A typical student at Penn, Rendell now Pa. governor

Not unlike many Penn undergrads today, when Ed Rendell was a student here, he was just interested in having a good time.

Now he just happens to be governor of Pennsylvania.

Penn was a little different in the '60s when Rendell was a student in the College. Locust Walk had just been closed off to traffic. The high rises were non-existent, a vague idea in the mind of some ambitious planner. The Van Pelt Library was just a few years old.

But some things never change. The Daily Pennsylvanian's editorial page was still criticizing the student government, and Penn's Greek system was still plagued with disciplinary action -- when Rendell pledged with Pi Lambda Phi his sophomore year, the fraternity was on probation for branding its pledges' buttocks with the pi symbol the year before.

"Mooning became a fad," wrote then-student Marty Wiener in the Senior Class Prophecy of Poor Richard's Record, Penn's yearbook, for 1965. "But we always felt bad because the Pi Lam pledges were afraid to join in."

Rendell lived off campus his senior year, up past 40th and Market streets. Self-declared compulsive neatnik Peter Vantine was his roommate.

"It was kind of like the odd couple," Vantine recalls. "I don't think Ed was ever real ordered and organized."

On Sunday nights, he and Rendell would make spaghetti with the two guys who lived below them. They frequented Smokey Joe's and liked to hang out at a soda shop called the Dirty Drug, which was across from the women's dormitories, now Hill College House.

During his college years, academics weren't Rendell's priority. He was the type who could study the night before, the type who could get by on natural intelligence and had decided to do so, according to Mike Stiles -- now vice president of operations and administration for the Philadelphia Phillies -- who was two years behind Rendell at Penn.

"He was informal to the extreme," Stiles says, describing Rendell's morning uniform of pajamas, fuzzy slippers and a trench coat. "He took a very relaxed attitude toward that portion of college life."

Vantine expresses similar views.

"I don't think Ed was ever overwhelmed by a sense of academic duty," he says.

Stiles recalls, in The Player, a Philly magazine now out of publication, how Rendell once nearly drove their elderly Spanish professor insane. Rendell had brought an electric toothbrush to class in his trench coat pocket, and he would turn it on each time the professor began to speak.

"The professor apparently thought there was a problem with his hearing aid -- or brain," Stiles wrote. "He whacked the side of his head with his open palm on more than one occasion."

Vantine recalls that Rendell used to date as often as possible, but like himself, not to much avail.

"This was, unfortunately, several years before the sexual revolution," Vantine says.

One thing Rendell took more seriously than the language requirement and his pursuit of co-eds was his involvement in student politics. The government organizations, like many other student groups at Penn, were still gender-segregated.

By his junior year, Rendell was the vice president of the Men's Student Government. In spring 1965, he was revving up to head the group's "Red and Blue" Party as their candidate for president.

It was no easy election, and one that Rendell ultimately lost to "Change Party" candidate Steve Aron. Since Rendell was the established, fraternity-backed candidate, The Daily Pennsylvanian took an avidly "anti-Ed" stance and condemned him for illegally campaigning in the freshman dormitories.

On election day, the newspaper ran an editorial entitled "Better Dead than Ed."

The editorial described Rendell as "the cupid of Locust Street, perhaps better off were he to be placed in a large diaper and allowed to shoot his arrows of verbal tripe into the hearts of the opposition. The cherubic Ed... is as much interested in doing a good job in the student government as Chiang Kai-Shek is interested in erecting a monument to Mao. Perhaps the male students want more of the same garbage. And if they do, Ed Rendell and company will certainly give it to them."

Not that it mattered -- while members of the opposition posted the editorial around campus, most of the DP's print run mysteriously disappeared that morning, according to Stiles.

Rendell managed to get his party back into control before he graduated and moved on to Villanova University School of Law in fall 1965.

"He was just enamored with politics," Vantine says.

One of the biggest victories during his tenure on the Men's Student Government was the establishment of the "student ticket," which granted students a huge discount for Penn games and events.

Rendell, an ardent Quaker basketball fan, was a leading voice in that fight, even as he watched the Quakers suffer defeat to the '65 Tigers squad, led by Bill Bradley. Although Rendell may no longer qualify for the student discount, he still attends anywhere from 12 to 15 games a season.

Rendell "had that same kind of incredible energy then that he has now," Stiles says. As governor, "he's just managed to channel it in more positively."

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