Page 202 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
junior. Inasmuch as Jim did not go to Princeton, as many Law- renceville grads do (virtually automatically, it seems), he was thought to be less than very bright. That seemed to me a valid assess- ment. I liked him but not enough to drive anywhere with him. He was very rich and therefore could afford his habit of totaling brand- new Lotus Fords. He still drives race cars. He also became a fraternity brother of mine.
• When Peter Nevin was an infant, a piece of plaster detached from the ceiling in the room in which he was lying. Luckily for him, it missed, as many pieces of plaster falling near other people in Berlin at that time did not. Peter thought it charming to play loud Nazi music on his sound system when, in what passed for humorous hijinks, a game of Frisbee that was modeled on dodgeball was played on Morrow’s front lawn between two teams, one of which was play- fully called the “Jews,” because all of its members were, and because all of the members of the second team—which didn’t need its own name—were not. (In the beginning, most people candidly advertised their backgrounds, often as a defensive tactic that was calculated to diminish tension; in the normal male bonding style, the same guys would make fun, playfully it seemed, of other peoples’ backgrounds.) Somehow, Nevin, the only person with whom I ever had a physical confrontation in college or thereafter, also ended up in my fraternity.
• Jeff Kittay was Jewish, but not my kind of Jewish. (As I came to understand it, as much as 20 percent of the class was some type of Jewish, although there was only one of the students, not Jeff, who actually appeared to observe the holidays.) Jeff ’s father, Sol, was the owner of BVD, the maker of men’s underwear, and Jeff made it a point to let you know that he would never disclose what BVD stood for (probably not, I assumed, “Balls Very Dangly”). He kept a Sun- beam convertible off campus (no one was permitted to drive until junior year), would have himself shaved in a barbershop in town, had a llama rug on his floor, and had the first-generation IBM
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