COMMENDED
There was a Playboy bunny in my high school. A future Playboy bunny. The bunny — now 75 — recently called my daughter in Chicago. The former bunny is a gardener and landscaping consultant. When she saw my daughter’s area code (Cleveland / 216), the former bunny said she had been a party animal in high school — Charles F. Brush High. My school. She said she didn’t know me.
I was no party animal.
The ex-bunny said she never paid for a drink until she was 30. My daughter said I had been a “nerd.” (Nerd wasn’t even a word in 1968! We were called “dips,” short for dipshits.)
After powwowing with my daughter, I got out my yearbook for the lowdown on the ex-bunny. The ex-bunny had been a blond Jewish majorette. Really? And I didn’t even recognize her pic. (Hey, it was a big school.)
[Correction: she was no Jew. See postscript at bottom. The future bunny was just an above-average-intelligence, blond shikse. Boring!]
Also, there was a page in the yearbook of National Merit semi-finalists and commended scholars. I wasn’t on that page. The ex-bunny was. Whoa.
My friend Hersky wasn’t on the National Merit page either, and he got a 789 on the math SAT (before the math SAT was recentered, in 1995, which jacked up many math scores). Hersky specialized in numbers and Cliff Notes. He never read a book — and still hasn’t. I read some books — short ones, like The Time Machine and Goodbye Mr. Chips. (I started reading in college.)
In high school, I hung out with many commended and meritorious people, but not the future bunny. She must have been dating. I liked hanging out with people smarting than me. My crowd devoured the Comparative Guide to American Colleges, which we called the Bible. We learned about Reed, Pomona, and Rice. Rice’s freshman class had an incredibly high median math score. Emory was another good school. Swarthmore was harder to get into than Harvard.
Northwestern . . . I flew student-standby to Evanston for an interview. At the Cleveland airport, the ticket agent asked if I was an attaché because I didn’t have any baggage. I didn’t know what attache meant.
I expected some tough questions at Northwestern, maybe about the latest book I had read. I had read a book about Nazis — my favorite subject. The interviewer didn’t ask me anything about books. Instead, he extolled the university’s six-year medical program. (I was pre-med, like everybody else.) Northwestern smelled like dead fish from Lake Michigan. I could hardly breathe. Northwestern was a playboy school.
I flew to Johns Hopkins –a pre-med powerhouse. I talked about Nazis, and then the interviewer segued into mainstream material. He said Twain wrote Ethan Frome. No way! He didn’t catch me. Hopkins was isolated and there was no social life.
I’ll get back to the Playboy bunny eventually.
The admissions interviewer at Washington U. said I’d get in. Washington U. was easy to get into back then, just like Northwestern.
Meanwhile, back in Cleveland, at a cocktail party, my parents ran into a very savvy parent who said the best way to get into medical school was to attend a state school and get good grades. Go to Ohio State and get A’s, which was better than C’s at Harvard.
I wasn’t going to no Ohio state school, folks!! Ohio State was open-admissions then and took everybody. I hadn’t memorized the Comparative Guide to American Colleges to go to no Ohio state school. Not even Miami U. of Ohio. As a consolation, my parents said I could try for Michigan, Michigan State or Wisconsin.
Michigan didn’t do interviews. Not their thing. Too big.
I got into Michigan early decision. The ex-bunny went to the University of Miami in Florida. More power to her, for getting out of Ohio. Maybe someday she and I will meet up and discuss how we didn’t know each other.
Charles F. Brush High was a big school. Six-hundred thirty-five kids. Yes, there were bigger graduating classes in Cleveland, but not many. And very few had bunnies-to-be.
—
Correction: A Brush alum — who had been to the future bunny’s house back in the day — wrote me: “No Judaica around. Mother and sister were blond and Protestant. No accents. Lived in a goyish neighborhood.” Oops.
I had presupposed the bunny was Jewish because of two things: when talking to my daughter, the bunny had mentioned a South Euclid Jewish neighborhood that she called “Chanukah Heights.” So I figured the ex-bunny was from there. But she wasn’t. Also, the ex-bunny’s last name is vaguely Jewish — like Lewis, Brooks, or Cole.
4 comments
Took me 3 1/2 hours to get through that. I have other things to do in my life, Bert…. Now, back to business: Turns out Natalie McDaniel, our “First Lady,” was in our daughter’s class at Hts. High. Rachel says Natalie was probably in the Stage Crew and they had some classes together and they were sort of friendly.
650 is big? Our Shaw graduating class alone had 417 kids. And, by the way, my former, coulda been Playboy wife was ranked No. 4 in the class, and she DID go to Miami U. I was only No, 19 (which, somehow, got me recruited by Rutgers). Neither one of us became doctors.
I used to study those college description and rating books and almanac listings with letter grades fervently, one reason I chose SUNY Binghamton (now Binghamton University) over CWRU for grad. school in 1970..
My graduating class at Elyria HS numbered nearly 700 and I entered my senior year so knew almost none of the kids I passed in the hall — good training for the U of M. I was wait-listed for admission to AA so had to work my tail off to get my grades up. Ended up acing every class but math, which had been my bete noire since the ninth grade. Finally got an A in that one too since it was Statistics, not Calculus, which would have sunk me. The only one in my corner was my Economics teacher, Mr. Watts, who had a daughter at the U of M and told me to forget about my safety schools (Miami and Kent) and go all out for AA. My parents would have been happy if I’d applied to OSU, my father’s alma mater. Thank G-d I listened to Mr. Watts.
Leave a Comment