A Comment from David Maxwell

David shared this with Creating Great Places as a comment to a previous post, but we thought it was great and wanted to make sure it front and center:

When I was 17 years old (1962), I traveled through the Soviet Union for 7 weeks as the bandboy for the Benny Goodman Band's tour of the USSR (my father was the first trumpet player). That trip led to me desire to become a diplomat (later channeled into a career as a professor of Russian literature and ultimately a university administrator) and my major at Grinnell College in Russian Area Studies (where I enrolled 6 weeks after returning from the USSR).On July 4th, 1962, the band was invited to the U.S. Embassy's "party house" on the banks of the river in Moscow. At one point, there was a tremendous outpouring of excitement: Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev had shown up to wish us "congratulations on the anniversary of your revolution." He made the rounds of the party and shook hands with everyone - including me -- and was particularly struck by the fact that the first trumpet player (who, at 6'5" and 240 lbs, towered over him), was able to greet him in Russian!Given the political environment of 1962, most people I knew found it hard to believe that I'd actually been in the USSR - shaking hands with Krushchev was well beyond the limits of credibility for most of them!The Goodman Band was the first American jazz band "behind the Iron Curtain," and was seen as an important early step in the cultural and educational exchanges that ultimately -- I believe--had a powerful impact on relations between the two countries, and on political change in the USSR..