Benny Goodman was entitled to spend two weeks at a summer camp near Chicago. It was the only time he could get away from his bleak neighborhood. He also received two years of instruction from classically trained clarinetist Franz Schoepp. When he was 17, his father was killed by a passing car after stepping off a streetcar. His father's death was "the saddest thing that ever happened in our family", Goodman said. He attended Lewis Institute (Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1924 as a high-school sophomore and played clarinet in a dance hall band. His early influences were New Orleans jazz clarinetists
Benny Goodman reports spread word of the exciting music and enthusiastic dancing. The Palomar engagement was such a marked success that it is often described as the beginning of the swing era. According to Donald Clarke, "It is clear in retrospect that the Swing Era had been waiting to happen, but it was Goodman and his band that touched it off." The reception of American swing was less enthusastic in Europe. British author J. C. Squire filed a complaint with BBC radio and to demand it stop playing Goodman's music, which he called "an awful series of jungle noises which can hearten