Initiation Night Part One
Written by Chris C on October 3rd, 2007
College was a lot of fun and as I have said quite a few times before, being in a fraternity was like that same fun times a thousand. Beer was free, there were always girls around, and you had pledges to be your errand boys. Good times.
Our fraternity was also one of the top on campus. We won best frat two out of the first three years of the award. Our parties were huge and one was so big we had to bus people in. Our house sat on a hill overlooking campus, and we made huge wooden letters and placed them on the roof. California has the Hollywood sign, my school had TKE.
We had a Coke machine that dispensed beer. We had a jukebox and we figured out that by turning it off and on a certain number of times, it would give like 1,600 credits.
To be honest, things were so successful I still wonder if it really happened, it was all like some amazing kick-ass dream. I feel very lucky to have been a part of it. As I have said many times, it was some of the best years of my life.
But the most fun of all were the pledges, the future of the fraternity.
Our first pledge group was duly named the Alpha class. Being a Greek organization, each class was the corresponding letter with the alphabet, alpha, beta, gamma, etc…. I don’t know why fraternities and sororities are part of a Greek system, but I can assure you that aside from this, we learned nothing about Greece.
The nine of them began their pledge period with a simple drinking night. They were all put in a room by themselves with a ½ keg. They had to hold it up off the ground until it was empty. A ½ keg can be easily held up by one person. A bunch of them can easily keep it up for hours. We were drinking downstairs.
It wasn’t like we were dicks about it though. We were drinking from the same keg and we were a bunch of lushes. One nice side benefit was this helped them get to know each other, and created a teamwork situation right from the start.
It was also the only time during the pledge program they would be allowed to drink. Not only that but they ended up cleaning all our apartments all the time. Years later the Alpha class would still be referred to as the ‘cleaning pledges’.
We also had them carry odd things. Like a small rock that they would later paint and put the fraternity letters on. It seems stupid, but then they would give it to their fraternity ‘big brother’ (mentor). This part was pretty cool, and to this day the one my little brother gave me is still sitting on my bookcase.
There were also the odd questions they would have to know the answers to, like how many nipple hairs I had (thirteen but I had one removed) or who Gene Pitney was (country singer from the 50’s whose picture was on the basement wall when we moved into our fraternity house.).
So the night of initiation came. (This was the informal initiation. The formal one involved seriousness, suits, and representatives from headquarters.) The pledges were excited. It was finally their big day.
Little did they know what was in store.
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