American Fraternity Man (25 page)

I
take another bite of the chili, thinking as I swallow that the calorie count probably exceeds the daily allotment I’ve set in my personal goals, thinking that my stomach is going to start gurgling at any moment, thinking that—just as I work myself into a conversational groove and Dr. Wigginton finally warms to me, just as he’s about to say “You, sir, are indeed a Diamond Candidate”…at that precise moment, I will be unable to hold back an earthquake-strength chili-fart. And from that, there can be no recovery.

“You’ve seen quite a bit?” Dr. Wigginton ask
s, and for the briefest moment he seems interested. But then: “It’s nothing compared to the things
I’ve
seen, I can assure you.”

“
Sure. I wasn’t saying—”

And
then he tells me that he’s seen every East Coast chapter house. He and several other Penn State alumni, he says, took a summer retirement trip along the coast several years ago, stopping at every school at which a Nu Kappa Epsilon chapter house had been erected. “When we walked into the houses,” he says, “the first reaction was confusion.” He makes a face of mock perplexity, and suddenly a system of wrinkles ravages his once-smooth cheeks and forehead. “Who’s the old man, they asked. But when they found out who we were…” Burly laugh. “The reaction turned to terror.”

While I was an undergraduate back at EU, alumni would
sometimes stop by the house wearing faded NKE polos tucked into pleated khaki shorts, and they’d walk the hallways pointing out tiny defects in the crown molding or paint. Lou Forester, a Board member for our Housing Corporation, stopped by each Spring with his wife and—as he led her to each room of the house—asked her if
she
would ever live here, if she would allow her son to live here. “You’re an alumni,” I remember telling Lou, “and we’re just kids. Of course you can live better than this.” I thought it was a clever response. “First of all,” Lou said without even turning from a small scratch on one of the built-in bookshelves, “I am a single alumnus. The word ‘alumni’ refers to a group, the word ‘alumnus’ refers to an individual. Until we can make that distinction, we can never have a productive dialogue. Second, my name is on the wall of this fraternity house. Under ‘Diamond Donors.’ Until your name is listed anywhere on the Donor Roll, your input is not taken seriously.” I was just a sophomore when I questioned Lou, and so I quickly learned to shut up and let him make his inspections. But still, from that moment, the word “alumni” burned in my mind. Alumni…donor…the pinnacle of fraternal and professional excellence. Never once did we have an alumnus stop by the house wearing a torn AC/DC shirt and cut-off jean shorts, smelling of fish bait and rum: every single alumnus seemed wealthy and powerful, confident and comfortable, so much that we undergraduates felt like their subordinates, like we were interning in
their
fraternity. I’ve always pictured the day when I could finally sit with them, talk with them, compare careers and cars and clothes and wives and sons. I’ve always pictured the day when that word “alumnus” would be bestowed upon me.

*

Nu Kappa Epsilon distributes to every new pledge a 250-page hardcover manual called
The
Marathon
, the most recent edition filled with information on the “DO IT!” program, filled with diagrams and hierarchical charts of the National Fraternity, and—most important—filled with the rich and graphic-intensive history of the Fraternity. The manual tells us that Nu Kappa Epsilon Fraternity was founded in 1910 at Carolina Baptist College, the dream of eight young men scattered far from their birthplaces of Charleston, Columbia, and Charlotte. As was typical in those days, none of these students was older than eighteen; five of the eight men were boys, just seventeen, and one was
sixteen
.

A tiny liberal arts college in the northern sand hill country of South Carolina, Carolina Baptist prided itself on its literature and history departments, and the rigorous curriculum was designed to ensure that each male graduate (there were no female students in those days) could converse extensively on the subject of the classics, could speak admirable Latin, and could call-and-respond for hours with Biblical quotations and British poetry.

Carolina Baptist: fertile soil in which would grow many future lawyers, politicians, professors, and pastors. The college at which these eight students studied was the quintessence of Bible Belt Academia. Not just “fertile soil”…no, bigger…a full nursery of sturdy trees. Yes, plant wealthy-but-rough Southern boys in the tilled dirt of Carolina Baptist, there in the sunshine, and after four years of study, watch them emerge with a newfound sense of culture, etiquette, a firm connection to the strong roots of Deep South Power necessary to earn quick trips into esteemed law firms, into graduate school at the University of Virginia or Duke or Vanderbilt. In 1910, a degree from Carolina Baptist College was a golden ticket born of four solid years of scholarship, of study late at night in the humid dorm rooms, reading thick textbooks by the light of the student’s lamp.

The campus community at Carolina Baptist, also, featured enough extra-curricular activities for these young men to remain constantly and thoroughly immersed in those Deep South roots of power, that branching underworld of connections which their rich politician-fathers had secured for them at such great expense. The most distinguished of these activities was the campus literary society, The American Men of Letters, and it inducted just three new men each semester and published annually a 50-page book of poetry and of criticism on the contemporary classics of Southern literature. Held in equal esteem was the Carolina Baptist baseball team, which played against nearby Furman, the University of South Carolina, the College of Charleston, and Emory and Oglethorpe down in Atlanta; years later, alumni would claim that the baseball team’s overwhelming Southern dominance so scared other universities that the Southeastern Conference passed over Carolina Baptist in the early years of the sports conference’s formation. This legend, of course, ignores the obvious fact that Carolina Baptist had no football team, which, as the years passed and the SEC universities grew larger and more prominent and football became more and more important, sealed Carolina Baptist’s current reputation as a tiny, quaint, and mostly irrelevant campus. That soil hasn’t gone infertile in the last century, but the
tree nursery now seems more like a hobbyist’s garden.

Three fraternities also met regularly on campus, though in the years immediately following the turn of the century, they didn’t yet live together in fraternity houses. Alumni would wait until after the Great War to petition the college for land on which to build the current Greek Row, a block of column-adorned, plantation-style mansions, each complete with porch s
wings and weeping willow trees. In 1910, these fraternities admitted just three or four new members each term, and as their rites of passage, they didn’t haze their pledges (many fraternity historians insist that hazing originated as the soldiers of WWI and WWII returned to college and introduced boot camp tactics into the houses). Instead, each fraternity steeped itself heavily in a specific academic subject, one studying Roman history and another studying Romantic poetry. Professors and dignitaries at Carolina Baptist sat in honorary positions with these fraternities, giving them extra reading assignments as though fraternity life was another class, helping them to organize academic banquets at which poetry was recited and grades celebrated. And, of course, the greater the passion that students, alumni, and faculty developed for these fraternities, the greater the number of annual traditions and friendly rivalries that developed. Today, Carolina Baptist still holds its Fraternity Wheelbarrow Pull (though the winning fraternity is no longer made to wear dresses and cook dinner for the losers).

An invitation into any campus group, society, sports team, or fraternity, was seen as an instant invitation into that larger network of Southern Somebodies. Admission into Carolina Baptist College was special, certainly, but it was only the first step; membership in a fraternity or a literary society meant that you had
made it
, no worries. You’d latched onto those roots, and now your future could become warmly intertwined within them, could grow along with them.

The only problem, though, was that the very exclusivity that seemed essential for these campus groups to exist soon worked to their detriment. Carolina Baptist had been slowly increasing enrollment in the early 1900s, and by 1910 reached a staggering 220 students. But the fraternities, comfortable with their membership numbers, refused to adapt and grow. Exclusivity became
even more
exclusive, as more potential suitors—from which the fraternities could select at will—appeared on campus, and were rejected and discarded like invasive weeds.

But thankfully…
two blood brothers, Lesley and Jackson Cohen, separated in age by only a year but electing to enroll at Carolina Baptist at the same time, both found themselves in Fall of 1910 among the large number of disappointed freshmen not selected by any fraternity as pledges. Lesley and Jackson soon made friends with a student named C. Anthony Croke, and (as legend goes) the three began to dine together every evening, began to watch with hawkish interest the interactions of the other campus fraternities.

So infatuated with their own traditions were these fraternities, said Jackson Cohen (the most assertive of the three youths), that they had forsaken all that was meaningful about the fraternity experience. He claimed that fraternity brothers were neither “brotherly” to one another, nor interested in working together for any common good; they seemed devoted only to exploiting that life of power that they had entered.
Essentially, he said,
fraternity
at Carolina Baptist had died. From
The Marathon,
a famous NKE quote: “We shall have a brotherhood of our own,” said Jackson Cohen. “We shall have a selfless fraternity of gentlemen more distinguished than they.”

And out of this desire for fraternal bonds came Nu Kappa Epsilon, officially established in November of 1910. And the fraternity bloomed first on that Carolina Baptist campus, as the neglected suitors from all other campus fraternities jumped at the opportunity to start something new and different, to start something
living
, to find their place, to secure the companionship that they so desperately craved. To found a fraternity, they believed,
the right
way
. Then the fraternity spread its seed throughout the entire Deep South, where many similar colleges and universities experienced the same phenomenon: growing in enrollment but under-served by the over-exclusive campus fraternities.

Nu Kappa Epsilon first received petitions from students at those schools closest, from Furman and South Carolina and Chapel Hill, and then from schools as far south as Stetson University, and as far west as Ole Miss. Growth slowed during the Great War, bu
t the Roaring Twenties brought a fresh crop of young men to college, and from coast to coast, these men looked to join brotherhoods as strong as those that they had left in the military, and NKE soon found itself with chapters at UCLA and Washington and Penn State and Pittsburgh and Illinois. The Grand Tradition of Nu Kappa Epsilon had begun.

It’s a fun story to tell, a fun history lesson for any chapter that doesn’t “get it.” They are part of something larger than themselves
, a century of tradition that began with young men just like them.

So that’s
the official history. And when we tell the story, we make the intentions seem so pure. But I’m quickly learning that history is never so neat as we’d like to believe.

*

This is Dr. Wigginton’s version of the history:

“Have you been to State College yet?” Dr. Wigginton ask
s me, still on the porch after more than an hour of one-sided conversation. He’s already refilled my chili bowl, and once again I couldn’t refuse his hospitality.

I
tell him that I’ve been in Pennsylvania only three or four days.

“Mmm,” he
says, and shakes his head again. “I visited two weeks ago for a coach’s brunch. Only a few old-timers came by. You have seen the house, correct?”

I
tell him that I don’t think so.

“You don’t know the story of the Penn State house fire? 1985?”

The gas is starting to build from the chili. I take a deep breath and will it away. “The Penn State house fire?” I say. Does
every
chapter have a house-fire story?

“
I’ll have to refresh your history at another time. In any case, it’s an impressive mess those young men have made of that home! More than a hundred members, and they seem incapable even of wiping the sprayed beer from the glass frame of the charter.”

I picture the ceiling fan at Pittsburgh, the beer
, the paint.

“They cannot empty trash cans,” he
says. “Even on gameday, they cannot just pretend that they appreciate tradition. And this is a four-million dollar house.” So far, I’ve been his audience but not his conversational equal, and I fear that I might spend the entire afternoon listening to him relive his fraternity memories. A wasted alumni visit. So I tell him that I understand, that I appreciate tradition, that this was the reason I took the job.

Dr. Wigginton stop
s, considers me from an angle, eyes squinted. “Do you?”