A former classmate began a new Facebook group last week, dedicated to our high school graduating class, Chicago’s Roger C. Sullivan High School, Class of 1972. Since this coincided with unpacking the moving box that contained my final high school yearbook  I took the opportunity to find my pages, my pictures, my prophecies. I was on the Navillus staff (Sullivan spelled backward-get it?) and had joined lots of clubs to polish my college applications, so my face popped up in quite a few places. But with the jaundiced eye of someone who is far closer to his oldest grandchild’s high school days (11 years in the future) to his own (45 years in the past), I thought I would revisit all those activities that were meant to make my college application stand out and rate them for nerdliness. So here, with a rating scale of Nerd Factor of 1 (hey that’s cool) to 10 (complete loser activity) I present the high school life of Lester Raff, Sullivan Class of ’72.

1—————————————10

Cooler                                         Loser

• National Honor Society-Nerd Factor 6 with extra nerd point for being President.
• Local Honor Society-Nerd Factor 10. This was just another name for the National Honor Society.
• National Merit Finalist-Nerd Factor 8. Doing well on a test (PSAT) no one else cared about. And “Finalist” is another name for loser.
• It’s Academic-Nerd Factor 4. Yeah, being on TV was pretty cool. But of course losing on local TV prepared me for losing on Jeopardy on national TV a few years later.
• Freshman, Sophomore and Junior Councils- Nerd Factor 7 for each year. Did anyone care?
• Navillus Layout Editor-Nerd Factor 8. And if the rest of the staff was having wild “creative type of people” parties, I was never invited.
• Rangers-Nerd Factor 9. Who were the Rangers? The smart guys confined to a small cubicle outside the main office were they ran the ditto machine. Or as described by one of the shop teachers “A bunch of brainiacs who don’t know their asses from their elbows.”  I guess he wanted to have that ditto machine in his office!
• Safety Unit-Nerd Factor 10. The Rangers+Arm Badges. We guarded the exits during fire drills.
• Key, German, Bridge and Chess Clubs-Nerd Factor ?– I don’t know, I never went to the meetings.

By my reckoning that averages out to a 7.6 on the Nerd Factor scale. How good of a predictor of future life was that? I think I have done a few cool things in life, and on the whole been pretty successful, but sad to say, when you look up nerd in the dictionary, you see the picture of a pathologist. Somethings are just destiny, you know?

How about you? How well did High School predict your life? And were those four years your high point, your low, or somewhere in-between?

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