Famous Cleveland Alumni (And a Few Dropouts)

Ah, the beautiful actress and Cleveland native toiled around the community college campus before launching a longstanding and successful career in Hollywood. Her time at Tri-C somehow falls lower than the movie stuff on her Wikipedia page, but whatever.

Known for his flat-top haircut, Norris Cole attended CSU from 2007 to 2011 and was drafted by the NBA’s Miami Heat after a historic senior year. CSU Coach Gary Waters recruited Cole from Dayton and Cole became, arguably, the greatest CSU basketball product of all time. He has been in the NBA three years, and has two NBA championships — as many as LeBron James — to show for it.

Legendary Cleveland City Council President George Forbes attended BW on the GI bill after serving with the U.S. Marine Corps. He graduated in 1957 and went on to attain his J.D. from Cleveland-Marshall School of Law. He retains star power to this day, inserting himself in major political conversations that continue to shape the region and its prospects.

The former OSU football coach has just been installed as president of Youngstown State University. He graduated from BW in 1975 after starting as QB for the football team, which his father, Lee Tressel, coached. (Tressel’s mother was also the athletic historian at BW at the time).

The mayor of this fair city and Vietnam War vet — who knew? — graduated from CSU after getting his associate degree from Tri-C. Jackson got his law degree from Cleveland-Marshall and became a diehard neighborhood advocate as a Ward 5 councilman and city council president. Ironic how he was a staunch critic of Mayor Michael White, whom Jackson always said focused too much on downtown despite campaigning to restore Cleveland’s neighborhoods. In Cleveland, the critics are only critics until they’re in positions of power; then it’s the same old song and dance.

The Girls creator and indie darling Lena Dunham graduated from Oberlin in 2008. She has since become one of the preeminent “voices of her gen-eration,” chronicling the ambivalence and malaise of young New Yorkers in love and loss in a show you say you hate but watch anyway.

One half of the founding team of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream (actually Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings Inc.), Greenfield attended Oberlin and stud-ied pre-med, with every intention of going on to med school. After graduation in ’73, he applied and was rejected in two successive years, so he started an ice cream shop with his buddy Ben Cohen in a gas station in Vermont. The rest is history.

Born in South Dakota, Gerberding graduated from Case with a degree in bio and chemistry before becoming the first female director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where, among other things, she organized the response to the anthrax terrorist scare of 2001. She’s now a badass infectious disease expert.

Though the boy mayor attended Cleveland State for three years in the late ’60s, he ultimately graduated from Case with both a Bachelors and a Masters of speech and communication. He went on to become one of the most divisive political figures in Cleveland history, marrying three women, and improbably joining Fox News as a regular contributor.

The Indians’ play-by-play announcer on SportsTime Ohio is a distinguished alumnus of the BW communications program. He graduated in 1990 and spent his early career with Channel 5 as a producer and nightly sports anchor. He’s been with the Indians since 2000 and calling games on STO since 2007.