THE UNKNOWN SPITZER

Much ink has already been spilled chronicling the life and times of
Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer, and surely there is much more to come.

But Spitzer is more than just the buttoned-down, hard-charging
Sheriff of Wall Street most often portrayed in the press.

He's also a father of three teenaged girls who keeps Grateful Dead
CDs in his office, drives a pickup truck at his Columbia County
weekend rental home and boasts a wicked tennis forehand, thanks in
part to private lessons from former top-10 tennis pro Tim Mayotte.

Here are 10 things you probably did not know about the 56th governor
of the Empire State:

1. Spitzer may be regarded as a brainiac, but he got rejected by
Harvard as a senior in high school. "It was one of those easy
decisions: [Princeton] said yes, and Harvard said no. It made it all
very easy."

2. He attended his first rock concert in 1977 as a freshman in
college - Jethro Tull, which that year released its acoustic classic
"Songs From the Wood" album. Unclear whether this is related to his
answering "yes," in a debate this year, when asked if he had ever
smoked marijuana.

3. What he likes to do on a Friday night: "Go to the movies with my
wife, Silda, and as many of our three daughters as would be willing
to spend the night hanging out with their parents."

4. He reported $1.35 million in income last year, mostly from family
real estate investments, but his staff insists he owns only three
pairs of shoes - a pair of gray New Balance running shoes, loafers
and one pair of work shoes.

5. He's a big NASCAR fan. His brother-in-law is an engineer for
Hendrick Motorsports, the winner of nine NASCAR championships since 1996.

6. Spitzer's own wheels are decidedly unsporty. The family owns two
minivans: a 1996 Plymouth Grand Voyager and a 2003 Chrysler Town &
Country (the upstate truck comes with the rental house).

7. He doesn't just run campaigns. In 1983, when he was 24 years old,
Spitzer ran the New York City Marathon in 3 hours, 32 minutes. He
still runs 4 miles around the Central Park Reservoir most mornings,
usually at 6 a.m.

8. He has two dogs, Jesse and James, but there's nothing cowboy about
them. Jesse is a Bichon Frise whose name is an acronym based on
Spitzer's daughters' and wife's names - J (Jenna), E (Elyssa), S
(Silda), S (Sarabeth) - and his own, E (Eliot). James is a much
larger Wheaten terrier (and the only other man in the house, Spitzer
often notes).

9. As a Harvard Law School student, Spitzer helped Alan Dershowitz
research his successful appeal of Claus von Bulow's conviction for
the murder of his wife, Sunny von Bulow. At one point, the job
required Spitzer to go to a gay bathhouse to meet with the owner
about an alleged drug connection.

10. The three people he'd most like to assemble at the same dinner
table: Al Smith, the reformist governor who led New York for much of
the 1920s; Frederick Douglass, the African-American orator and
abolitionist, and the rocker Bruce Springsteen.