The story is improbable. Three men and a single woman meet at a bar on A1A sometime in February 1958. One, a thirty something physicist, proposes the ridiculous idea of launching a college. Someone standing off to the side overhears the conversation and tosses thirty-seven cents of change from a long distance phone call on the bar and quips “go start your college with this.” No one knows precisely what the facts were. This is the legend. 

 Seven years later Jerry Keuper must have been thinking about this episode when he opened a letter from the advertising department of Time Magazine. In December 1966, Time announced a nationwide contest for a free, full page ad in the magazine. The magazine’s editors invited college and university presidents to submit one page descriptions of their schools. The most creative submissions would be published. Always on the look-out for ways to publicize Countdown College, Keuper summoned Homer Pyle, the college’s part time publicist, to his office. Pyle’s assignment: Come up with a proposal. 

 A few days later, Pyle returned with a draft for F.I.T.’s entry composed around a spoof on the title of W. Somerset Maugham 1919 novel The Moon and Sixpence. In Pyle’s parody, Maugham’s “Sixpence” became Keuper’s “37 cents” Keuper like the idea and submitted the copy. Weeks passed. Good news came in the form of a telegram from Time’s headquarters. ”The Moon and 37 Cents” was scheduled to be published in the magazine’s June 1967 Florida edition.