You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

THE DARKER SIDE OF FRATERNITY LIFE

I am in a good position to write about fraternity life as I have lived in two different fraternities on different campuses. I have also been close to sorority living having been a student ‘house boy’, for three years, serving girls and washing dishes after meals. In addition, my Mother was a fraternity house mother at Oregon State for five years. She shared her experiences of fraternity life from the perspective of a house mother.

It is now sixty years since I have had any contact with a fraternity or fraternity alumnae. Certainly, there were enjoyable experiences in fraternity living but my memory of those experiences seems to have faded. What remains is this collection of less favorable recollections. I am concerned about what that says about me.

Sigma Chi at Oregon State College:

In my freshman year, I lived as a pledge in the Sigma Chi house at Oregon State University. This experience was positive partly because there was a housemother living in the house. We were expected to learn good manners, especially at the formal dinners. Any transgression was punished with a ‘ding’ which resulted in loss of privileges or extra house duty. We would also learn such things as the correct way to set a table, a skill which came in handy a few years later when I was setting tables for 45 AOPi girls at the University of Oregon.

The experience of being a freshman, living in the house, entailed cleaning duties. This would not have been a problem, except that the overzealous upper-class “brother”, who had volunteered to be in charge of seeing to it that we freshmen did our cleaning properly. There are positions in organizations which in which volunteers should not be allowed. I swear that this guy got his pleasure out of the power he had over the freshmen. He wore white gloves to check our dusting. He seemed to enjoy detecting a small amount of dust on his white glove. If he did, even if it had been on top of door trim, his punishment was a cold shower. The water was extremely cold, especially in the winter. He seemed to get some sadistic pleasure out of watching us shivering under the cold water.

The dean of women, at that time, was known for being especially conservative regarding female student liberties. If a sorority was to share an activity with a fraternity, such as a dinner, she had to approve. Our house mother was anxious that the Sigma Chis be thought of favorably by the Dean of Women. So she invited her to dinner.

The dining room was tight. The tables were arranged in a U shape so that no one was far from the head table. On the evening of the dean’s visit, the noise at the table was, as usual, a clatter of utensils on dishes and many conversations. No one conversation could be distinguished from another. Unless you were sitting next to the person with whom you were talking. Occasionally there would be a pause in the din when all conversations would stop at the same moment. On the evening of the dean’s visit, the conversation was, as usual, a pervasive rumble. However, a pause in conversation happened at just the moment when a brother stated “I’ll bet the old gal has never had an organism.” The silence that followed was deafening.

With only a couple of exceptions, I liked the men I came to know in the Sigma Chi house and enjoyed one year that I was there. However, my grades were not high enough for initiation. When I transferred to the University of Oregon I hoped to join a fraternity.

Beta Theta Pi at the University of Oregon:

I decided to accept the offer of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity at Oregon because four of my high school friends had pledged Beta. The fraternities, on the Oregon campus, do not have housemothers. While most fraternities maintained pride in their civility, the Betas did not. The fraternity chapter room was supposed to be a hallowed space where only the initiated could enter in reverence. However, for several months, during the time that I lived there, it could not be used, not even for monthly chapter meetings, because it had become a film studio in which one of the “brothers” was editing porn films. He would splice out all of the preliminary scenes, those where the actors developed character and the romance was building. He would leave only the scenes of greatest pornographic interest. He was a business major and was making good money renting these modified porn films to other fraternities. The film studio was eventually cleared out of the chapter room but that did not mean it had been restored to the sanctified space it was intended to be.

One afternoon, as I was studying at my desk in my room, one of the ‘brothers’ knocked, urgently, on my door and said “Quick come down to the chapter room. There is a housewife from Springfield there who wants to be fucked by every man in the house.” Why a woman would want to do this is beyond me. Perhaps she was seeking revenge for the dalliances of her husband. I wanted no part of it and declined. I had not yet enjoyed the experience of intercourse, and certainly did not want to have my first time be with a troubled woman who had just been visited by number of my ‘brothers’.

The way we were expected to prove ourselves as worthy of Beta membership was to successfully endure the riggers of initiation. The big challenge was surviving ‘Hell Week’. Each day of the week there was some stupid stunts which we would have to perform. One day we initiates were required to put a string over our collar which hung down the outside of our shirt like a string tie. The other end of the string was supposed to be tied to our penis. The girls of certain sororities were told where the string was tied. When they would see us on campus they were invited to pull on the string in order to humiliate us. In fact, I and others tied the string to the top button of our fly or to our belt buckles. We would then pretend to be embarrassed if a girl would tug on it. I would have been delighted if a coed had tugged on my string as it may have indicated a sexual interest. None did.

On another day we were required to remove all of our clothes when we returned from our afternoon classes. The rest of that day, through dinner and the evening we were to remain naked. At the end of the evening all were to lay in a row on the floor and spread our cheeks for the humiliation of the ‘Ass hole check’ where an upperclassman would grade us on how clean our anus was. In my experience there, this was the only instance where hygiene was encouraged by the Beta brotherhood.

The only other hell week task which I remember was “The Fire brigade”. A small bonfire was built in the parking lot behind the house. A large kettle of very spicy ‘soup’ was placed at the top of the stairs on the third floor. The primary ingredient of the ‘soup’ was several bottles of Tabasco sauce. It also included hot chilli peppers. The initiates, in their underwear, were required to take a mouthful of this painfully spicy liquid and run down stairs, out the back door of the house and spit it on the fire. After spitting out the piquante “soup” onto the fire we were required to run back up stairs wailing like a fire engine siren or shouting “ding ding ding” to take another mouth full of the burning liquid. This was to continue until the the fire was extinguished. Although it was a small fire, it was obvious that it was going to take a long time to extinguish the flames by spitting on it. As we ran from the fire through the parking lot and back into the house, we passed the garbage dumpsters. Next to one, was an open gallon can which had contained crushed tomatoes. I noticed it as I exited the house on my first run. On the way back to the soup service, I grabbed it. Bending over as I ran back up the stairs I hid the can against my stomach so no one would notice it. When I reached the large kettle of spicy liquid I leaned over the kettle and tipped my head back to receive another mouth full of ‘soup’ from the large ladle the upperclassman was using in his attempt to pour as much soup into my mouth as possible. He was concentrating on his task and did not notice that I was dipping the gallon can into the soup kettle. With the gallon can full of ‘soup’ I ran down the stairs. Upperclassmen came running after me yelling “Stop Tod he’s got a bucket.” When I reached the fire, I pitched the contents of the “bucket” onto it with such force that it not only extinguished the flame but spread the steaming wood across the parking lot. This ended the fire brigade. I endured all of this, primarily to show that I could. But because of it, I came to have a low opinion of the Beta House and its concept of fraternity.

I did not live in the Beta house the following year. It was too expensive and I had little desire to be there on a regular basis. I had taken a job as a ‘house boy’ at the AOPi sorority. Because of my job, I was in the sorority for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The AOPi sorority was not one of the prestigious sororities on campus. These women, were not the cheer leaders or campus queens. They were unpretentious girls from small rural towns around Oregon. Because of my job in the kitchen and serving their meals, I had come to know and like these young women both as individuals and as a group. Some of them, knowing I was a Beta, asked if I would set up a dinner exchange between the AOPis and the Betas. The final blow to my participation in the Beta fraternity came when, at a chapter meeting, I proposed that we have a dinner exchange with the AOPi women. My “brothers” laughed out loud, hooted, and shouted insulting comments about that “house full of hicks”. I was surprised at their haughty response. It revealed an undeserved arrogance. Their reaction to my suggestion, along with all that I had experienced while living there, convinced me that I no longer wished to be associated with this group of men. From that point on, I ceased any further affiliation with the Betas.

My experiences of living in two different fraternities were not white and black. Both offered positive and negative experiences. On balance, my year in the Sigma Chi house at OSU, where civility and academic achievement were the focus, was a positive experience. I can’t say the same for the Beta House on the UofO campus.

A couple of years after I had graduated, the University of Oregon closed the Beta house because of frequent violations of the campus behavioral norms. Later the empty building was the location for filming the movie ‘Animal House’.