 game in which Walker was

responsible for 471 yards in total offense—and Penn State, in the

Cotton Bowl.

In the American heartland, Bud Wilkinson, a guard-turned

quarterback on Bernie Bierman’s 1935 and 1936 championship

teams, continued crafting a stellar record at Oklahoma, which eventu-

ally left him with a 145-29-4 record. He also won three national

championships and compiled an unbeaten streak of 47 games. Back-

to-back undefeated regular seasons in 1949 and 1950 led to Wilkinson’s

ﬁrst national title team, as determined by both the AP and the new

United Press International polls, although that squad, which had won

31 straight games, lost in the Sugar Bowl to Paul ‘‘Bear’’ Bryant’s

Kentucky Wildcats, 13-7. Wilkinson’s stars included stellar half-

backs Billie Vessels (the 1952 Heisman Award winner), Tommie

McDonald, and Joe Don Looney. Oklahoma took the 1955 and 1956

national titles, before ﬁnally losing to Notre Dame 7-0 in 1957,

ending college football’s longest winning streak. While remaining a

Big 8 Conference heavyweight, Wilkinson’s Sooners increasingly

had a tough time defeating Darrell Royal’s Texas Longhorns at their

annual game in Dallas.

The Wilkinson era ushered in a period of top-notch coaches at

many universities. The University of Texas, during Royal’s 19 year

reign, repeatedly vied for national supremacy, ending up with three

national crowns and victories over Roger Staubach and the Naval

Academy in the 1964 Cotton Bowl; Joe Namath and Bryant’s

Alabama Crimson Tide in the 1965 Orange Bowl, and Ara Parseghian’s

Notre Dame squad in the 1970 Cotton Bowl. UT’s triple-option led to

30 consecutive wins before Notre Dame and quarterback Joe Theisman

defeated the Longhorns 24-11 in the 1971 Cotton Bowl. That enabled

COLTRANEENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

557

Nebraska’s Bob Devaney to claim share of the ﬁrst of two successive

national titles. Out west, John McKay grabbed four national champi-

onships, featuring Heisman trophy tailbacks Mike Garrett and O. J.

Simpson. Ohio State’s Woody Hayes, relying on a ground game, took

hold of three national titles, while Bryant guided Alabama to an

unprecedented six national championships. Beginning in 1964,

Parseghian revitalized the then dormant program at college football’s

most historic campus, Notre Dame. After the 1966 and 1973 seasons,

his Fighting Irish ended up at the top of the polls, as they would

following the 1977 and 1988 campaigns, under coaches Dan Devine

and Lou Holtz, respectively. In 1968, Penn State’s Joe Paterno had his

ﬁrst of ﬁve undefeated seasons, although only one concluded with a

national title; on another occasion, his once-beaten Nittany Lions

were ranked number one. During the 1980s, Miami won four national

titles, twice under coach Dennis Erickson. Devaney’s successor at

Nebraska, Tom Osborne, did him one better, ending his career with

three national championships in his last four years. With crowns in

1974, 1975, and 1985, Oklahoma’s Barry Switzer equalled Wilkinson’s

championship record. Florida State’s Bobby Bowden took one lone

national title, but his Seminoles were ranked in the top four at the

close of twelve consecutive seasons. Following the 1996 season,

Grambling’s Eddie Robinson retired with a record 402 victories;

Bryant’s 323 wins topped the charts for Division 1-A coaches.

From the 1960s onward, college football’s appeal was height-

ened by the impact of television. Two-platoon systems and clock-

stopping rule changes that ushered in many more plays made for an

open-ended game, featuring passes and wishbone offenses. Seeking

improved television packages, schools withdrew from traditional

conferences and joined reconﬁgured ones. Penn State, for example,

entered the Big Ten, while Miami joined the Big East. The historic

Southwest Conference collapsed, with Texas, Texas A & M, Baylor,

and Texas Tech linking up with the former Big Eight schools to

establish the Big Twelve. Professionalization of the sport continued,

with elaborate athletic facilities created, nationwide recruiting under-

taken, and large bureaucratic apparatuses appearing. Unfortunately,

scandals also brewed, with SMU’s highly-ranked football program

receiving the so-called ‘‘death penalty’’ in February 1987.

—Robert C. Cottrell

URTHER READING:

Baker, William J. Sports in the Western World. Totowa, New Jersey,

Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 1982.

Gorn, Elliot J., and Warren Goldstein. A Brief History of American

Sports. New York, Hill and Wang, 1993.

Nelson, David M. Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules, and the

Men Who Made the Game. Newark, University of Delaware

Press, 1994.

Newcombe, Jack, editor. The Fireside Book of Football. New York,

Simon and Schuster, 1964.

Oriard, Michael. Reading Football: Sport, Popular Journalism, and

American Culture, 1876-1913. Chapel Hill, University of North

Carolina Press, 1993.

Perrin, Tom. Football: A College History. Jefferson, North Carolina,

McFarland & Company, 1987.

Rader, Benjamin G. American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to

the Age of Televised Sports. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey,

Prentice Hall, 1996.

Riess, Steven A. Sport in Industrial America, 1850-1920. Wheeling,

Illinois, Harlan Davidson, 1975.

Roberts, Randy, and James Olson. Winning Is the Only Thing: Sports

in America Since 1945. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1989.

Smith, Ronald A. Sports & Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College

Athletics. New York, Oxford University Press, 1990.

Sperber, Murray. Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre

Dame Football. New York, Henry Holt, 1995.

Collins, Albert (1932-1993)

Guitarist Albert Collins helped modernize blues and bring it to a

new audience, blending classic traditions with rock and funk into his

high-energy delivery. Born in Leona, Texas, Collins’s early inﬂuenc-

es included T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, and family friend

Lightnin’ Hopkins. He was also inﬂuenced by jazz organists Jimmy

Smith and Jimmy McGriff, and saxophone players Arnett Cobb and

Illinois Jacquet. Collins’s ﬁrst recording success was the instrumental

single ‘‘Frosty’’ recorded in 1962. He signed with Imperial Records

in 1968 and moved to the West Coast, where he inspired Robert Cray,

Johnny Winter, and Janis Joplin. Collins reached the height of his

powers with Chicago’s Alligator Records in the 1980s, recording the

Grammy Award-winning Showdown album with Cray and fellow

Texan Johnny Copeland in 1985. He signed with Virgin Records in

1990 and recorded three more albums before his death from lung cancer.

—Jon Klinkowitz

URTHER READING:

Milkowski, Bill. ‘‘Mr. Freeze.’’ Guitar World. September 1990,

74-80, 99.

Obrecht, Jas, editor. Blues Guitar: The Men Who Made the Music.

San Francisco, GPI Books, 1990.

Whiteis, David. ‘‘Albert Collins: Ice on the Telecaster, Fire on the

Belly.’’ Down Beat. May 1991, 24.

Coltrane, John (1926-1967)

Saxophonist John Coltrane exerted a huge inﬂuence on the

generation of jazz musicians that followed him. In fact, many view

Trane, as he was known, as a kind of sacred leader. It is certain that he

fostered trends in jazz, while developing those already present. While

taking bop trends in harmonization to their ultimate logical conclu-

sion with his stream-of-sound style in the 1950s, Coltrane also

explored the simpler modal style as well as Free Jazz, which empha-

sized melodic development free from the conﬁnes of chordal progres-

sion. In common with other innovators, he never entirely abandoned

the use of one style while moving toward another.

Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, in 1926 and grew

up in High Point, North Carolina, where his maternal grandfather was

a preacher. His father was an established tailor and, thus, in common

COLTRANE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

558

John Coltrane

with many jazz musicians, Coltrane came from the black middle

class. Both his parents were musical and he grew up in a musical

environment. He was only 12 when his father died, but his mother

kept the family together and provided him with economic and

emotional stability. She moved to Philadelphia where jobs were more

plentiful in the World War II economy but sent money home for his

support. After graduating from high school in 1943, Coltrane joined

his mother in Philadelphia, where he studied alto saxophone at the

Orenstein School and made an impression with his seriousness,

discipline, and eagerness. Drafted into the navy, he spent his service

time playing in the navy band in Hawaii, and after his discharge he

resumed his saxophone studies. Soon after, he played in a number of

rhythm and blues bands, most notably that of Eddie ‘‘Cleanhead’’

Vinson. The spectacle of the serious Coltrane tossing horns to Vinson

in a vaudeville setting is hard to imagine but that is what he did, and

did well, according to contemporary accounts. Certainly, that rhythm

and blues inﬂuence was always discernible in his playing and added

depth to his ballad performances.

By the mid-1940s Trane was playing tenor saxophone, a switch

originally made so as not to compete with Vinson. He listed Dexter

Gordon as a major inﬂuence but also absorbed the work of many other

musicians. Indeed, Coltrane listened to everyone and adapted ele-

ments from many that accorded with his own developing style.

Unfortunately, Coltrane’s various addictions began to catch up with

him at this time. He was an alcoholic, a heroin user, a heavy smoker,

and was addicted to sweets—habits that caused the disruption of his

personal and professional relationships and damaged his reputation.

Eventually, he managed to kick all his habits except his sugar

addiction, which cost him his teeth. Having refused dental care, all his

teeth ultimately decayed and had to be removed.

From 1949 to 1951 Coltrane played with Dizzy Gillespie’s band,

and it is with them that he recorded his ﬁrst solo. In 1951, he moved

back to Philadelphia with his mother and resumed formal musical

studies at the Graniff School of Music. In addition to studying

saxophone, he studied theory with Dennis Sandole. Some critics have

traced Coltrane’s fascination with bi-tonality and the use of scalar

composition to this period in his career. In 1952 he resumed work

with a rhythm and blues band, that of Earl Bostic who, interestingly,

like Vinson, was primarily noted for his work on alto saxophone.

Bostic’s R&B style was enormously popular in the early 1950s and

Coltrane was once again exposed to large dance audiences and their

emotional reactions to the music. Coltrane soon left Bostic to work

with his early idol, Johnny Hodges. Hodges had left Duke Ellington’s

band for a brief time to head his own band, one that has been

underrated or forgotten over the years. In 1954 Hodges ﬁred Trane

because his heroin addiction had made him erratic and undependable.

Once more he returned to Philadelphia where he suffered from

physical and emotional problems. In this period, he met Juanita

Grubbs, known as Naima, and married her in 1955. He sorted out his

problems to the extent that he was able to resume playing, and joined

Miles Davis’s classic 1955 quintet. By this time, his style had

incorporated elements of Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins.

While Trane could play gorgeous melodic lines like Parker, in the

1950s he generally preferred to construct arpeggio-like vertical runs

at breakneck speed. Alcohol and drug abuse, however, cost him his

job with Miles Davis in 1957. Again, he returned to Philadelphia and

his mother, but this time he determined to conquer his multiple

addictions, locked himself in his room, and subsisted on water for

some days. When he emerged he was ready to resume his life

and work.

From this time on, he became fascinated by Eastern religions.

Although he never practiced an Eastern faith, he studied the teachings

and incorporated elements into his music as well as his personal

philosophy. Open use of these elements, however, awaited the 1960s

and its ethos. Meanwhile, later in 1957, Trane picked up his career

with a stunning engagement with Thelonius Monk at the Five Spot in

Manhattan. Working with Monk was worth more than all the theory

courses combined. Coltrane perfected his sheets-of-sound style with

Monk, while absorbing Monk’s unique approach to harmonic con-

ception. Unfortunately, only one record of this fertile period has

emerged, but it demonstrates just how vital the partnership was in

Coltrane’s development.

When Sonny Rollins left Miles Davis, Coltrane returned. Davis

showed some courage in bringing him back against the advice of

many friends who considered Trane as too erratic and a man who

should have left much of his performance in the practice room. His

tone and style were not yet the models they soon became, but Coltrane

played well on what is now regarded as one of the classic jazz albums

of all time, 1959’s Kind of Blue. Record contracts soon followed, and

Trane became the darling of the Hard Boppers, his sheets-of-sound

period seeming a logical extension of the bop movement.

In 1960 Coltrane struck out on his own and explored different

styles of playing. In his 1959 Giant Steps album he showed his ability

to develop an older style while moving into a newer one. He

developed his hard-bop soloing on some cuts while moving into poly-

tonality and modal areas on others. His album My Favorite Things

(1960) marked the return of the soprano saxophone to jazz. Although