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The item about Cole having grown up in Chicago puzzles me. I first met Jerry around 1979 when I interviewed him for a Champs story and he never mentioned anything about Chicago. He was born in Green Bay and played in local bands and had his own band there before he went to California to join the Champs in 1961. His connection with a couple of those bands is included in my book, "Do You Hear That Beat".
I eventually played a couple of gigs with him and he sat in on a couple others that I was playing. He told a lot of stories (to put it politely). He claimed to have driven Buddy Holly to the Green Bay airport after his final gig there ... and that was in the same conversation where he had given me his birth year as 1947. On gigs he often introduced songs like "Splish Splash" as songs that he had written. He claimed that his version of "Midnight Mary" was the hit, even though it went top 10 by Joey Powers and never charted by Cole, and in later years he always claimed to have played on "Tequila", even though he joined the Champs nearly 3 years after that hit. I never heard of his supposed time in Chicago until I saw it on a website around 2009. He was an excellent player and he certainly did a ton of things in music, but it was difficult to know where to draw the line when it came to his claims.
Gem777 (talk) 19:26, 9 December 2010 (UTC) Gary Myers
Also, regarding him starting the Happy Tiger label with Ray Ruff, according to another Wikipedia entry, Happy Tiger Records was owned by Flying Tiger Airlines.Gem777 (talk) 06:16, 16 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
