In 1964, the year Bobby Greene turned 17, he was hopelessly in love with a pretty 13-year-old named Lindy Lemmon. Day by day in his diary, he chronicled his obsession for her.
He has decided to publish his 1964 diary. Titled Be True to Your School, the book comes out this month and has already been excerpted in the Trib, Esquire, and Family Circle.
Still, she can’t forget him — he won’t let her. He has written about her before, talked about her on the radio, and regaled David Letterman’s millions of viewers with his memories of her. It makes Lindy a bit uncomfortable.
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As Greene told the story in Esquire, he and Lindy went to dinner, just the two of them, and he self-consciously “pretended it was a newspaper interview and asked questions by rote.” He learned that she taught a Sunday school class, took aerobic dance lessons, and had grown up to live in a very different world than he lived in. “I realized that I had no right to be doing this,” he wrote. “I was so used to intruding into people’s lives for my professional purposes that I had blithely intruded into Lindy’s for my own personal ones. But I wasn’t going to find that boy from 1963 — at least not here: all I was going to do was confuse Lindy and make her wonder what it was I wanted.”
The Esquire story was in some ways unsettling to Lindy. “When I read it, I got the feeling that he was big-time Chicago and I was a small-time Ohio housewife,” she says. “It was as if I hadn’t grown — like he had come so far from Bexley and I hadn’t. But then I thought about it, and the truth is, he’s right. I am a housewife, but that’s what I want to be.”
Ron Maciejowski was one of Ohio State’s quarterbacks in the late 60s. He made it briefly to the pros, for the Chicago Bears, but never got in a game. He doesn’t feel threatened by Greene’s successes, his wealth, his celebrity status, or the scores of famous people the columnist has interviewed. So what if Richard Nixon has called Greene on the phone? “Nixon called me, too,” Maciejowski says, “right after an Ohio State game. He’d been watching the game, so he called and talked to me and the placekicker. That’s when I knew the country was in trouble.” He grins. “If it’s one-upmanship [with Greene], I’m right in there.”
Yet she understands why some people enjoy reading of his nostalgic yearnings, even if they aren’t obsessed with their own glory days. “He has a way of touching that moment that everyone is interested in,” she says. “And he has a way with sentiment. Reading sentimental and talking sentimental are two different things. A lot of people have to be drunk to talk about the past. But they always like to read about it. Reading is a private thing.”
