Some people attend Harvard, Yale or Stanford. This thread is not for them. Famous people are supposed to go to those schools. This thread is for those of us who went to second, third, or lower tier schools. Your state schools, small private colleges, what have you. Did anyone famous go there? I am mostly thinking of people who are still living.
Jesse Ventura went to my high school. He was a senior when I was a sophomore. He was Jim Janos then…tall, skinny guy on the swim team. Lettered three years in a row.
Phil Alden Robinson (director of “Field of Dreams”) went to my college, along with one president (Chester Alan Arthur) and maybe another (Jimmy Carter claimed so, but there is no record, since he was in a special program for Navy training and not a regular student).
Madonna: St. Andrew (elementary) School, Rochester, MI. (She started the year after I left.) St. Andrew closed as a parish school some time in the 1970s, then was re-opened as Holy Family Regional Elementary School at some later date (1980s?).
Pam Eldred, Miss America, 1970, was (I believe) a graduate of Mercy College, Detroit, where I took a couple of courses a couple of years later.
I never met either of them, although I knew a guy who went out on a date with Ms. Eldred and my kid brother was one year ahead of Madonna, so probably encountered her on the playground.
Aimee Mann (singer) went to my high school. She only went there for her freshman, sophomore, and junior years. My mom was apparently really good friends with her; she has quite a few old pictures of the two of them.
The best known but far from famous person who went to school with me was actually expelled from my HS but went on to the University of Michigan and became, among other things, Christopher Reeve’s personal physician after his horrible accident.
I briefly attended a horrible little fresh water college in Southern Missouri. Actually, they threw my sorry butt out of there after one semester. They constantly told everyone that Robert Cummings, a really cheesy 1950s TV and grade B movie actor was an alumni–and the only one they bragged about. I attended, and twice graduated from, one of the great public universities with too many distinguished graduates to list.
My university is distinguished in Australia, but hardly well-known outside this country, so I guess it counts as “unheralded”.
Anyway, Bob Hawke, former Prime Minister of Australia, attended my uni. He is reputed to have set a record in yard glass drinking (that’s beer drinking from a very long glass with a big bulb at the end) at the uni tavern.
Matt Groening (creater of The Simpsons), Michael Richards (Kramer on Seinfeld) and I all went to The Evergreen State College. It’s no coincidence that the Simpsons live on Evergreen Terrace.
And WNBA player Kate Starbird went to the same high school I did.
Former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John D. Ryan and former U.S. Senator Guy M. Gillette both graduated from my high school. Neither is well known any more, but used to be.
Jerry Cantrell (of Alice in Chains fame) went to my high school. He preceded my friends and I by about 10 years, but we have the old yearbooks to prove it.