Sheldon Dietz ranked 202nd in the Class of 1937 at Boston Latin. "There were 250 people in the class," he says, of which 40 shouldn't have graduated."

Nevertheless he went to the Harvard admission meeting in his senior year. "Dietz, what the hell are you. Doing here?" a classmate asked him. Dietz wasn't sure. But he had already applied to Rutgers, the University of. Michigan, Cornell, and Bowdoin, and he figured he might as well ask Harvard. His teachers told him no. He did it anyway.

Rutgers, the University of Michigan, Cornell, and Bowdoin turned him down. Harvard accepted him. It was his first defiance of the experts.

In the past two years, challenging the Harvard Cooperative Society's plans for an annex on Palmer Street, he has vanquished or at least equaled every expert sent into the lists to meet him. And he emerged from the fight last week with a $45,000 settlement from the Coop.

It isn't difficult to see how he won. Diets almost never let down his guard against anyone who acts like an expert. Even when he is sitting and talking with a reporter, he constantly interrupts himself by asking. "Did what I just say make sense?" If the reporter answers yes, Dietz simply asks him, "Why?"

Dietz's overbearing confidence in himself often magnetizes the people around him. One night last winter he kept the CRIMSON's newsroom in an uproar for five minutes with and imitation of a printing press. When he gets his shoes shined at the place next to the Harvard Square Theater, he keeps every one of the shoeshine boys in stitches.

His magnetism can scare the people who have to deal with him. "He's a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," a bureaucrat who has confronted Dietz said last week.

Dietz's supposed irrationality is often invoked to explain why he hung on in his fight against the Coop, winking at setbacks from zoning boards and courts. But, for those who know Dietz, it isn't much of an explanation.

"You can make one of two commitments," Dietz says, "to an organization or to yourself." What made him choose himself? Possibly Harvard. He may have been a kid from the Roxbury ghetto, but he thrived. "I discovered Protestantism," he explains.

He also discovered something else--the art of starting from scratch. Scratch was his first junior varsity football game. He managed to center the ball back 39 feet and in the process, hit the fullback, Lothrop Withington Jr. '40, in the head. "Dietz has a great memory of his captain coming up to his locker," Dietz says (he often affects the third person), "and telling him he would be one of the six men who would not make the junior varsity trip to Yale."

His First Comeback

He practiced. By his varsity year, he was Coach Harlow's starting center, playing a full 60 minutes against Michigan. Dietz still remembers what a Michigan All-American said the second time Dietz tackled him: "Hey, kid, you're playing a pretty good game." Dietz spent a happy night in Stillman Infirmary.

Harlow called him "Lone Star," after Lone Star Dietz, the Indian chief of the pro football Boston Redskins. So did his classmates. And they applauded him. They even whistled at him once senior year when he stripped to his red fiannel underwear on a Dunster House stage.

Dietz still hears the applause and whistles. He heard them at his 15th reunion when he repeated the striptease in Soldiers Field. And he heard them last Monday night, when he improvised some songs for a small group of 25th reunions. "When I'm spontaneous, I'm a poet, I'm an artist," he says. "But the only people who know it are the ones who are there. I've got the largest floating audience in the world."

Dietz says of his years at Harvard, "I learned that you can be a non-conformist and still be accepted." Then he learned that you can't be at the Business School. His mother urged him to go, and he went, unecstatically.