By Jerry Pearce

Walking into the average department store in the present day, you may find that two distinct themes exist in the gradually shrinking music section of a majority of retailers. Under each alphabetized artist card, you’ll find a few of their past classic albums for sale, along with about a dozen copies of an album featuring a compilation of their greatest hits. For an artist as timeless as Frank Sinatra, he proves to be no exception to this theme. It was through a compilation disc like such that I began a musical journey from casual Sinatra listener to die-hard fandom.

When I was in my early teens, my grandfather retired from commercial truck driving. For a fellow who spent the better part of thirty years driving the highways of America to support his family, retirement meant boredom. To alleviate all the free time that had opened up in his schedule, he started taking under the table jobs delivering supplies across the tristate area with his own truck. I would join him on these trips, and together we’d hit the road with, strangely enough, the same compact disc always playing on repeat in his Chevy Silverado. I was thirteen years old.