Retro Fraternity Rush -totally 80's
"Now, don't go and do something stupid like join a fraternity." The words rang in my ears as my parents' car pulled away from my dorm. It was September 1987, and I had just arrived at Ball State University to begin five, long years study in pursuit of an architecture degree. I was over three hundred miles from home and knew no one on this campus of nearly 20,000 students.
My parents had always pushed academic achievement, and while I excelled in most subjects in high school, my parents constantly reminded me that I was going to college to hit the books, not have a good time. While my mother had been in a sorority in college, she discouraged me from pledging. My father had only finished one semester of college before enlisting in the Navy during the Korean War, and had no affinity for Greek Life.
At the time Ball State had a rather schizophrenic reputation: outstanding architecture program - #18 on the Playboy party school list. It was no secret that the architecture program was the most demanding major at Ball State - one only had to look at the haggard expression on the students entering and leaving the building. I spent most of my first quarter living in the first year studio, leaving for what seemed like only short intervals. I envied the masses of students making the party crawl up and down fraternity row on Friday and Saturday night, plastic tumbler in hand.
I knew nothing about fraternities except what I had seen on tv and in the movies, and had my head full of preconceptions about what the members were like and what happened behind the doors of their houses. I viewed myself as shut out of that aspect of college life, especially since I was living in the honors dorm, and my roommate and friends in the dorm were sooo straight-laced.
I made friends with a couple of guys in my first-year architecture studio after the first month or so, Pat and Jon. They took me to my first party in college, and we started to hang out quite a bit. They had a friend Paul, who was also a first year, who had started gen. ed. classes during the summer. I didn't really care much for Paul; I found him rather obnoxious, but he always knew where there was a party on the weekends, so it was a sort of package deal.
Fall quarter ended around Thanksgiving, and winter quarter brought around Formal Rush for freshmen. Paul had spent a great deal of time during the summer hanging out at one particular chapter house, and Paul had known all along that he was going to rush that chapter at the earliest possible opportunity. He gave Pat, Jon, and I the hard sell that we should all rush "his" chapter, and that we could all be pledge brothers.
I still remembered what my parents had said, and I didn't see myself as the fraternity "type", but I finally was persuaded to just go through "Round Robin" and satisfy my curiosity about what some of those houses were like on the inside.
I registered for recruitment with Pat and Jon at an IFC Rush table at the Scramble Light on campus. We attended a mandatory rush orientation meeting in Pruis Hall that was packed with guys sitting on the stairs and every available seat filled. The fraternity adviser and the IFC officers said a bunch of things that I no longer recall, and there was a slide presentation on the different chapters with each chapter rush chair speaking for maybe 90 seconds...
We each got a rush directory with a 2-page spread on each fraternity. Most of the fraternities had a picture of guys in blazers or tuxes, a picture with sorority women, or a "jock" picture engaged in some sort of athletic activity.
There was one chapter that definitely veered from the norm: it had on the bottom half of one page, a picture of a guy that was clearly taken from GQ Magazine: cleft chin, moussed hair, expensive clothes. Beneath that picture was a simple caption, "None of our guys looks like this." We laughed our asses off at that.
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