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weekends. I had come to Latin confident in my intelligence, but I'd never been a serious student, and now I struggled with mediocre grades. Social adjustments were equally difficult. Classmates noted that I spoke like Rocky Balboa. A haughty math teacher rebuked me during class for wearing a long-sleeved thermal undershirt – 'We don't display our underwear here, son.' Latin was intimidating, but it also focused me. I gradually adapted and matured, although my sleep deficit proved to be chronic. "As a senior I recall one particularly tired morning when I arrived at my locker to find an unpaid tuition notice. I snapped, and stormed off to demand my transcript so that I could transfer to a less expensive school. I heatedly told Mr. Eaton that I'd already given him all the money I had, and that I was now exhausted and broke. I may have used bad language. He looked at me through glasses perched at the very tip of a very long nose, and remanded me to his outer office. Mr. Eaton later emerged with a new financial aid offer, having dismissed my previous debt and making me ashamed of my earlier tone. "That night I begged off work. Feeling less pressure than I had in years, I wanted to celebrate. As I drove my mother's car to pick up a pizza, I spotted a girl from my former school. I pulled over, and she asked me how my new school was going. With teenage cool I shrugged and admitted, 'It goes on.' "In reality, however, Latin did much more for me than 'go on.' It opened new worlds of understanding and opportunity, and did so with an uncommon generosity of both spirit and purse. I went on to an Ivy League college prepared to think and compete, and did so as the direct result of Latin having extended to me a life-changing opportunity based purely on undeveloped potential and youthful bluster." care of, and we became friends again. Being in a small school, playing sports together, everyone had to get along in the end." Diana (Karasik) Levin '56 said she wasn't very aware that being Jewish might set her apart until she came to Latin her sophomore year of high school shortly after the boys and girls schools merged. "It was a difficult start. I was one of only two Jewish girls in my class, and I quickly came to understand that I stood out because of it." A few months later, once Levin got to know her new classmates and made friends, her background no longer seemed so important. Jewish alumni from the '40s, '50s and even '60s, recalled that discrimination generally took place outside of Latin's walls. For example, Jewish students were not invited to dances at the The Fortnightly Club or the Saddle and Cycle Club, although everyone could take lessons with Lester Mayhew, who taught dance at The Fortnightly Club. Howard Ecker '62 remembers coming to Latin as a "token" Jewish student in the third grade during the fall of 1952. "My mother tells me the story of getting a phone call from the headmaster informing her that I had been accepted because, in his words, 'Every class needs at least one Jew, and mine was the first application to come in.' Ecker's relationship Alumni from the '40s and '50s remember only a handful of Catholic families at the school. Raymond Cyrus with his classmates in 1964. – Brock Silvers '82 LATI N SCHOOL OF CHI CA GO 103