Some of its best known arrangements are Coney Island Baby, Danny Boy, East of the Sun, Is That the Way You Look?, Mack the Knife, Many Rivers to Cross, Masochism Tango, The National Anthem, Poinciana, Route 66, Walking in Memphis, and If I Ain't Got You.
1941-1943: The Founders The Colgate Thirteen didn't officially form until 1942, but its beginning can be traced several weeks before the U.S. entered World War II.
Three students—Norman “Jerry” Scott, Hank Pierce and Evans “Jan” Spear—joined the university's glee club but quit soon afterward because “they just didn’t like it,” recalled Bill MacIntosh, a fellow Thirteener from the Class of 1944, in a 2017 documentary about the group.
The university instituted an accelerated schedule to graduate students for military service and seven Thirteeners in the Class of ‘43 earned their degrees in December 1942.
The group also beefed up its showmanship and performed at various, mostly local venues: business and alumni gatherings, bars, fraternity parties and even sororities as far as Syracuse University and Skidmore College.
As the decade closed, the group was invited to sing at the famed Waldorf Astoria Hotel’s Starlight Roof nightclub in New York City.