On a cool desert evening in the fall of 1974, the telephone rang in the suburban Tucson home of Steve and Lynn Colwell.
     “ Hello, this is Pete Rozelle,” said the voice.
Steve’s heart skipped a beat.
     “Oh, hello, Mr. Rozelle. Good evening.” Rozelle was commissioner of the National Football League and a friend of Lynn’s father, Herb Hutner, a prominent Los Angeles businessman.
      Rozelle was calling to invite Up with People to produce the halftime show for Super Bowl X in 1976, America’s bicentennial year. The game would be played in Miami’s Orange Bowl and globally televised. Rozelle said Lynn’s father had suggested Up with People’s international casts could give a new dimension to the event. Steve assured him he’d have an answer soon and the call ended.
     Steve, typically undemonstrative, turned to his wife with a grin as broad as
his face.
     “ Wow, Lynn, can you believe this? The Super Bowl! He’s asked us to create a halftime show for the Super Bowl!”
     Steve and his brothers Paul and Ralph had sparked the creation of Up with People a decade earlier. “But we’d never dreamed of anything like this happening. It was simply beyond our imaginations,” Steve said. The Colwells themselves defied imagination. They were radio, TV, and recording artists in their teens. And from the early 1950s, with their friend and collaborator, Herb Allen, they worked in volunteer nation-building efforts and
played to kings and commoners literally everywhere.
     Steve, the oldest, had a guileless face with eyes that seemed to smile perpetually beneath an always-neat head of red-brown hair. Ralph, the youngest, not to create a only looked the junior but would maintain his youthful appearance for decades. Paul’s face had an angularity that made him the most memorable of the three. All three, through charm, talent, or just plain good luck, seemed able to walk through any door and find a welcome.
     Herb Allen was shorter and muscular, with a winsome smile. A virtuoso xylophonist, he would astound listeners with the velocity of “The Flight of the
Bumble Bee.” As a skilled concert pianist, no chord or span seemed beyond the reach of his seemingly too-short fingers and hands. He possessed an inexhaustible sense of humor, and was hopelessly addicted to puns.
    In the mid ‘60s, the Colwells and Allen had simply wanted to create a showcase for the talents of youth at student leadership conferences on Mackinac Island in Michigan. They knew they’d provide entertainment for the locals and summer visitors, but no one had seen further than that.
      At the 1964 gathering, bolstered by the energy and enthusiasm of the students, the program organizers had set up a giant tent on an athletic field for Sing Out evenings after the conference sessions. Talent was abundant. A seaworthy motorized gravel barge was located and turned into a kind of showboat that could power itself from marina to marina around the Great Lakes, and the students sang from their floating stage to crowds who gathered at the docksides.
     In 1965 during a three-day road trip to the conference from Arizona, Paul
and Ralph Colwell wrote a song they titled “Up with People.” Steve said later,
“ Hey, I drove the car! Doesn’t that count?” The new song became the finale for the ‘65 production.
     That summer, Henry Cass, a leading British producer/director, flew in from London and helped the Colwells and Allen turn a series of performances into a full-fledged musical. The show became an overnight sensation and late that summer toured the Northeast. Another barge was procured, and in Martha’s Vineyard and other historic settings around Cape Cod, thousands streamed to the harbors to see and hear the innovative demonstration of youth.

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