Born in 1917, Gerald Wexler grew up in New York's largely immigrant neighborhood of Washington Heights. His father, Harry, who arrived from Poland at age 19, worked as a window washer, and his withdrawn acceptance of his lot -- an early-morning route with a pail and ladder -- came to symbolize for Wexler the entrapment and hopelessness of his working-class family at the onset of the Depression.

It was his mother, however, who represented the fantasy of escape and transcendence. An attractive woman who had little interest in the pieties of her social station, Elsa Wexler turned heads in Washington Heights as she strolled in homemade hats and costume jewelry, a golf bag thrown over her shoulder. A committed socialist, she spent hours selling copies of the Daily Worker in Harlem. Elsa also brought home copies of Shakespeare, Molihre, Havelock Ellis and Theodore Dreiser, deciding that Gerald would be everything she was not -- a Brahmin, a contributor to culture and most of all a writer, a desire that she managed to instill in her son.

In the meantime, Wexler spent his adolescence at Artie's poolroom on the corner of 181st Street and Bennett Avenue, cutting classes and hustling three-cushion billiards. Wexler had little use for public education, and after graduating from high school in 1932, he enrolled in City College, only to drop out two semesters later. During his truant afternoons, however, he managed to acquire a more enduring passion than pool -- jazz. Haunting Salvation Army depots and used-furniture stores under the els for abandoned records during the day, Wexler and his friends would spend evenings dancing to Fletcher Henderson's band at the Savoy Ballroom.

Elsa's final attempt to school her son entailed removing him from his dysfunctional surroundings, and in 1936 Gerald enrolled in Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science as a journalism major. Kansas City gave Wexler his first taste of shouted blues and country music, but less than two years later he was back in New York, as a result of bad grades and a dismal attitude.

Back at home, economics necessitated the unthinkable, and Jerry joined his father on the window-washing circuit with his own ladder and pail. He hated washing windows, but it was his after-hours existence as a Jazz Age hipster that made the menial labor tolerable. In the evenings, Roy Eldridge, Sidney Bechet and Billie Holiday beckoned from clubs in Harlem and on 52nd Street, and Wexler remembers the period with uninhibited pleasure: "Nothing would make me happier than to share a joint with Max Kaminsky in the basement of Jimmy Ryan's."

His first inkling of a career in the music business must have come from a close-knit circle of jazz record collectors who met at Milt Gabler's Commodore Music Shop. George Avakian, Bob Thiel, Alfred Lion and John Hammond were among the core members, and all would eventually be remembered as luminaries of the recording industry. "We thought -- what hubris -- 'We can make these records,'" recalls Wexler.

Before his first brush with the industry, however, the newly married Wexler was drafted, and spent the World War II stationed in Florida and Texas. After his discharge he returned to Kansas to complete his degree. But in 1947, a journalism diploma in hand, Wexler found himself back in Washington Heights, living with his wife Shirley's parents. He was 30 and in search of his first real job.

After months of rejection by the big New York papers, he found a job as a cub reporter at Billboard magazine. It was an unexpected detour into the music industry, but soon Wexler was interviewing song pluggers at Lindy's Delicatessen, composers at the Brill Building and jukebox roughnecks and rack jobbers on 11th Avenue. It was an invaluable education and Wexler proved to be a natural. He turned Patti Page on to "The Tennessee Waltz," which became one of pop music's biggest pre-rock 'n' roll records and, more tellingly, changed the title of Billboard's black music chart from "Race Records" to "Rhythm and Blues," a rubric used to this day.

During his years as a reporter, Wexler grew increasingly close to Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson, two fellow record collectors and jazz cognoscenti who had founded Atlantic Records, a small rhythm and blues label in New York. The three men would attend concerts, trade gossip and vacation together at Fire Island, and soon Wexler was asked to join the company. In an act of characteristic audacity, Wexler demanded to be a full partner, a request that was greeted with incredulous laughter. But a year later, when Abramson went into the Army for a two-year stint (he would leave the company by the end of the '50s), Ertegun agreed to Wexler's terms.

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