Fate is a funny thing.

As a child enduring the freezing winters in Chicago, Bruce Belland would watch newsreels of his beloved Cubs playing off-season baseball under the swaying palm trees of an island off the coast of California. That island was Santa Catalina, and Charles Wrigley owned both the Cubs and the island. For a chilly young boy surrounded by snow, the setting seemed like a dream.

In the late 1940s, right before junior high, Belland’s parents moved the family to Hollywood and the former Midwesterner found himself awake in a dream, living in the glorious California sunshine, with blue skies and red terracotta roofs, surrounded by green-fronded palm trees he had only ever seen in black and white.

At the age of 15, Belland broke his ankle and his parents gave him a ukulele to occupy his time during his recuperation. He learned a few chords and began to carry it around wherever he went. A year or two later, while surfing the waves at Cabrillo Beach, a friend pointed out to sea and identified Santa Catalina, remarking that it was about 26 miles away. The comment sparked a memory of watching those old newsreels years earlier, and Belland set out to write a song. He later grabbed his classmate Glen Larson to help with the lyrics.

Larson and Belland formed a vocal group with two underclassmen named Ed Cobb and Marv Ingram and the quartet debuted as The Four Preps at a high school talent show. Two years later, in 1956, they performed at a UCLA sorority party where a friend secretly recorded their performance. It actually sounded pretty good, so Belland took the tape and went from one end of Sunset Boulevard to the other in an attempt to find anyone in the music business who wanted to hear it. Luckily, his efforts landed the group a manager who played it for novice Capitol producer Voyle Gilmore (who only had one album in his credits as of yet, but that album was Frank Sinatra’s classic, In The Wee Small Hours) and he signed them to Capitol Records only a few days later.

The Four Preps didn’t have much initial success, but then Larson suggested they dust off “26 Miles (Santa Catalina).” Gilmore tried to talk them out of it — artists never wrote their own songs at that time — but gave the group a chance to record the track. Released as a single in late 1957, “26 Miles (Santa Catalina)” swam its way up to #2 on the US Radio Airplay chart. Little could that young kid in Chicago have imagined that the island he once saw as flickering images of a faraway paradise would one day bring him fame and fortune.

So gaze on those island pearls, and promote romance … with The Four Preps.

But the story of The Four Preps doesn’t end there. Ed Cobb left the group in 1966. He had already written big hits such as “Every Little Bit Hurts,” “Dirty Water,” and “Tainted Love” (which would later become an 80s smash for Soft Cell), but he moved into production and engineering, working closely with garage rockers The Standells and The Chocolate Watchband and later with vocal group The Lettermen.

After The Four Preps formally broke up in 1969, Glen A. Larson went into television and wrote, produced, and created countless hit series, including McCloud, Quincy M.E., Magnum P.I., Knight Rider, and Battlestar Galactica (to name a few).

Bruce Belland also moved into the television business, eventually working himself up the chain to become a Vice-President of NBC. He later resurrected The Four Preps as a live act with some new members and toured for decades. His name will come up again soon…..