A wake-up call at Penn, 1960

Stanley Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of prions. Martin Cruz Smith wrote the ultimate Soviet-era crime novel, Gorky Park. The anthropologist Jeremy Sabloff became an authority on ancient Maya civilization and preindustrial urbanism. The securities analyst Martin Zweig famously predicted the stock market crash of 1987 just three days before it occurred. My sophomore roommate, Tom Strauss, became president of Salomon Brothers, the big Wall Street investment house. Constance McNeely Horner held several high government posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Robert Gardner wrote Gerald Ford's presidential campaign song, "I'm Feeling Good About America." Roger Tauss spent 20 years as international political director of the Transport Workers Union. And two of our classmates — Revlon tycoon Ronald Perelman and corporate raider Nelson Peltz — can still be found on the “Forbes 400” list of wealthiest Americans.

All those feats occurred years after we graduated, of course. My freshman roommate, Jeff Schussler, on the other hand, became famous during our very first week on campus.

Checking the mail

The transition from high school to college is never easy, but Jeff’s adjustment was especially rocky. At North Miami High School he had been a reasonably decent student — decent enough, at least, to gain admission to an Ivy League college — and sufficiently popular that two girlfriends back home competed for his affections. But at Penn, where students were largely left to sink or swim, Jeff was quickly singled out as the freshman most likely to drown.

He was painfully homesick, checking the mailroom three or four times a day for letters from home. On one occasion, Jeff simply loitered in the mailroom for some two hours until, as if by force of his will, the letter he was waiting for finally dropped into our box.

His study and personal planning habits seemed abysmal. Although Jeff was not a morning person, he signed up for introductory German, a course that met five days a week at 8 a.m. Inevitably, he slept past most of his German classes and eventually stopped going altogether. He fared little better in his other courses.

“They told me, ‘Go north, young man, to get a good education,’” Jeff often said, shaking his head ironically. His implication was clear: Had he remained down south, he wouldn’t be struggling.

Famous phone call

The first Saturday night of our first week at Penn, the University scheduled a big freshman mixer, a prime opportunity for new Penn men to meet new Penn women and vice versa. Jeff and I got all dressed up and were just about to head over to the dance when Jeff expressed an urge to phone his girlfriend in North Miami.

Such a call was a big deal in those days. We had no private phone in our room, and in any case a long-distance call was a major expense. So while I waited in our dorm room, Jeff headed to the bank of pay phones at the student lounge. There, he dropped the requisite coins in the phone box and connected with his Florida sweetheart.

After three minutes, the operator instructed Jeff to deposit another $1.75 for three more minutes, and Jeff complied. But when the operator failed to return after another three minutes, Jeff went right on talking — for 90 minutes, while I cooled my heels back in our dorm room.

After 90 minutes, the operator came back on the line. “Please deposit $43,” she informed Jeff.

Forty-three dollars in 1960 was equivalent to more than $400 today. Overnight, Jeff became a legendary figure on campus. Wherever he went, total strangers would ask him, “Made any phone calls lately, Jeff?”

Our Mona Lisa

Jeff’s first semester grade transcript was a solid litany of D’s, F’s, and “Incompletes.” Most students would have dropped out or flunked out at that point. But Jeff took the bad news as a wakeup call. Over the next three and a half years, he buckled down, attended summer school every summer, and somehow managed to graduate right on time in 1964 with the future Nobel Prize winner Stan Prusiner and the rest of us. He also somehow managed to pay off his $43 debt to the phone company.

After graduation, I barely saw or heard from Jeff again. When I visited Miami in 1977 to promote my book on Jewish genealogy, he stopped by to say hello, but that was about the extent of our contact. But last Saturday, for whatever reason, I found myself recalling another incident from our freshman year.

That spring, Life magazine produced a special issue devoted to “The Irish in America.” Jeff and I were so beguiled by Sheila Finn, the fresh-faced colleen on the cover, that we taped it up on our dorm room wall for daily inspiration. You might say Sheila Finn became our low-budget equivalent of the Mona Lisa, and we became the middle-class equivalent of the 19th-century coke king Henry Clay Frick.

Emotional outlet

At the end of his rapacious but lonely life, Frick would routinely descend at night from his second-floor bedroom to the ground floor of his Fifth Avenue mansion, there to sit for a while in the darkness, cigar in hand, staring at one of his paintings, lit only by a small spotlight. In 1998, after ten years’ research into Frick’s art collection as well as modern grief theory, Frick's great-granddaughter Martha Frick Symington Sanger contended in a book that Frick’s collecting was driven neither by art appreciation nor by hunger for status symbols, but by grief over the loss of his favored first daughter. The paintings, she concluded, became the outlet for the emotions that Frick had never seemed capable of sharing with other people. (Click here.)

Life’s cover photo of Sheila Finn performed a similar function for college males. One of our Penn classmates from Florida, Denis Russ, was so entranced by Sheila that he used to stop by our room just to stare at her image for minutes on end. One Friday night, a bunch of us were trying to figure out what to do that night — go to a game, a party, a movie? Said Denis: “Why don’t we just sit here and look at this picture?”

Candice Bergen’s lament

This past Sunday — one day after that memory crossed my mind — I received an email from the very same Denis Russ, informing me that Jeff Schussler had passed away in June. Seemingly overnight, my once-beleaguered 18-year-old roommate had evolved into a 73-year-old man, and now he’s gone. For that matter, Sheila Finn must be about 75 now, if she’s still around.

“Life goes on slowly,” another of our Penn contemporaries, the actress Candice Bergen, reflected in an AARP Magazine interview this past May, “but in the end it rips by in a New York minute. You’re here one minute, and it’s a dirt bath the next. I still don’t know how to come to terms with it.” Few of us do. But I will say this for Jeff: In those four years of college, he did learn how to come to terms with life.