35 girls and not one boy showed up to audition for the annual Hollywood High School talent show in the fall of 1955. The next day, the school bulletin pleaded for "any guys out there who can do anything" and a show business story began that sounds a little like an MGM musical. Unable to resist such amorously appealing odds, four talented and highly-motivated teenagers in the school choir, lead singer Bruce Belland, baritone Glen Larson, bass Ed Cobb and high tenor Marvin Ingram, literally formed a quartet overnight and stepped into the crinoline void as The Four Preps. After stealing the show with choice hits by their idols, The Crew Cuts and The Four Lads, they quickly found themselves in demand for every kind of event imaginable. "We didn't turn anything down", Bruce Belland remembers. "We once performed on the back of a flatbed truck for the opening of a parking lot. They paid us $75.00; enough to buy gas and our first matching sport coats. We were totally stoked". A short time later, legendary Capitol Records producer Voyle Gilmore, who recorded stars like Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and Louis Prima & Keely Smith, heard a tape of a live performance by The Four Preps and signed them to a long-term recording contract. At the time, the Preps were the youngest act ever to sign with a major record label. (In an article about their signing, Variety dubbed them "Capitol's jolly juveniles".) While The Preps started searching for a hit, their old HHS classmate, Ricky Nelson, was launching a recording career of his own. As his records began to burn up the airwaves, he and The Four Preps embarked on their first nationwide personal appearance tour which kicked off the very week that Nelson's picture was on the cover of LIFE magazine, with the caption - "RICKY NELSON - Teen Idol" - a phrase the Editors had created expressly for him. The group was picked up by Capitol Records and scored a hit in 1957 with "26 Miles (Santa Catalina), co-written by Larson. But Larson wanted to be a television writer, and he turned out scripts he hoped to sell, while The Four Preps toured extensively. Glen Larson's first story credit came in 1966 for an episode of El fugitivo (1963). He rose quickly in the television business, becoming an associate producer on Ladrón sin destino (1968) in 1968.
