When I was a teenager all my friends were reading stuff like “Catcher in the Rye.” I read it but it didn’t to much for me. What I really enjoyed were the books by Max Shulman, especially Barefoot Boy With Cheek.

In this hilarious novel about college life, protagonist Asa Hearthrug falls into a trapdoor in the sidewalk on his first day on campus. It has been set up by a fraternity that is so unpopular on campus, this is the only way it can get candidates for fraternity rush.

I thought about that yesterday when I heard that President Obama couldn’t fill the hall at a community college. White House aides had to be sent out to commandeer uninterested students from the campus to fill the empty seats, sort of like the fraternity in Shulman’s novel:

With less than an hour before President Obama’s scheduled speech, 75 seats remained empty in the recreation center at Cuyahoga Community College’s Western Campus.

So organizers went around campus and recruited more students to fill the seats.