From September of 1966 until May of 1967, I was in my senior year as a student at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, part of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Eliminating my health concerns and worries about how the Vietnam War would affect my post-graduation prospects (see my blog post of May 8, 2016 - Fifty Years), I would say that my senior year was blissful in comparison to my first three years at Penn.
As I had taken four courses during Summer School in 1964, I only had to take the minimum four courses per semester my senior year. As such, my work load was reduced. Because I had gotten good grades my junior year, I was no longer stressed about the possibility of not graduating on time.
My only other unfulfilled graduation requirement was passing a swimming test (swimming across a 50 meter pool). As I was not much of a swimmer at the time, I went to see the Director of Physical Education, George Munger, who, without my even asking, gave me a waiver for the swimming requirement. Munger had been Penn's most successful football coach up to that time winning 65% of his teams' games from 1938 to 1953.
Unfortunately, I was still living in a dormitory thanks to my father's lack of encouragement and my own cowardice. After our sophomore year, my friend, Scott Kahn, and I agreed to room together in an off campus apartment for our final two years at Penn. While I was at home that summer of 1965, Scott stayed in Philadelphia looking for an apartment.
When Scott found one, he sent me a copy of the lease for me to sign. When I showed it to my father, who needed to pay my share of the rent, he told me that the landlord was a crook who would take advantage of me. I learned that my father was speaking from ignorance, never having seen a lease like that. He told me he would pay the rent, but if anything else happened, I was on my own. I failed to be brave and take a chance. Scott lived at the apartment for two years without any serious problems. When my children were in the same situation years later, I was supportive of them as I wished my father would have been with me.
I think my favorite course that senior year was an introductory one in real estate. I learned its three rules: location, location, and location. Our professor had us study an actual neighborhood in West Philadelphia, not far from the campus. Each student was given an address of a house in the neighborhood and had to do various research related to the house. One was to go to Philadelphia City Hall (intersection of Broad and Market Streets) and look up the last three times the house had been sold (using old fashioned microfilm) to certify that each owner had signed on the subsequent sales document. This is what title insurance is about.
Some time during that senior year, a colleague mentioned that one of our fellow students was Donald Trump, the son of a wealthy New York City real estate developer. He was a junior transfer from Fordham University in New York City. Trump was at Penn because of the real estate program that the Wharton School offered. He graduated 12 months after I did in May of 1968.
Donald Trump was born June 14, 1946 in Jamaica Estates, Queens, into a family of five children (three boys and two girls). He attended the Kew-Forest School, a local private school, until age thirteen. In 1959, his parents sent Trump to the New York Military Academy, a private boarding school in the rural village of Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, about 60 miles north of New York City. (My mother threatened to send me to a similar school, the Manlius Military School in DeWitt, New York.) Trump graduated from the New York Military Academy in 1964. Then came Fordham and Penn. As we both took a course or courses in Penn's Real Estate Department, our paths may have crossed, but if they did, I wouldn't have known who he was by sight.
I need to put the kibosh on one rumor that was attributed to both Candice Bergen, the actress who entered Penn with my freshman class in 1963, and Trump. They dated while they were both students at Penn? Not possible! [I saw a video interview with her and she stated that at the time of their date, he was not a student at Penn] She left in the spring of 1965 because a lack of good grades (too busy with a modeling career) and he did not arrive until the fall of the following year, 1966.
It is little known, but two years after his Penn graduation, Trump invested $70,000 in a Broadway show called Paris is Out, becoming one of its producers. The comedy closed after 96 performances (about 12 weeks). A year later, he took over his father's real estate business.
In June of 2015, Trump announced that he was a candidate for president of the United States. In July of this year, he received the nomination of the Republican Party. The presidential election will be this coming Tuesday, the 8th of November. What ever happens, I hope for the best for my country.
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