Word: cole
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...insurrections, most unions continue to be run as tight little clubs by entrenched leaders who keep a close rein through patronage and control of the union newspaper. "They just don't seem to groom heirs or successors," says Presidential Labor Mediator David L. Cole. Often a prospective new leader is as old as the man he may replace. Among the major leaders and their likely successors...
...coronation took place in a Los Angeles saloon. The proprietor slipped up to the bandstand, playfully popped a tinseled paper crown on the young singer's head, and decreed: "King Cole!" The title stuck. And so, for the next quarter of a century, did Nat King Cole, right at the top as one of the most captivatingly popular crooners of all time. No one was more amazed at his enduring success than Cole himself. "My voice," he would say wonderingly, "is nothing to be proud...
Meanwhile, Cole was also topping the jazz polls for his "floating swing" style of piano in the tradition of his idol, Earl ("Fatha") Hines. Cole became a strong force in jazz, influenced the styles of such greats as Bill Evans, Ray Charles, Oscar Peterson. The event that helped turn him permanently into a singer was the unlikely appearance in 1948 of a bearded, barefoot hermit-songwriter named Eden Ahbez, who smuggled one of his songs to Cole through his valet. It was called Nature Boy, and Cole's haunting version of it became a runaway bestseller. He soon broke...
...Successor. During a concert in Birmingham in 1956, five white men leaped onto the stage and knocked him down. Cole was unhurt. That is, until later, when the Negro press scalded him "for kneeling before the throne of Jim Crow" by playing before a segregated audience. In Harlem, some juke joints ceremoniously smashed his records. "I'm an entertainer," he answered, "not a politician. I'm crusading in my own way. I feel I can help ease the tension by gaining the respect of both races all over the country...
Died. Nat King Cole, 45, balladeer for a generation of Americans; of lung cancer; in Los Angeles (see SHOW BUSINESS...