Education: Top of the Heap

Some may soon run the country—and some may soon fade away. Whatever their future, a few extraordinary graduates from U.S. campuses, this year as every year, have already achieved that rare blend of ability and ambition that ignores all obstacles and stretches all talents. Last week TIME correspondents picked a dozen of the top graduates from top schools:

Bandel Bezzerides, 20, a straight-A physics major at the University of California at Berkeley and the No. 1 student in a class of 2,352, says he “didn’t work too hard for those grades, really.” Son of unlettered. Greek immigrant parents, he grew up in Stockton, where his father ran a wholesale produce house. Winning a state scholarship, he startled Berkeley professors with his “knack for understanding something very complex almost immediately, almost offhandedly.” Though he says that he ”likes people,” he shunned all organized campus activity (including last week’s commencement), instead played public-links golf, listened to Bach and Bartok records in his rooming-house quarters. He will study for a Cal doctorate in solid-state physics, but refuses to get excited over his potentially brilliant career. Says he: “I never plan anything more than three days in advance.”

Mills College’s chic, petite Renata Klara Wlodarczyk (pronounced Vwo-dar-chick), 22, is a Polish-born English major who leaves the West Coast’s top women’s campus with a Phi Beta Kappa key, a 3.9 average (out of a possible 4.0) and a two-year Marshall Scholarship to Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall College. While her architect father was flying for the R.A.F. in World War II, Renata’s mother enlisted in the Polish underground. In 1946 her mother bribed Russian guards and waded with her across a river into Czechoslovakia. Reunited in London, the family got U.S. citizenship in California. Editor of the campus magazine, Renata skis, swims, sails, speaks French. Polish, British-accented English, “and a little Swahili that I picked up on an African safari last year” (courtesy of a classmate’s wealthy oilman father). Renata’s hopes are for the retreat of Communism (“It goes against human nature”) and a future teaching job in a U.S. college. She glows at the prospect of marriage: “Maybe I’ll meet a man with a pronounceable name.”

The University of North Carolina’s confident Joseph Wayne Grimsley, 25, is one of seven children of a Wilson county tenant farmer. He graduated near the top of his class with a B.A. in international studies. Though softspoken, Grimsley has no doubt of his future: “I say shoot big. I’m aiming for Secretary of State or something in that line.” Born in a farmhouse, Grimsley enlisted in the Army after high school, got his taste for diplomacy while serving at the U.S. embassy in Rome. Using the G.I. bill, he became the first of his family to attend college. A campus politician, he headed everything from the athletic association to the interdormitory council. Last summer he worked hard to nominate Lyndon Johnson for President in Los Angeles, where he organized Johnson’s uproarious airport welcome. This summer, Fulbright Scholar Grimsley heads for Bogota’s University of the Andes to study Colombia’s political system. His motto: “Not to make millions, but to make millions safe and happy.”

Delbert LeRoy True, pride of the anthropology department at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a hard-handed man of 37. Son of a lumberyard foreman in Wilmington, Calif., True as a boy was a fascinated fossil hunter and “hooked on California Indians.” But when he graduated from high school in 1941, he had no money for college (“My family has always figured the hell with education”). True worked in a shipyard, served as an aerial-gunnery instructor in World War II, acquired a small avocado ranch in the Pauma Valley. In 1953 some U.C.L.A. anthropologists interviewed local Indians, fired up True to publish archaeological papers in learned journals. In 1959 he sold part of his ranch for $10,000, let his wife and children run the rest, went off to enter U.C.L.A.’s “gifted students” program, wound up with a B.A. and a B+ average—enough to win a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for a year’s graduate study. Last week, skipping U.C.L.A.’s commencement, True was off to the University of Arizona to aim for a Ph.D. in anthropology by 1963 and a teaching job in a university. Said he, taking anthropology’s long view: “I guess I’m the first member of my family to get a degree in a thousand generations.”

Pilot-to-be John D. Sullivan Jr., 21, is top cadet in a class of 217 at the U.S. Air Academy. Son of a retired druggist in Worcester, Mass., Sullivan was appointed in 1957 by U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy. In four years he completed 205½ semester hours, compared with the national college average of 124. He was top man in basic sciences, electrical engineering, military studies, social sciences and overall academic achievement. Sullivan hopes to fly for SAC, then study science in graduate school and some day teach at the academy. Said he happily last week: “Today is the beginning.”

The University of Chicago’s exuberantly extracurricular Alice Schaeffer, 21, is an English major from Evanston, who moved the dean of students to burble that she is “the veritable Renaissance woman of unending versatility.” A top scholar, Alice won such praise by tireless toil for the university theater, the annual Blackfriars shows, the Darwin show, the Billy Barnes Revue, the interdormitory council and the Festival of the Arts. This summer she has a job in a student revue at Chicago’s Sherry Hotel; next fall she heads for Stanford and a master’s degree. Her dream: to be a dean of students.

Michigan State University’s Ted Petrie, 21, is the first student in M.S.U. history to graduate with a straight-A record. Son of a foreman at an Oldsmobile forge plant in Lansing, Petrie sagged below A only twice in high school (B’s in gym and English literature) “because I didn’t work.” At M.S.U., where he eased the financial pinch by living at home and working summers as a lifeguard, he found time for swimming, handball and bottle-ball as well as math. Awarded hefty grants for undergraduate research by the National Science Foundation, Petrie now has a $3,200-a-year N.S.F. fellowship for graduate work at Princeton. The future worries him: “Communism seems to be creeping up on us all over the world. I don’t feel I can plan ten years ahead.”

James Edward Gunn, 22, is a summa cum laude graduate in math and physics at Rice University, the Southwest’s toughest campus. A straight-A high school graduate, Gunn attended Rice on a four-year scholarship, won a peck of academic prizes. “I’ve never been able really to determine the limits of his ability,” says one physics professor. “I’ve never been able to ask him an exam question that he can’t give a perfect answer to.” Except for the astronomy club, Gunn steered clear of extracurricular activities, studied ten hours a day. Still, he found time for Army R.O.T.C. and the girl he married last week. Headed for Caltech to study astrophysics, Gunn thinks that “academic life is the only one that would suit me. I’m interested in problems that industry has no use for.” Main ones: “The secrets of gravity and traveling to the stars.” For if myopic man “ever becomes a galactic being.” muses Gunn, “it will probably be a key to his maturing.”

Columbia’s John Vaio, 21, delivered the first Class Day valedictory in Latin on Morningside Heights since circa 1900. Thundering like Cicero himself, Vaio declaimed that “ita mater nostra imperitiam iuventutis dispulit atque ignoratiam” (Columbia “has driven away the inexperience of youth”), and once he slipped orotundly into Greek, extolling Columbia’s pressure àperńs els áxpov ixéσoa.i (“to reach the summit of excellence”). Slender, pale Classicist Vaio, who finds that world affairs, science and business “do not amuse” him, graduated with a higher average than anyone since 1952, won a summa. He was born in Oakland, Calif., the son of immigrant Italian parents; his late father was a cook. Bored in high school with “incomprehensibly incompetent” language teachers, Vaio on his own learned Latin. Greek and French, and enough Chinese to translate poetry. He also knocked out his own English version of the first third of Dante’s Inferno. At Columbia, where Vaio studied German and Japanese for variety, famed Classicist Gilbert Highet called his translations “beautiful—extraordinarily lively and poetic,” gave him an A+ (“something I’ve done only once before”). After two or three years as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford’s University College, Vaio is headed for college teaching.

The University of Chicago’s Latvian-born Anita Rozlapa, 22, fled at the age of five with her family from the Russians and lived in a German D.P. camp until she was eleven. “I loved woods and flowers,” she recalls, “and some said I could become a biologist.” Instead, brought to the U.S. by a suburban Chicago couple, small, bright Refugee Rozlapa fell in love with Spanish at La Grange (Ill.) High School. With a George M. Pullman Scholarship, she wound up at Chicago, where she was Spanish Club president and earned a better than 3.7 average. Now she has a Fulbright fellowship to study in Madrid, hopes eventually to teach “in a large university like Chicago,” where she can research and translate from the whole spectrum of Spanish literature. “I would be very happy,” says she, “to get across to students the great interest I have in Spanish—how to manipulate the language, how to understand the literature.”

Harvard College’s calm, mature Martin S. Feldstein, 21, was named by his 1,000 classmates to deliver the serious commencement oration this week. At his Long Island public high school, Feldstein ranked fifth in the class, scored in the “low 700s” on his College Board exams, and had no Harvard-alumni ties. Harvard not only spotted his promise but also helped him get a full four-year General Motors scholarship when his father, a lawyer-accountant, died in 1957. Feldstein focused on math, economics and premedical courses, got a prize for straight A’s in his sophomore year, made Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, became president of the economics honor society chapter, and this year won the Palfrey Exhibition award for the outstanding scholarship student. He also tended babies, sold junior-executive hats to business school graduates and worked summers at the Sloan-Kettering cancer research lab. Already accepted at Harvard Medical School, he will first use his Fulbright Scholarship to earn a bachelor of philosophy degree in economics at Oxford’s Brasenose College. “I want to learn how the National Health Service operates in England,” says he.

Princeton’s Valedictorian Frederic Kreisler, 21, a summa cum laude major in medieval history with a four-year average of A+, is a nephew of Violinist Fritz Kreisler, and himself an accomplished pianist. One professor calls him “intellectually and personally the most outstanding boy I ever met at Princeton.” Fluent in French and German, he was top man at Pelham (N.Y.) Memorial High School, top freshman at Princeton, made Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and won a Carnegie grant for summer research at the University of Vienna on his thesis. “The Coronation of Charlemagne” (grade: A+). Known for wearing lederhosen even in winter, Kreisler says that “I don’t think I have ever consciously considered grades as a goal.” A Marshall scholar, headed for two years at Oxford’s Balliol College, he wants to be a teacher-scholar. His main interest is man’s “preservation of the ability to adapt to accelerating revolutions.” As though for the nation’s entire class of 1961, he sums up: “Our job now is to keep changing, keep responding, keep living.”