Chasing ghosts

I’ve only partially processed the experience of the last two days, so this post will be a bit unfocused.
I spent Friday evening and a good portion of yesterday with about 50 of my Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity brothers. The occasion was the dedication of a new fraternity house at Indiana State University at Terre Haute. It’s the first purpose-built fraternity house in the school’s history and stands conveniently at the north edge of the campus. The old house was what passed for a mansion 110 years ago in Terre Haute in heavily treed neighborhood about a mile south of the campus. When I was a student, it was part of a “fraternity row,” of sorts. Tau Kappa Epsilon was next door to the south, Lambda Chi Alpha was a couple of doors north and Theta Chi was across the street.
Over the subsequent 40-plus years, the old house managed to outlive its usefulness. It was too small, too costly to heat, too expensive to maintain and too far from campus.
The chapter was chartered in 1963, so it’s taken four decades to grow an alumni base with the wherewithal to raise $1.3 million for a new house.
I signed up for the Dedication Weekend activities in the hope of catching up with a lot of old friends. Other than being on hand for a significant event in the chapter’s history and providing a photographic record of it, I might as well have stayed home.
With the exception of one guy, none of my old friends – and no one from my pledge class – showed up.
Maria came along and was an astonishingly good sport throughout.
As I looked around me at the dedication banquet last night, it occurred to me that I was in a room full of millionaires. Considering that I’m halfway there, on paper at least, being worth $1 million isn’t that big of a deal for a diligent college grad in his late 50s or older.
Especially for this crowd. When I enrolled at Indiana State, it was called Indiana State College – a transitional name the school bore for only a couple of years as it ramped up from Indiana State Teachers College to Indiana State University.
So a lot of the guys in my fraternity, the newest and most vital on campus at the time, were there to become educators and most of the others were business majors. Now that I think of it, I only remember one music major, no writers and no artists.
During my era, at least, Zeta Omicron of Alpha Tau Omega was cranking out ambitious, serious young men who were prepared to work hard and achieve the American Dream.
I, on the other hand, was the poster boy for underachievement. I set the record for SAT scores at my high school, had a state scholarship and a projected graduating GPA of 4.0.
But I found too much at Indiana State to interest me outside of the classroom – hanging with friends, learning everything there was to know about the student newspaper, drinking and carousing… While I was flunking out twice and dragging down the chapter cumulative GPA, ZO had the best GPA of any fraternity on campus and was the top ATO chapter in the nation academically.

While I was way out of tune with the fraternity’s academic life, I gloried in the pranks, road trips and drunken revelry that constituted the male bonding social side of the coin.
This was the early ‘60s Animal House Period for American college fraternities and I recognized myself and a lot of my friends in the movie.
So I guess that’s the ghost I was chasing when I sent in my reservation for the Dedication Weekend festivities.
I’d also hoped the weekend would give Maria, who was born the year I pledged ATO, some insights into my personal history.
Nope.
We found ourselves in the company of friendly strangers with whom we had very little in common.
The guys I would have enjoyed seeing are either disconnected from the fraternity or disconnected from life, i.e. dead.
Like Jerry Chud, a brilliant happy-go-lucky vagabond who was in grad school in Missoula, Mont., when he saw a note on a bulletin board advertising an opening for a high school music teacher in Selawik, Alaska. Selawik is a tiny Eskimo village situated where the Arctic Circle crosses the Alaskan coastline. Jerry took the job, taught himself to play all of the band instruments and had a successful life as an Alaskan music educator until a brain tumor took his life in the mid-1990s.
Like Jan Eglen, a brilliant guy who gave up his goal of following in his physician father’s footsteps when he encountered his first med school cadaver. He went on to found a hovercraft company, have a practice as a psychologist and launch several internet businesses. He was also my best man at my first wedding, but I have never held that against him.
Like Oz Morgan, who gave up trying to teach English to junior high school kids after about three years and went into banking. He’s president of a medium-size bank now and we get together every few years.
Like Jim White, a high school track star who majored in math and graduated from ISU with a 4.0, only to piss it all away on drugs and debauchery starting with the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco. The last time I heard from him, he was homeless and living on the beach at Ft. Myers, Fla.
Like Bill Broadstreet, a trumpet-playing music major who went on to become a music teacher in the Indianapolis Public Schools system. Bill followed in his alcoholic father’s footsteps and died about 10 years ago.
And like Reed McCormick, who graduated from Delphi High School two years ahead of me and was a pivotal influence in my pledging ATO. Reed, for years a respected educator – most recently at a charter school in Arizona – was an absolute wild man in college.
Sure, it was great to see the new house and meet some of the current crop of Zeta Omicron guys. And it was interesting to see how the ISU campus has morphed into something barely recognizable as the college campus of my misspent youth.
The purpose of the weekend was to thank those who made the new house happen and to formally transfer it to the care of a new generation and the organizers did it well. I’m glad I was there to see it.
But I was mostly politely bored.