Jeff Goodman ’71: “Some of the best times of my life; I wish I could go back.”

While Jeff Goodman’s job as a sales rep in the men’s apparel business took him all over the country, he’s never moved from his native Atlanta. He attended Georgia Tech on a track scholarship and returns to campus often, recently taking in the men’s hoops victory over Notre Dame with fellow pledge brother Sam Schwartz ’71. 

“I’d give anything to be back at school again. Every time I’m back there with my kids or down there with my friends, I say that. I said it last night when we went watch Tech play basketball. I said to Sam, ‘I wish we were back in school.’ He said the same thing.” 

One of Jeff’s standout memories from his fraternity days involves Schwartz and a sticky situation. 

“Sam was ‘kidnapped’ and brought out to Stone Mountain. There was a lot of wilderness between Atlanta and Stone Mountain back then. So the brothers left Sam out there in his underwear and poured maple syrup all over him and then poured cornflakes all over that. He finally got to a house where he borrowed the phone, but it took numerous houses, because he would knock on the door, they’d look out the peephole, and there he was with no clothes on.” 

Schwartz did eventually make it back to campus, and maybe even tracked down chief syrupy perpetrator Mike “Fog” Weinstein ‘70, but there were no hard feelings afterward. “Sam happens to be the most successful person in our pledge class, but you’d never know it by talking to him, a real down-to-earth guy,” Jeff said. 

“The year after me exploded. My pledge class (1967) was only 18, and that made about 50 brothers, I think, but then the next pledge class was, I believe, around 52 members, and that was the largest pledge class ever. They doubled the size of the fraternity.” 

Jeff recalls that the jump in size allowed the house intramural teams to become much more competitive over the next several years, although his obligations as a scholarship athlete precluded his participation. Academics also kept him very busy. “I tried studying my freshman year the way I tried studying in high school, and I couldn’t do that at Tech. I almost flunked out! I figured out that if I wasn’t in class or at practice, I had to be in the library.” 

But he also remembers fun nights spent chowing down on Lums’ beer-steamed hot dogs at the corner of Spring and Peachtree as well as some not-so-subtle subterfuge in sneaking his way into Underground Atlanta night clubs: “Someone in our fraternity house, somehow, got a blank New Jersey driver’s license, and everybody was duplicating it and making a license saying you were over 21. We would all go down there with a group or with a bunch of dates, and everybody had a New Jersey driver’s license. I’m sure they knew there was something suspicious, but back then things were not as strict as they would be today.” 

“I still have friends from 50+ years ago,” Jeff reports. “At Georgia Tech, in the fraternity, running cross country, some of the best times of my life.”