Why was Frank Sinatra referred to as the “Chairman of the Board”?
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
