twofold: “Not only haven’t I studied; I can’t even find the book.”
As an undergraduate at Swarthmore, David Cohen took time off to work in the office of Congressman James Scheuer and graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. As an undergraduate at Penn, Ed Rendell got enormously involved in school government, had poor grades the first semester of his sophomore year, while he was being rushed for a fraternity, and was remembered by at least one professor not for the zeal with which he approached Penn academics but for the zeal with which he approached Penn co-eds. The fraternity he belonged to at Penn, Pi Lambda Phi, was known on campus as the Jewish animal house, and when Rendell joined it, it was under suspension for branding the Pi sign on the virginal buttocks of its pledges.
After college, David Cohen went to one of the nation’s finest law schools—the University of Pennsylvania. After college, Rendell applied to Penn Law School, but despite being a Penn alumnus, he did not gain acceptance—the classic case of a very smart person with unique powers ofmemory and reasoning who saw college as a gilded fraternity house: he said he scored a 710 on his law boards, placing him the second highest of the Penn graduates applying for admission. But his grade point average, a 2.5, placed him 201st. Rendell went to Villanova Law School instead.
At Penn Law School, David Cohen became a legend because of his hard work and mature judgment. At Villanova University School of Law, Ed Rendell became a legend because of the apartment he lived in on Lombard Street. A frequent guest dubbed it the Ape House, an appellation Rendell did not even begin to dispute. “Oooh, what a pigpen,” he recalled fondly. As for his future after law school, many agreed that it would be great, or at least interesting, as long as it had as little to do with the actual practice of law as possible.
David Cohen started going out with his future wife, Rhonda, at Swarthmore after they began to work on the school newspaper together. So worried was Rhonda about dating a coworker that she made him promise he would not quit the paper if they broke up. Ed Rendell’s dating patterns in college were guided in part by the urgings of his mother, who seemed largely interested in his marrying someone rich. As a result, he went out with a stream of women who were pampered and obnoxious, albeit very rich—until he met Midge Osterlund. At the time, one of his closest friends, Dave Montgomery, who went on to become president of the Philadelphia Phillies, was on a date with Midge, and Rendell was with someone else. Rendell asked Montgomery how things were going with Midge, and when the response was lukewarm, Rendell proposed a trade: he would give Montgomery the dating rights to the woman he was seeing in return for rights to Midge. As an added incentive, Rendell agreed to throw in a couple of Peter Paul Mounds bars.
Midge had first met Rendell at the Ape House on Lombard Street, where, she remembered, his idea of doing dishes was to fill the bathtub with them and proceed from there. She was a junior at Penn from a Catholic family in Wilmington, Delaware, where her father, like just about everyone else in that city, worked for Du Pont. Rendell, in law school at that point, was a Jew from Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side of New York. She was blond and athletic with just the right touch of sass; he was dark and handsome and jutting-jawed with enough gestures and spontaneous outbursts to make a drum major jealous.
There was nothing casual about their on-again, off-again romance, nor was there anything remotely casual about him. She remembered sitting in awe and disbelief on one of their first dates, at a Penn basketball game, ashe screamed and yelled. She remembered the way he ate, voraciously, with his fingers. She was intoxicated by his intensity and yet in another way was so overwhelmed by it that she broke up with him in the fall of her senior year at
As an undergraduate at Swarthmore, David Cohen took time off to work in the office of Congressman James Scheuer and graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. As an undergraduate at Penn, Ed Rendell got enormously involved in school government, had poor grades the first semester of his sophomore year, while he was being rushed for a fraternity, and was remembered by at least one professor not for the zeal with which he approached Penn academics but for the zeal with which he approached Penn co-eds. The fraternity he belonged to at Penn, Pi Lambda Phi, was known on campus as the Jewish animal house, and when Rendell joined it, it was under suspension for branding the Pi sign on the virginal buttocks of its pledges.
After college, David Cohen went to one of the nation’s finest law schools—the University of Pennsylvania. After college, Rendell applied to Penn Law School, but despite being a Penn alumnus, he did not gain acceptance—the classic case of a very smart person with unique powers ofmemory and reasoning who saw college as a gilded fraternity house: he said he scored a 710 on his law boards, placing him the second highest of the Penn graduates applying for admission. But his grade point average, a 2.5, placed him 201st. Rendell went to Villanova Law School instead.
At Penn Law School, David Cohen became a legend because of his hard work and mature judgment. At Villanova University School of Law, Ed Rendell became a legend because of the apartment he lived in on Lombard Street. A frequent guest dubbed it the Ape House, an appellation Rendell did not even begin to dispute. “Oooh, what a pigpen,” he recalled fondly. As for his future after law school, many agreed that it would be great, or at least interesting, as long as it had as little to do with the actual practice of law as possible.
David Cohen started going out with his future wife, Rhonda, at Swarthmore after they began to work on the school newspaper together. So worried was Rhonda about dating a coworker that she made him promise he would not quit the paper if they broke up. Ed Rendell’s dating patterns in college were guided in part by the urgings of his mother, who seemed largely interested in his marrying someone rich. As a result, he went out with a stream of women who were pampered and obnoxious, albeit very rich—until he met Midge Osterlund. At the time, one of his closest friends, Dave Montgomery, who went on to become president of the Philadelphia Phillies, was on a date with Midge, and Rendell was with someone else. Rendell asked Montgomery how things were going with Midge, and when the response was lukewarm, Rendell proposed a trade: he would give Montgomery the dating rights to the woman he was seeing in return for rights to Midge. As an added incentive, Rendell agreed to throw in a couple of Peter Paul Mounds bars.
Midge had first met Rendell at the Ape House on Lombard Street, where, she remembered, his idea of doing dishes was to fill the bathtub with them and proceed from there. She was a junior at Penn from a Catholic family in Wilmington, Delaware, where her father, like just about everyone else in that city, worked for Du Pont. Rendell, in law school at that point, was a Jew from Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side of New York. She was blond and athletic with just the right touch of sass; he was dark and handsome and jutting-jawed with enough gestures and spontaneous outbursts to make a drum major jealous.
There was nothing casual about their on-again, off-again romance, nor was there anything remotely casual about him. She remembered sitting in awe and disbelief on one of their first dates, at a Penn basketball game, ashe screamed and yelled. She remembered the way he ate, voraciously, with his fingers. She was intoxicated by his intensity and yet in another way was so overwhelmed by it that she broke up with him in the fall of her senior year at
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