Video: Letterman Salutes Ball State on Late Show

The miseducation of David Letterman is well documented. He was a “C” student at Indy’s Broad Ripple High School before he embarked on the same sort of academic life at Muncie’s Ball State University. He now bestows an annual BSU scholarship on (yes, yes) a fellow “C” student. Well, Letterman extrapolated on all this on The Late Show on Feb. 25, describing, to hilarious effect, his applications to both Ball State and Indiana University.

See the nearly-three-minute clip here, in which Dave sends up Ball State itself and the WCRD radio station on campus, which recently won an award as Indiana College Radio Station of the Year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W69-rWODW24

Turns out Letterman was accepted to IU (“the big basketball powerhouse”) and placed on immediate academic probation. “Will that get in the way of my drinkin’?” he said a young Letterman had wondered. “So I said ‘No dice.’ I wrote ’em back and said, ‘Get yourself another boy.'”

About his Ball State app, however: “I sent it back in, and I was admitted with honors. … No, that’s not true.”

“The place is fantastic,” Letterman says of Ball State at large. “It’s like a wonderland of education. When I was there, it was all dumb kids. And now they’re wildly intelligent, and they’re bright faced, and they’re excited, and they’re eager to learn, and they get there early and they stay late, and they have a big time.”

On Late Show, Letterman also spoke to WBST, the public radio station “serving the Muncie metroplex,” where he was released for seemingly practical and understandable reasons: “I was drunk one day and didn’t show up.”

Letterman is set to retire from his broadcasting career this May after hosting Late Show since late August 1993 on CBS. He first burned the midnight oil on TV in February 1982 as host of Late Night with David Letterman on NBC.

WCRD, dubbed “The Pulse of Ball State” at 91.3 FM, was born in 1989. The station operates out of (a-ha) the David Letterman Communication and Media Building on campus, and long before it was “The Pulse,” it was “The Broken Wing of College Radio,” a wink to Letterman himself.