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When a Yahoo! search on "chairman of the board" led us to a furniture-maker who creates benches and chairs from skis and snowboards, and the same phrase, enclosed in quotation marks, pointed us to Lou Gerstner's home page at IBM, we realized that we needed to define our terms more precisely. We refined the search by typing "sinatra and 'chairman of the board'" and the results looked more promising. After a couple of false starts, we located an archived article from The
Tech, MIT's newspaper, written in 1990 on the occasion of Sinatra's 75th birthday. Here, in a brief biographical sketch, we learned that Sinatra acquired the nickname "Chairman of the Board" after founding Reprise Records in 1961. Later in the sixties, this label went on to record musicians as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, the Kinks, and Neil Young. Chairman of the Board was one of many heroic epithets used to describe Frank Sinatra during his decades as a leading celebrity icon, heart-throb, bad boy, singer/stylist of swing ballads, romantic leading man, and serious movie actor. The Chairman of the Board was also known as The Voice, The King of Crooners, Ol' Blue Eyes, or simply the Greatest Entertainer of
the 20th century. In fact, most of the 1998 online obituaries we read used some combination of these titles to pay homage to Hoboken, New Jersey's legendary star and to honor his stature as a showbiz institution. CNN's memorial homage to Sinatra, discovered in Yahoo!'s Sinatra Memorials category, quotes from U2's Bono, who performed and recorded with Frank in the nineties. Bono says, "Sinatra has got... swagger and attitude. Bad attitude. Frank's the chairman of the bad." In fact, if you're looking for the dark side of Frank Sinatra, The Smoking Gun
has it covered. But whether you remember him as King of the Rat Pack or Chairman of the Board, Sinatra remains unforgettable.
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