Redd Foxx was just 18 years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He was part of a washtub band called the Jump Swinging Six leading up to that, and the group even made an appearance on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, one of the popular radio talent shows of the time. That all changed when the United States entered World War II, and one of the members of the band enlisted in the military. “We kept going until the war broke up the group,” Foxx recalled of his early days as a musician.

According to Michael Seth Starr’s 2011 book, Black and Blue: The Redd Foxx Story, the future Sanford and Son star didn’t share his former bandmate’s enthusiasm for serving his country. In those days, Foxx was living in Harlem, and though he was barely scraping by, he still wasn’t willing to give it all up and risk the possibility of getting killed or seriously injured overseas. He’d earned himself a reputation around town and was already a bit of a ladies’ man in his teens, so what was going on outside of his neighborhood was the furthest thing from his mind. “We weren’t into that kind of bag. Not then. Harlem was our world. It was a place where we were fixed,” Foxx remembered years later.

When the draft board eventually came calling, Foxx was forced to get creative. He was in perfect health, but with the help of an old draft-dodging trick he’d heard about, he was able to pull a fast one and convince them that he wasn’t. “I went to a draft board in Harlem. The doctor decided I had a heart condition, so I was rejected,” Foxx explained. “Those cats weren’t hip yet to the soap deal. I had eaten a half bar of Octagon soap, which causes heart palpitations.” 

Foxx may have lucked out and fooled the draft board, but his prospects weren’t too bright now that his band was broken up. Although he briefly formed another group with two guitar players he knew, things wouldn’t start looking up for him until after World War II ended, interestingly enough. Foxx started to rise in the ranks as a comedian in 1945, and by the following year, he’d recorded a few risqué blues songs for Savoy Records that had a humorous vibe to them. A decade later, he put out one of the earliest stand-up comedy albums, and before long, he would become known across the country as “The King of the Party Records.”