Great article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/bu...anted=all&_r=0
Vanessa Vick for The New York Times
Jerry Reid, who is fulfilling a deferred dream of college, with some of his Chi Phi fraternity brothers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
By DAVID WALLIS
Published: March 12, 2013
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In the 1960s, going to college for Jerry Reid meant not enrolling, but tagging along with his pal William Lloyd Sturman and crashing at his fraternity, Chi Phi, at the University of Virginia. “He brought me to U.Va and introduced me to a life I didn’t even know existed,” Mr. Reid said in a recent telephone interview. Despite coaxing from Mr. Sturman, who died in 1984, Mr. Reid assumed that a university education was unattainable for a boy from Dogtown, the working-class neighborhood in Richmond, Va., where he grew up. “I did not see higher education as a possibility,” Mr. Reid said.
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Fast-forward to 2009. Mr. Reid, then 65 and working in the food safety industry, stopped by the Virginia campus for a breather during a business trip. While relaxing in a walled garden, Mr. Reid remembers having an epiphany. “ ‘This has been in my mind since 1963,’ ” he recalled thinking to himself. “It’s time to do something.” The next morning, Mr. Reid called the university’s admissions office, and later enrolled in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies. But simply attending the University of Virginia did not entirely fulfill Mr. Reid’s deferred dream. He also joined Chi Phi, the fraternity where he caroused as a younger man — although he managed to bypass the often grueling process of pledging, the step before formal initiation into the group.
In the following edited and condensed conversation, Mr. Reid (Class of ’14) discussed his experience as his fraternity’s only older member.
Q. Why did you decide to forgo college after high school?
A. I was a screw-up basically.
Q. Define that.
A. Resisting authority figures, acting out, peroxiding my hair in the front along with a group of other semi-juvenile delinquents. We never did anything horrible or terrible, but we were the guys who had a chip on our shoulders for no good reason at all.
Q. You met your wife at a Chi Phi frat party in 1966. How does she feel about your new life as a collegian?
A. She said: “I won’t live in a dorm with you. I’ve already done that myself. And I would really appreciate it if you didn’t pledge a fraternity.” I said, well, I didn’t have to pledge. I simply initiated, thanks to a very good friend, Jim Soderquist, he’s the Grand Alpha of Chi Phi — the top guy in the national organization.
Q. You had friends in high places.
A. Yes, I did.
Q. Detail the initiation process.
A. It’s interesting and it’s completely secret. It’s very solemn, and you know you are joining something that makes you part of a family.
Q. Did the frat force you to undress during the ceremony?
A. No, no, thank goodness. The hazing and the branding and paddling and all those things, they’ve gone away.
Q. How often do classmates mention “Old School,” the film in which an octogenarian named Blue Palasky joins a fraternity?
A. They tried to put me in Blue Palasky’s shoes, and I’ve said that’s absolutely a falsehood. Blue Palasky sits around and sucks down brew, and tries to be a part of a fraternity, and he doesn’t really get it done. I have become fully engaged. I am a brother eternal of all of the young men in Chi Phi.
Q. You joined a fraternal organization, but given the age difference between you and your brothers, do you feel paternal toward your peers?
A. Yes, I do. I try to keep the paternal aspects in the background. I don’t want to be known as a grandfather. I want to be known as a brother and they allow me to do that. Many of my young friends in the fraternity tell me they view me as a 20-year-old with 48 years of extra experience.
Q. Do you dispense specific advice to your brothers?
A. What I’ve done is put myself in a position to know who to refer them to if they have issues with honor and issues with drinking. I take very, very special care to not be judgmental, but to be able to introduce them to the place they need to go to get help that’s available within the university.
Q. Is it true that you wear a T-shirt that reads, “We are U.Va! and Jerry Reid is a student”? Do students often mistake you for a professor?
A. I won’t mind being mistaken for a professor later, but I was being looked at sideways as some old guy just hanging around grounds.
Q. Is there pressure on you to buy the booze for frat parties?
A. No, there’s not. I told them upfront that is something I don’t do and they honor that.
Q. Cornell recently suspended a fraternity for “under-age and excessive alcohol consumption.” And Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta fraternity faces punishment for serving alcohol to under-age students. Does alcohol remain as much a part of frat culture as it did in the 1960s?
A. I believe it’s very close, if not maintaining its grip. There are many good organizations at the University of Virginia that look into this. They also have party patrols, which are students governing students.
Q. Should the legal drinking age be lowered from 21?
A. That should be the case. That’s what I grew up with — 3.2 alcohol, which was half of strength of a normal beer. That was the beer in the ’60s that 18-year-olds were allowed to buy. I would certainly allow the 3.2 beer to 18-year-olds, who are qualified to go off to war.
Q. Have you had to rebuff any advances from female classmates?
A. That’s not happened. They want to hear my stories of the old days. They want me to be a chronicler of all those events, and also, sometimes, to warn them against the excesses of alcohol. I’ve put quite a number of my young college friends in taxis and made sure they got back to their dorm rooms.
Q. What advice would you give to an older adult returning to school or going for the first time?
A. Take advantage of it if you can. I’ve always said that when you get off the path and life gets in the way earlier, the path waits for you. I got so far away from higher education that I couldn’t even see it over the horizon, and then one day in 2009 I said, “I believe I can do this.”
Q. How have the manners of students changed since the ’60s?
A. Fortunately, I’m at the University of Virginia. They have days at the football game called Guys in Ties, Girls in Pearls, where people put their ties and coats on and dress up in their pearls and heels and come to a football game. At the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, when we’re in the hall, it’s “Mr. Reid.” We call each other Mister and Miss. We open doors. We do things that harken back to an earlier day.
Q. What are your postgraduation plans?
A. I think there’s a possibility I might go to the Curry School of Education and maybe work inside the education school or inside the administration of a school, but the teaching component will always be there.
Q. What’s your current grade point average?
A. 3.55
Q. Isn’t there room for improvement, young man?
A. I want a 3.7.
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