Just across the street from the bookstore where I work stands one of Colfax Avenue's major landmarks - East High School. It is hard to ignore, since roughly 100,000 students descend on the bookstore's coffee bar at lunchtime and seem to occupy every square inch of the place. The building is modeled after Independence Hall in Philadelphia, by the way, and it has a long list of distinguished graduates, including Beat Generation icon Neal Cassady, singer Judy Collins, former first lady Mamie Eisenhower, Douglas Fairbanks, actress Pam Grier, Academy Award winner Hattie McDaniel (for Gone With The Wind), author Sidney Sheldon, and astronaut Jack Swigert. I myself went to Rich Central High School in Olympia Fields, Illinois (we were of course "The Olympians"), but the only famous alumni I know who graduated from there was David Mamet, author of Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and he had the nerve to graduate the year before I started there. Talk about getting no respect.
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