SCHOOL’S OUT ’86 : Even for ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ Life Is No Cinch

A special report on graduation ‘86, summer plans, this year’s brightest high school grads, and those once voted most likely to succeed. Other stories begin on Page 10.

They are selected unscientifically. They could simply be the best-liked high school seniors. Or the smartest, the most talented, athletic, hard-working, street-wise, or ambitious. For whatever reasons, their classmates voted them “Most Likely to Succeed.”

And they probably will, according to Christopher Jencks, a sociology professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who is co-author of “Who Gets Ahead,” an analysis of what leads to financial success and status. But, he added, their classmates’ vote of confidence is not a guarantee.

Not every high school superstar is wired for success. A few find the title to be a check that life refuses to cash. Others say that the label--with its expectations spelled out so publicly--spurred them on to greater achievement. Some have redefined the word “success.” Some say they’re still working on it.

Here, three former Orange County high school seniors who were named “Most Likely to Succeed” describe their experiences in the years since high school.

“I always came across as a person who had it all together,” said Linda Harrison, 38. “So I had to live up to that expectation.”

She and her second husband, George, own a financial consulting business in San Francisco. They have two children. This year, her goal is to earn $180,000.

In 1966, then named Linda Seymour, she was named along with Jon Knight as “Most Likely to Succeed” at La Quinta High School in Westminster. Knight, she said, was killed about five years later when a car he was working on rolled over him.

Harrison was class treasurer, student body treasurer, a song leader, and Girls’ League president. She had a 3.8 grade point average. “I never doubted I would succeed,” she said.

“Our dad and mother were very supportive. Dad used to say, number one, ‘It can be done,’ and, two, ‘Think big.’ ” Her siblings, also high achievers, include state Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim), a sister who owns an escrow company and another sister who is a corporate comptroller.

They all worked in high school. Harrison had her first job at 13 selling magazines over the phone.

After high school graduation, she went to Cal State Fullerton and worked part-time as a bank teller. She married at 19 and, starting in a management training program, worked her way up in banking. After 16 years, she was assistant vice president for Security Pacific National Bank, making $36,000 a year.

Then she had what she calls her “mid-life crisis.” After 11 years of marriage, she had undergone a “devastating” divorce. “It set me back years, both financially and emotionally.” She then married a man in the banking industry.

She said she had played a supportive role for her first husband. In contrast, she said, her second husband nurtures her. “Not only do we work together, but he demands I be the best I can be. So, in fact, I achieve more today than I have ever achieved.”

They decided to have a child. They moved to San Francisco from Orange County and opened their own business. “I don’t think I can ever remember being happier,” she said.

Does she feel successful? “I feel I’m working toward being successful. Actually, success to me is two things. Not only an appreciation for the kind of work you’re doing but also it is equated in terms of dollars. I need to make the dollars to equate it with real success.”

Harrison said she considers her intelligence to be average. She attributed her achievements more to a gregarious personality, hard work and tenacity.

“I just worked real hard to be the person I wanted to be. That meant getting good grades in school and developing an appreciation for the finer things in life. It’s sort of like living this person you’ve created in people’s minds. You’d better be it or you have deceived a lot of people.”

Long-range studies measuring early leadership and genius have yet to provide solid predictors of prominence, wealth or happiness, according to Jencks. But the qualities that that inspire people to vote someone “Most Likely to Succeed” do actually contribute to success in terms of career status and income, Jencks said. They include ambition, grades, academic test scores, highly educated parents, a white, urban background and “various personality factors,” he said.

For instance, he said, “We know that people who score high on a personality scale that measures impulsiveness do a little worse than average” in career success.

His studies, however, did not include accomplishment, social service, self-satisfaction or happiness as part of success. “When you define success differently, you get different answers,” he said. “The definition is arbitrary.”

Many people like to point to the examples of Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison--all underachievers in school, said William Foster, an education professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and director of the Center for Individual Development.

Pondering their cases, he decided to compare high-ability underachievers with high achievers to see if their “life satisfaction and life success” differs by the time they reach their 30s and 40s. “My suspicions are that there is a real possibility that the high-ability underachievers may have comparable success later in life, but the data remains to be analyzed,” he said.

More than high grades, he said, extracurricular activities such as sports, Scouts, student council or service clubs are better predictors of future success, he said. “People in this environment are learning important lessons about what real life is like.”

“One of the things I tell my players is that you may have a bad game, but that doesn’t mean you are a bad person,” said Vince Moll, 34, a biology teacher and head baseball coach at Idaho Falls High School in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Moll said that philosophy helped him avoid dejection when he realized his dreams of a career in major league baseball would not come true.

In the beginning, he said, “a lot came easy for me. Academics were not difficult. I was in advanced placement.”

With a 3.88 grade point average, Moll was in the top 1% of his 1969 graduating class at Marina High School in Huntington Beach when he was voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” He had been junior class president, president of a few service clubs, was captain of both the baseball and basketball teams and played varsity football. He was the Rotary Club Boy of the Year.

He was accepted at Stanford University, but decided to enter USC on a baseball scholarship. “At the time, an athletic career was important and SC was the place to go,” he said.

After graduating with a double major in biology and physical education, Moll signed with the Kansas City Royals. After playing minor league, Class A ball for a year, he was told he might have a chance at the majors if he stayed in the minors another three years.

“I guess I didn’t have the ability to advance further,” he recalled. “At times, I didn’t hit real well. I didn’t have my whole game together.” Besides, he was about to marry and the unstable life of the minor leagues was not favorable to marriage, he said.

Disappointed, he quit the Royals and returned to USC, where he received a teaching credential. He and his wife were new teachers at an intermediate school in Seal Beach when Proposition 13, the tax-cut measure, was passed in 1978. Budget cuts eliminated their jobs. That year they moved to Idaho.

“I went up the ladder as far as my ability would take me,” Moll said. “There were obviously disappointments. I accepted it pretty well.”

He said that he came from a close-knit family and that his parents “did a lot as far as self-esteem. They always said, ‘As long as you do your best, it’s all we ask.’ ”

“I really enjoy working with young people,” he said. Much of his satisfaction now comes from helping them succeed in the classroom as well as on the playing field. He was named “Teacher of the Year” at Idaho Falls High. Several of his players have been drafted by major league teams. “For Idaho, I guess that’s unusual.”

Does he feel successful? “I think there’s a tendency to equate success with monetary gain,” he said. “Maybe I’m rationalizing, but I feel happy. I feel I’m contributing and making a difference. In those terms I feel like a success.”

Most challenges in adult life require failure, Rutgers professor Foster said. Many who were high achievers as children are accustomed to perfection and emotionally unequipped to fail, he said.

Some students find their achievement grinding to a halt when they leave school and come to face with failure for the first time, Foster said. Though bright and capable, they lack the willingness of a pole vaulter to pick himself up and jump again and again until he makes it over the bar, he said.

A reason, he said, is that tasks are too easy for them and they are motivated by external rewards such as grades or money. “Some parents say, ‘We’ll give you 20 bucks for an A.’ ”

Public schools that stress basics, he says, create such “extrinsic” motivation by failing to tailor tasks to challenge hard-working or gifted students. “Intrinsic” motivation, on the other hand, can be created by offering a task just above a student’s capacity, much like raising the bar an inch higher than the pole vaulter’s last jump.

Oldtimers at Corona del Mar High School remember Vicki McCarty Iovine. They remember she was the first girl to be elected student body president, and they know she became a lawyer. But most of all they remember that she was a Playboy centerfold.

Iovine, 32, now a resident of Sherman Oaks, remembers feeling she never quite fit in with the “golden-haired, beautifully tanned, nice-car” atmosphere of Newport Beach. “We didn’t have any money. I didn’t know how to sail a boat, for heaven’s sake. I barely managed roller skating. I felt inadequate.

“I worked so hard to excel to make up for it.”

In 1972, when she was elected “Most Likely to Succeed,” the fruits of the ‘60s were being gathered. “Eighteen-year-olds were getting the right to vote,” she said. “There was a tremendous sense of civic responsibility and civic involvement. We wanted to identify with the commitment to change and making a better world. We were very idealistic. Embarrassingly so, as I think now. . . .”

Labeled a “mentally gifted minor,” she maintained an A-minus grade average while also working in ice cream parlors and health food stores and volunteering for Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign. She was valedictorian and one of the first young women to be elected student body president in Southern California. She was also a prom queen.

She was offered a scholarship to UC Berkeley. But after graduation, to her mother’s dismay, she decided instead to travel alone through Europe for a year. She used the money she had made working.

After the year she went to Berkeley, where she sprinted through her undergraduate courses, winning a Phi Beta Kappa key and a summa cum laude designation in 2 1/2 years. She also worked as a congressional intern in Washington. At the last minute, she applied for law school and was accepted by three schools. She went to Hastings College of Law in San Francisco.

“I wanted to move to a city and become Mary Tyler Moore. I wanted to throw my hat up in the air and have a great life.”

Before graduating from Hastings and passing the bar, she was awarded a Rotary International Fellowship and went to study public international law at Cambridge, where she obtained an LL.D. And she also posed for Playboy, an event that she says “changed the course of (her) life.”

While applying for a summer internship on a Los Angeles newspaper, she had been asked to write a story on Playboy Magazine’s search for its 25th anniversary Playmate by posing as an applicant. She pursued the test assignment. As a result, she was chosen as one of the six finalists and was asked by Playboy to pose as a centerfold.

While she expressed her own “political problems” with the magazine, they offered her $10,000, the chance to meet Hugh Hefner and the opportunity to write the copy that would accompany her nude pictures. “As my confidence was bolstered, I thought, ‘What the heck! I’ve been the little girl in the library in glasses and a bun studying my fanny off for 20 years. These people are saying we think you are pretty and we think you are a sex symbol.’ So I said OK.”

After the September, 1979, Back-to-School issue of Playboy appeared, she became a celebrity--sought by newspapers and television shows that were skeptical of her academic credentials.

But, she said, back at Hastings for her last year, “people hated me for it. . . . There was a lot of gossip about me.”

One reason she has not attended high school reunions, she said, has been the fear of being “the topic of every conversation.”

She went to work as corporate communications coordinator for Playboy Enterprises Inc. in Los Angeles and discovered the real world. “It’s a big city, Los Angeles. I had a tough time. I did not hold on to who I was.”

She said she became confused. “I thought I was what everybody thought I was. If you thought I was a centerfold, I was a centerfold. If you thought I was a lawyer, I was a lawyer. . . . It probably made me a little schizophrenic.”

She then pursued work in television and movies, landing parts in commercials, radio shows, cable television and a movie-of-the-week. And last year she married Jimmy Iovine, a record producer. They want to have children, she said.

“I took a deep breath and said I’ve been running so hard for so long, I didn’t know where I was going.” Now in addition to accompanying her husband on business trips to New York, she does volunteer work for the California Special Olympics--an altruistic venture that reminds her of high school days and gives her a feeling of “coming full circle.”

Does she feel successful? “I would not say I am a success. I am leading a successful life. I am happily married with a roof over my head, a comfortable life. I enjoy my work, I like my friends.

“I don’t work nearly as hard to achieve the same sort of goals I used to. I’ve done it. I’ve proved I could do well in school, be liked, be the smartest and considered pretty. I got a lot out of my system.”

Now that she leads a more conventional life, she says people do not resent her appearance in Playboy. “Now it’s a fun cocktail party anecdote. It’s not a threat.”

She might go to the next reunion of her high school class, she said. “Now, years later, I realize I fit in fine. I finally feel like my skin fits.”