C.J.: Commerce nominee Penny Pritzker and WCCO's Esme Murphy go way back

Minneapolis attorney Clinton Collins got educated at Harvard about "the meaning of real wealth" by President Obama's nominee for commerce secretary, Penny Pritzker.

Collins and Pritzker were students at Harvard a few years before Obama attended its law school.

"She lived in my dorm, Pennypacker, my freshman year. I met her. Nice girl. I was from Denver; I didn't know a thing about the Pritzkers of Chicago or how much money these people truly had.

"At the end of first semester, Penny had her bags packed and I said, 'Penny, where are you going?' " Collins told me. Pritzker told him she was on her way to her family's hotel.

"I thought, 'Oh, her family owns a little ski lodge in Vermont or something like that.' I said to her, 'Hey, you're traveling pretty light.' And she said, Well, I'm just going over to East Cambridge. Then I said, 'The only hotel in East Cambridge is the Hyatt Regency.' She said, That's where I'm going.

"I said, 'Oh, that's the family hotel!'

"That was one of the first times I really found out what real wealth was," Collins laughed. "It blew my mind."

Casually, Collins added, "I was in Pennypacker, Penny was in there, Esme Murphy — I think Esme and Penny were roommates."

I told Collins that Murphy, the WCCO-TV reporter and anchor who also hosts "Saturday Nights with Esme Murphy" for WCCO-AM, also came from a family with a lot of money.

"Yeah, she did. She went to some hoity-toity, fancy school in Manhattan, very exclusive," he said.

While confirming that she and Pritzker were indeed roommates at Harvard, Murphy demurred regarding her own family's assets: "I wouldn't say that."

Of Pritzker, Murphy said: "You would never have known her family has so much. She never acted like someone in that kind of position. Extremely down to earth. She never flaunted anything. She is very, very nice."

In another observation, Collins noted that Pritzker tanned well.

"When I first saw her, I thought she was black," said Collins. "And she told me that often black guys would hit on her. But I was definitely not her color nor her kind [in the financial sense]."

That last comment prompted more laughter from Collins, who was very chatty because he's home recuperating from surgery.

Anytime Fitness has joined Kmart in the euphemistic cheeky commercial craze.

A few weeks ago Kmart introduced a commercial whose questionable marketing tactic was discussed on at least one national morning TV show. The Kmart spot promotes free shipping with series of "ship my pants" lines.

"Always in tune with the latest consumer trends and pop culture," Anytime's national media director Mark Daly told me. Here's the video: www.tinyurl.com/msfoubu.

"Incidentally," noted Daly, "Forbes magazine recently named Anytime Fitness 'One of America's Most Promising Companies.' Later this month, when we open our first clubs in Hawaii and in Chile, we will have a total of nearly 2,200 clubs open in all 50 states and 15 countries on five continents. Not bad for a little franchise that opened its first club in Cambridge [Minn.] 11 years ago."

C.J. can be reached at cj@startribune.com and seen on Fox 9's "Buzz." E-mailers, please state a subject; "Hello" does not count. Attachments are not opened.