When school started, the fraternities started their pledge drives. All the frat houses were open every night after dinner and you could go by and meet the brothers. I had done this at Northeastern, pretending to be someone else. This time I went as myself.

Harv and I stopped at the first frat on the circle, the Theta Chi house. Within minutes, we were in a conversation with the president. Sammy was a senior and we hit it off right away. He spent some time selling us on the fraternity, but was just as enthusiastic about the rugby team he was the captain of. When he found out I had played football in high school, he said it would be a perfect sport for me. I didn’t bother to tell him I had finished my football career injured and on the bench.

We had such a great time and Sammy was so animated and fun to talk to that we tried a couple of other houses later that week, but wouldn’t spend more than ten minutes at each house. Pretty soon we were back with the Theta Chis. We hung out there the rest of the week and then we pledged. Sammy had gone out of his way and paid such special attention to us that wherever else we went, we couldn’t possibly be greeted with the same enthusiasm.

And Harv and I both signed up to play rugby.

Later we learned there were good guys in all the houses and good guys that had no fraternity affiliation. It just was that the Theta Chis seemed to have more characters that we liked and got along with in one house. And we liked the seniors. Well, most of them.

There was one who apparently had been really picked on as a freshman because now he was a senior, he was determined to exert his authority on all the pledges, even juniors like us. In the cafeteria, the fraternities had their own tables and we would all eat together. The seniors had the privilege of sending the pledges back for anything they wanted, whether it was seconds, a fork, salt or more desert. All of the other brothers used their power with Harv and me very judiciously because we were, after all, juniors.

To be fair, they had to make us do some stuff, but this one senior liked to harass us, especially me because he knew from his first look that he didn’t like me. And I didn’t like him. It came to a head one day in the cafeteria. He wanted me to go back through the dinner line to get him a second serving and I refused. He was pissed and wanted me sanctioned or whatever they do in fraternities to pledges who aren’t subservient. Most of the other brothers, realizing I was not a freshman pledge, tried to get him to ease up and forget about it. He never did nor did I.

It was around that time I began to realize the frat might not be a good fit for me. The main reason was money. I was able to pay for tuition and most of room and board but I needed help from loans and Mom and Doom to cover what I couldn’t cover. And Mom would periodically send me ten dollars for extras, which I usually spent on beer, ice cream or records. But I didn’t have enough for significant extras such as fraternity dues. So I stopped going through the initiation process.

I felt bad because I liked a lot of the guys in the Thet house and it was a great party house. Actually, on the weekends, a lot of the frats were great party houses. The houses were on the inside of a circle drive, facing out so many of the yards back up to each other, a great place to put bands and have a party. And there were lots of bands, parties, kegs and buckets of grain alcohol mixed with fruit punch.

To avoid any cover charges, I often would start the night at the country gas station just off campus, owned by a guy named Les. Les sold beer and some food but you had to be pretty desperate to try the food. You never knew what color the meat in his premade, cold cut sandwiches would be as he only got deliveries sporadically and the sandwiches could sit in his coolers for quite some time.

After my first rugby game, caked in mud. I discovered the sport was like football, but rougher. And with no pads. I had seen a guy’s eye get poked out and popped back in. The parties after the games were great, so, to stay safely involved, I became the team photographer.

I stuck to buying the cheapest 40 oz. bottles of beer that Les stocked and then would walk from house to house and try not to pay anything.

There were a lot of lawyers and doctors to be at Hampden-Sydney so on weekends, women were attracted to campus, coming from Longwood, Sweet Briar, Hollins and other women’s schools. This was still at the beginning of the women’s movement so getting married right after college was as viable a life choice as getting a career.

The problem with the fraternity party social situation was that you didn’t have a chance to get to know each other in a normal setting. You just had a few minutes at a party, yelling over a band at full volume, to make an almost instant favorable impression. Shouting my sarcasm proved to be a flawed strategy.

Sammy introduced me to his girl friend who said she had a friend, Cary, who was just like me: funny, with a side of sarcasm and bitterness. Cary and I did hit it off and we went out for a few months that fall and into January. I wasn’t ready for a serious relationship and Cary said she wasn’t either. But then she invited me to stop by and visit her family on my way back down to school after Christmas. That sounded serious to me.

Still, I agreed to stop off in her Washington DC suburb in Northern Virgina to meet her parents. Her dad was recently retired military and wore his crew cut as a political statement. He was very polite to me, but I am sure he saw my very bushy hair and beard as my political statement. For the war or against the war. Your hair said it for you. It was not a comfortable visit.

I headed back to school the next day. We didn’t see each other much after that and I have only one bad picture of her. You can’t even see her face because I am clowning around and have distracted her. She later gave me crap about that. And that was probably the thing that kept us apart. Within a few months of knowing her, she was already giving me grief about goofing around, acting inappropriately, not being serious. Imagine what it would have been like six months down the road when she really got to know how shallow I was. So I stopped calling her. And I never saw her again. Even when Harv and I were driving through Longwood every night after dinner.

Sammy got us out for the rugby team and that proved to be a great social experience if not a great sporting experience. We practiced out behind the commons, Winston Hall. Sammy and a couple of other seniors ran the practice and it was very low key. We spent a lot of time playing the game. It was fun as opposed to having Coach Chalmers try to twist your head and helmet off and Coach Robinson trying to motivate you by slyly implying that you were falling short, far short.

Team captain, Joe Samuels, on the left, dragged me onto the rugby team and into the social world of the Theta Chis and Hampden-Sydney. Jimmy Logan, on the right, introduced me and many others in the Theta Chi house to the show, “Soul Train.” I am grateful to them both.

It was a great way to meet a lot of guys from across campus. Some were great athletes, like Jimmy Logan. Logan was so good, he didn’t come to practice but once or twice a week and he was still a star on the weekends. You could get away with that in club rugby.

At first, Sammy thought I was very fast when he saw me run in warm ups. He saw my legs moving a mile a minute but what he didn’t noticed was the progress of my body in relationship to the earth. I have short legs and while my legs may have been moving very fast, my body wasn’t. When I had the ball, it didn’t take long for the opponents to catch up to me. Or for Sammy to realize I should play in the scrum, not the wing. But Harv and I had found another social circle.

Next time: Chapter 34: Road Tripping