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 life, having worked as 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 been 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 are less favorable recollections. I am concerned about what that says about me. That aside, here is what I remember.

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 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. I swear that this guy found pleasure in making the freshmen miserable. He had a pair of white gloves which he used to check our dusting. He seemed to enjoy detecting a small amount of dust on these gloves. 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 shower.

The dean of women, at that time, was known for being especially conservative regarding female student liberties. If a sorority were to share an activity with a fraternity, such as a dinner, she had to approve beforehand. 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. A conversation was only possible when you were sitting next to the person with whom you were talking. Occasionally, there would be a lull 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 bitty has never had an orgasm.” 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. So when I transferred to the University of Oregon, I was not committed to join the Sigma Chi 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 the taint of having been a porn film cutting room remained, preventing it from being restored to the sanctified space it had been.

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 a 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 stunt, which we would have to perform. One of the hell week days, 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. If they saw one of us on campus, they were invited to pull on the string to humiliate us. I tied the string to the top button of my fly. We were supposed to be embarrassed if a sorority girl were to tug on the string hanging in front of our shirt. 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 lie, face down, 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 that 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 this ‘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 mouthful of the burning liquid. This was to continue until the fire was extinguished. Although it was a small fire, upperclassmen continued to stoke it. It was obvious that we would be running this “firebriggade” for 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 that 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 the open can. Bending over as I ran back up the stairs, I hid the can against my stomach. No one noticed it. When I reached the large kettle of spicy liquid, I leaned over the kettle and tipped my head back to receive another mouthful of ‘soup’ from the large ladle that the upperclassman was using in his attempt to pour as much soup into our mouths as possible. He was concentrating on his task of filling my mouth. He didn’t notice that I was dipping the gallon can into the soup kettle. With the gallon can full of ‘soup’. I started running down the two flights of stairs. My can of “soup” was noticed by upperclassmen, who came running after me, yelling, “Stop Tod, he’s got a bucket.” When I reached the fire, while still running, 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 the adolescent stupidity hell week to show that I could. Experiences such as these lead me to have a low opinion of the Beta House and its concept of fraternity life. I did not live in the Beta house the following year. I had little desire to be there, and beside that, it was too expensive. 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 cheerleaders 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 AOPs 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 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.

A couple of years after I had graduated, The University closed the Beta House because of frequent violations of campus behavioral norms. Later, in an ironic consequence of its being empty, the Beta House was the shooting location for the movie “Animal House”.

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.