I celebrated 16 years in my house by paying off the mortgage. To my surprise, if you look at all the places I have lived, my house is now the one that I've lived in the longest.

In second place is my primary childhood home in North Dakota, which my parents moved out of in 2018 after just shy of 34 years of residence. I personally lived there ( Read more... )

The original Alpha Beta chapter of Phi Kappa was founded at the Case Institute of Technology on May 31, 1941. We have been a constant presence on campus through eighty years, a university merger, and the fraternity merger we celebrate today on Founder's Day. In those eight decades, we have initiated more than 800 brothers into what is now the Ohio ( Read more... )

It took some digging, but I found my black book, carefully preserved since my Fall 1996 pledge semester. I got the firsts and seconds for all 16 actives from that semester. The 17th brother, Eli, was out of town on co-op that semester, so I didn't meet him until after I was initiated. Hey Eli, I need your first ( Read more... )

In my recent fraternity history, I spent a lot of time on my first semester as a pledge and the overall pledge program and rightfully so given how much it impacted my life. I have barely ever touched on the radio training I did as an Assistant Programmer in the Spring 1998 semester, even with an entire tag of radio show history going back more than ( Read more... )

I've written 68 public posts for this series so far, and after this one I think I've down to two more to wrap it up. I've talked about a ton of different topics, which you can see in the ugly old school HTML block at the end. What haven't I covered?

- I didn't really talk about our house improvement projects in any depth. A bunch were mentioned in ( Read more... )

While letters were the most visible way to advertise your fraternity membership. The fraternity badge was the formal pin given out as part of Initation. Unlike the pledge pin, the badge was not intended for everyday where. It was worn instead with formal wear, typically on the pocket or over the heart, and was therefore larger and more ornate than ( Read more... )

An outside observer of a fraternity might have been forgiven for thinking it was a club for generating new t-shirts. Throughout most of college my primary attire was various fraternity t-shirts, most of which have long since expired or at best been relegated to being workout shirts.

First, there were the rush t-shirts. The bright orange Detour ( Read more... )

Nothing has gotten as many comments as the Bars & Restaurants, but some other posts got comments that elaborated on what I remembered. As before, here are the best of them, edited and saved for my convenience.

1. Ponding

Some folks came in and added a few more details.

Ducar said that I recall that a brother could be ponded for any reason (or no ( Read more... )

Some of the posts in this series have gotten a lot of comments on Facebook. As before, I'm continuing to collect them here so I can find them easily without scrolling back one hundred times.

1. Bars

The post about bars of our college years got a lot of comments on Facebook. As I myself noted, at the time:

Posts detailed semester breakdown: ( Read more... )

There are a lot of little things that we did at the house that don't really merit a full entry but are an indelible part of my memory. I'll touch on a few of them here.

[1] Those of us on the house meal plan had dinner in the Chapter Room Monday through Thursday at (I think) 6pm. Dinner was buffet style. I believe the exact sequence was that we'd ( Read more... )