My response to the suggestion about the Billy Joel song is much the same as Bethany's. (The Bethany who uses upper case as the Lord God intended.) I read the Catcher in the mid-fifties. As a youngish Englishman my contemporaries in America at that time seemed much less politicised than they were to become later. Holden's world is surely that of an America triumphant in the immediate aftermath of the war, enjoying a boom & not yet gripped by the nightmare of a Russian bomb coming in through the sky. His dismay is with the values of the adults he sees around him - the materialism & phoniness that eventually corrupts all humanity, not just the body politic. Of the items listed, only Sugar Ray Robinson & `The King & I' could have had any meaning since (in 1946-49) the others had not yet really engaged public awareness - & I'm not even sure about Robinson. My knowledge of boxing is even less than Bethany's but I'm told Sugar Ray had the kind of grace & style that might have endeared him to Holden as much as the saccharine Mr Hammerstein would certainly have revolted him. Scottie Bowman