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For example on p. 30 the girl in the car is Reddy Levy older sister of Laddie Levy, a classmate of mine at the McDonogh School. The guy with his hand on his hip is our own Doug Kelbaugh. The second guy might be McChesney or Dougs roomate, Edwards.
On p. 78 the girl facing you in the background is the late Bobbie Sell who married Pete Beweley 68.
Joe Wood 67 (July 17, 2002)
Our classmate Peter Sandman graciously contributed the following:
My recollections of Where the Girls Are are hazed by 35+ years of private mythmaking. But for what its worth...
The first edition, which the Prince self-published, was the brainchild of Jim MacGregor 66 I was asked to do most of the writing and several 68ers did most of the rules and hours fact-checking. Whoever happened to be passing by as I was writing contributed color and stereotypes....
The persona of witty womanizer was easy for me to assume in writing ... though as a Woodrow Wilson Society wonk I never could achieve it in person. With decades of hindsight, I still think the writing holds up if holds up can translate as a pretty decent example of sophomore smart aleck. The sexism is obviously dated but it doesnt bother me as much as it did in the eighties, when I guess I was more p.c. than I am now.
The book was meant to be a dating guide, to be read for fun and profit by road-tripping students at Princeton and other all-male colleges. (I was already pinned to my first wife, a Vassar student I knew from high school, so the whole thing was very theoretical to me.) When it came out, sales were primarily to college women, who bought it to see how their school fared; secondarily to high school girls, who used it as a sort of social Lovejoys. College men were a distant third in audience size.
There was a flurry of media interest, fueled by irritated and mock-irritated responses from students (women) who didnt like how their school was described. I was a contestant on To Tell the Truth; we were quote-of-the-day in the New York Times. Dial quickly republished the book, unchanged, and the Prince signed a contract with Dell (Dials mass market paperback house) for a national edition ... which we quickly produced, based on even less first-hand knowledge than the first edition. It sold well too. The profits enriched the 66 editorial board; and helped the Prince fund the transition from letterpress to offset. I got an instant reputation as an author, and over the next couple of years I published several other books (How to Succeed in Business Before Graduating, The Unabashed Career Guide, Students and the Law) that didnt do nearly as well but did well enough to help finance my way through grad school.
All the best. Peter (June 24, 2002)
We also have this contribution from Jim MacGregor 66
Its been so long that Im not sure my memories are particularly reliable, so take all of this with several grains of salt.
The Daily Princetonian used to do (still does) a fat summer issue for incoming freshmen, filled with information about almost everything, and ads from campus organization looking for new members and the local merchants hoping for new customers. Once on campus, freshmen told us they really wanted more information about social life, because it was hard to get started when there were no girls on campus and the surrounding geography was new and strange. So: Lets do a guide to womens colleges, perform a service for clueless freshmen everywhere, make a few bucks, have a little fun, and give ourselves an excuse to do, well, a little field research. Yes, it probably was my idea to begin with, but Peter Sandman did the lions share of the organizing and writing, with a ton of help from Ned Scharff and Lane Lasater from the class of 68. And we really did have a lot of fun doing it. Mostly I remember a lot of very late nights in the old Prince offices above the U-Store after final exams through to the end of Reunions, writing, editing, laying out, and enjoying each others witticisms, real and inadvertent. In the end, the book made the front page of the NY Times, Peter and John Kretzmann I did a few radio talk shows, and Dial Press bought reprint rights to the book. So it was a success.
But looking back at it now, what strikes me most is the incredible artificiality of the whole process about which we were writing. The idea that young people would need a guidebook to finding and dealing with people of the opposite sex in their native habitats is a strange one today; its reassuring that we were at least able to laugh at the peculiarities of the process. Its also, though, the last gasp of the 1950s; within months after WTGA was published, the anti-war, racial equality, sexual liberation, rock music, drug culture, youth movement would finally become widespread at Princeton (as it already had at numerous other campuses).
Theres an old story about a lady who urges Woodrow Wilson to make Princeton a co-ed university, in order to remove the false glamour with which the sexes regard each other. To which Wilson replies, Madam, that is the very thing we are trying at all costs to preserve. My son (age 32) and his peers went through college having not only romantic and sexual relationships, but also non-sexual friendships, with the opposite sex, and I think he, and they, are the healthier for it. After getting your e-mail, I dug out a copy of Where The Girls Are; its still moderately entertaining, but I wonder if we might not have been better off at some level if there hadnt been a reason to write it.
Cheers, JMacG (July 3, 2002)
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