From the actual school newspaper in January 1992:
Master Scalir found this the other day, and sent it to me. I actually stumbled upon these ads myself 30 years ago, and had a good laugh.
Did any girls call him? No. He did get some dudes prank calling him, though. He did another version of this ad where he gave out his actual dorm and room number, instructing girls to "come by anytime", but of course none did.
When he went to grad school (at a different college), he did the same thing, but with more entertaining results. First, they misread his "Handsome & Smart" writeup to be "Handsome $ Smart", and apparently the moron in charge of the classifieds wasn't very familiar with what an ampersand was. Ken was furious about this, and went down to complain, and got in a long argument with the person who made the mistake. He showed me the paper where he was drawing ampersands and dollar signs together, and showing the person the difference, who kept claiming that they thought it was a dollar sign. I wish I was there to see that. Later on, a friend of Ken's pranked him by placing an ad in that same paper, with the heading "HANDSOME $$$$$ SMART".
Anyway, the grad school ads (1993-1994, about 2 years after this) got more response. He got several prank calls, including one guy who was obsessed with pranking him, and kept calling with a fake female voice (which the guy did pretty well), waited until Ken seemed to fall for it, and then would go back to his male voice and start bashing Ken, at which point Ken would scream and hang up. The guy also left some entertaining messages on Ken's answering machine. The dude was never threatening or anything, he just liked prank calling Ken whenever he saw those ads.
Ken finally got a response from a real female, though. The girl then asked if she could "bring female friends over", and of course he stupidly said yes. Well, it turned out these chicks were extremely low-level scammers, as one distracted him in his bedroom while the rest opened the refrigerator and stole cartons of Pepsi. So this whole ruse was just to run out with a few cases of Pepsi, probably worth about $15 total, at most. Maybe they were looking to steal more, but he didn't have anything of value besides a TV, which in 1994 might have been too heavy for them to easily carry.
I kept urging him to give up on these dumb personal ads, telling him that girls will typically be afraid to cold call a dude who puts his phone number in the paper, as it comes off as creepy and desperate. I think he finally gave up on the ads after that Pepsi incident.
He did somewhat better when he figured out a "backdoor" way to call the LA Times personal ads for free (also around 1994), which normally required a 1-900 call for like $2/minute. This was him responding to ads, not posting his own. He used this backdoor to blanket-respond to every chick on there under 35, and some of them actually called him back and met him. He even messed around with a few of them, though most rejected him upon meeting.
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