This is a Call

Turning away from the rotting newspage for a moment...

T-shirts being made up now:

Rob &
Dave &
Whitney &
Squeaky.

TR &
Zman &
Marls &
Rootsy.

TJ &
Jerry &
Dennis &
Mayhugh.

Greg. 

...and a number of other FOGTB and commenters in this space...

What do they have in common?

We are all members of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity's Virginia Psi chapter.  Pi Lams.  Frat guys.  Yippee.

A little backstory...

"Founded at Yale University in 1895, Pi Lambda Phi was the first non-sectarian fraternity in the United States, accepting men of good character without regard to race or religion. There are presently 37 chapters in the United State and one in Canada. The Psi Chapter (also called Virginia Psi) at The College of William and Mary was installed in June 1929..."

Skip a bit, brother...

In 1989, Rob, Dave, and I (and this guy... and this guy... and this guy... and a guy named this...)
decided to enlist in the service of fraternal life. A semester of hijinks ensued. Three-plus more years of antics congealed. A life of friendship endured.  A blog of dipshittery materialized.  All this and more, on a very special episode of Gheorghe: The Blog.

We learned along the way that all men are created free and equal.  We learned the expression "not four years, but a lifetime." That the Pi Lam flower is the woodbine.  That the Pi Lam bird is not the nuthatch but is instead something else.

We learned that you can meet random idiots in a dormitory when you are 18 and create friendships that will last you a lifetime.  But that not everyone has a palate for Random Idiots.  We learned that being sarcastic and intoxicated and slovenly is not a successful formula for courting ladies, and that "getting lucky" is not a misnomer.

We learned the expression "four years, maybe five, but nary a credit hour more." We learned that the era of unbridled fraternity, rugby (or lacrosse), and alcohol at universities of tradition and prestige in the American South has come to a close.  And that filling a frat house with our kind of complex creature became increasingly, then impossibly hard.  We finally learned that if you smash a board over someone's face, even a friend's, and videotape it, the Man will come for you.

And that he did.  And the little social club thrown together in the year of the great stock market crash was suddenly no more in 2004.  And there was great depression.

* * * * *

Yesterday morning at our office in Hampton, VA, we had a networking event that drew a few dozen folks for coffee. Among the group was our fratre Chris Old's older brother Hunter, a Phi Kappa Tau at W&M while we were there. I talked to him at length.

Randomly, another guest was a much younger Tribe alum who had graduated within the past 10 years, and he was also a ΦΚΤ.  He told the tale of them being booted off campus (again), and that when it happened, they snagged a bunch of the old composites.

Here is the one he grabbed at right.

See anybody you've heard of?

As fraternities come and go and finally wither away from our alma mater, there's probably no sense in hoping against hope for a resurrection of our gang's chapter.

Instead, my ask is simple: did anyone grab the old composites when the house was eradicated from W&M?
Doesn't it seem like the Martha Wood Cottage might be a fine place to honor the misspent youth of our heydays?
Or did the powers that be in William & Mary's administration order those nostalgic snapshots of maturity gone by be unceremoniously burned to ashes?
If the Phi Tau's can do this, why not the Pi Lams?  Why not us??

Inquiring minds like mine want to know, and deep thoughts like this keep me from mulling over the state of the nation.

That is all.