‘Grease’ was inspired by the real teenage gangs and school life encountered by co-creator Jim Jacobs at Chicago’s Taft High School in the late 1950s. The article highlights how the fictional T-Birds drew on the school’s “greaser” culture, showing that the hugely successful musical and film originated in a working-class Chicago setting rather than a purely invented nostalgic world.

Jacobs graduated from Taft in 1960 and based characters and situations on people he knew, including his cousin Tommy Meyer as an influence on Danny Zuko. The male group was known locally as the Garvy Greasers, while the Pink Ladies were also a real girls’ gang; the original stage musical called the boys the Burger Palace Boys before later versions adopted the T-Birds name.