Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy-2.pdf - Microelectronics ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Richard B. Wells dormitory systems in the country and the fraternities and sororities had to compete with the various dorm houses economically. Snob factor just didn’t play any important role in this. Not for most of us, anyway. Room and board for living in the frat came to just under $1000 per year and tuition at ISU was another $600 per year. Then came the cost of textbooks, which averaged about $20 each in the campus bookstore. For my freshman year that added up to about another $200. Total damage: $1800 per year. It doesn’t sound like much by today’s standards, but in 1971-72 that was a lot. It was going to take every penny I had saved up for college just to pay for that first year. Naturally, I did go and apply for financial aid at the University’s financial aid office, but they told me my family wasn’t poor enough to qualify. Nixon and his Republicans had taken dead aim at the Great Society’s education programs. They didn’t have the votes in the Democrat-controlled Congress to do away with them entirely, but they would have if they could have. They still had an illegal and immoral war to pay for and college students weren’t their favorite people just then. Or now, for that matter. It’s easier to rule an uneducated citizenry. There were nine of us in my original pledge class. A fraternity has two classes of citizens. The active members or ‘actives’ are the full-fledged members. The pledges are the probationary not-members-yet class. Basically, we were the serfs. One of the guys in my pledge class was a holdover from the previous year. He was still a pledge because his grades hadn’t been high enough the year before. That was my first clue that I was going to have to at least start paying attention to what my own grades were. ISU was on the quarter system – that is, the school year was divided into three ‘quarters’ rather than two semesters – and John had been able to get his grades up high enough the previous spring to become an active during fall quarter of ’71. That was why, although he was a great guy, we didn’t really count him as one of the members of ‘our’ pledge class. Another guy, Jerry, was majoring in mechanical engineering because he thought ‘mechanical engineering’ meant ‘auto mechanics.’ I don’t know what kind of chimpanzee he must have had for a high school guidance counselor. Not too surprisingly, he didn’t make it through the first quarter of school and dropped out of college. That left seven of us. I didn’t realize it when we started out, but my six fellow pledges were to become my brothers in a very real sense and my dearest friends in life. In all the years since, only one other guy has joined their ranks as my brother and best friend. My new brothers were and are: Glen Wazny, a civil engineering major from Des Moines; Al Welch, a zoology major from the little Iowa town of Jefferson; Jerry Pribyl, a pre-veterinary medicine major from Omaha; Scott Morrison, an electrical engineering major from Des Moines, who would eventually switch majors and get degrees in architecture and civil engineering; Steve McCulloch, a landscape architecture major from Eden Prairie, Minnesota; and Rick Lyons, an industrial engineering major from Libertyville, Illinois. We began our freshman year as total strangers; we ended it as brothers for life. These six plus Bill plus Lyle plus one more guy we’ll talk about later are the only people in my life who occupy that place in my heart. Of course, all the members of a house are one’s fraternity brothers; ‘brother’ is what the Latin word frater means. They, too, become very special friends, just as your teammates on the football team do. But these six are extra special to me. The Sigma Nu house turned out to be neither animal house nor study grind house. In a peculiar way, it was both and it was neither. Iowa State’s full name is Iowa State University of Science & Technology, and most of the guys in the house were studying in the most difficult fields ISU had to offer. If we had had an official motto, it would have been Work hard, play hard. For most days of the week, the guys cracked the books hard and in the hallways of the house there would hang a tomb-like silence only occasionally disturbed by some raucous outbreak of horseplay. Of course, it takes some freshmen awhile to adjust to this regimen; it didn’t take anyone longer than it took me to make the adjustment. But the actives had their ways of disciplining pledges who didn’t quite get it yet and by the end of the first two quarters I wasn’t much of a goof-off anymore. Learning how to be a serious student took me just a little bit longer and required guidance from two important people, one a great teacher and the other a great leader and motivator who was a sophomore studying civil engineering. His name is Don Munksgaard. That was the ‘work hard’ part of the fraternity’s character. The ‘play hard’ part kicked in as soon as classes were done on Friday and roared with full youthful red-blooded energy and passion into the wee 137
Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Richard B. Wells hours of Sunday morning. By the time it ended, the tensions and stresses of the week would be burned away and we were ready to be students again. The rest of the day on Sunday was usually given over to recovery, and right after supper (‘dinner’) Sunday evening the ‘work hard’ cycle started all over again. For pledges the ‘play hard’ part did not begin on Friday – or at least was not supposed to begin – until we had attended to the cleaning of the fraternity house. The house had four floors: basement, main, second, and third. The basement held the kitchen, chapter room/dining room, furnace room, and a little room that had once served as the cook’s room but was unassigned to anything the year I joined. We would later convert that room into a lounge. The main floor had a large ante way, living room, TV room, a corridor where the mail boxes and phone desk were, a guest toilet, and another private room that had once served as the House Mother’s room but was now used by our cook. The second and third floors were where the study rooms were located. These floors each also had a bathroom with toilets, sinks and showers. The second floor was where the sleeping porch was located. The study rooms held three or four people, usually two actives and one pledge. They contained desks and a closet but no beds. We had a number of pledge duties we had to carry out on a rotating basis all week, but Friday night was when we all turned to and did the cleaning. The individual study rooms were the responsibility of their occupants, but all the common areas – kitchen, dining room, main floor, second and third floor hallways and bathrooms – were mopped, scrubbed, and cleaned weekly by the pledge class, nominally under the supervision of a house officer known as the Pledge Marshal. In reality, one of the pledges was assigned to act as ‘pledge house manager’ and was made responsible for seeing to it this was done. For reasons I no longer remember – probably because no one really wanted the job – my new pledge brothers elected me to act as pledge house manager. It might sound impressive, but all it really meant was if any active was displeased about anything I was the one he yelled at about it. The pledge system worked by peer pressure and, on the infrequent occasions when that didn’t work, by disciplinary punishments meted out by the actives through the Pledge Marshal. Once the Friday night house cleaning was done, we were free to do whatever we felt like. In point of theory it really only took a couple of hours for the group of us to clean the entire house, but in point of fact we usually did a lot of goofing around that stretched things out a lot longer than this, sometimes even late into the night. We would nominally divide up the different cleaning tasks among ourselves; after the first few weeks different guys developed preferences for different jobs. But regardless of who was assigned to do what, the pledge class as a whole was held responsible for the job as a whole. Because none of us were really all that thrilled to be mop jockeys, horseplay could break out at any time. One night I remember the basement crew instigated a long, noisy, boisterous water fight. Everybody in the house could hear it, but I wasn’t paying all that much attention to it since I was cleaning the main floor toilet at the time. As far as I was concerned, if my three brothers downstairs wanted to screw around all night, that was fine so long as eventually the job got done. Mop water was mop water no matter how it got on the floor. Unfortunately, the senior who was serving as vice president of the chapter – officially that office was known at the Lieutenant Commander or LC – did not share my lack of concern about the rowdy uproar emanating from the basement. I guess he thought mopping floors and cleaning sinks should be done with more dignity and decorum, or at least considerably more quietly. Whatever his reason, he did what actives usually did in cases like this: He came downstairs, yelled at me about it, and ordered me to go put a stop to it. Then he left for his date. I reluctantly went down the stairs into the basement. There were three of the guys, happy as larks and soaking wet from head to foot, standing in the very soggy kitchen. They stopped screwing around as I entered. “I’m sorry to have to do this,” I said, “but Carl said you guys have to stop messing around and get on with the job.” Jerry snuck up on me from behind and dumped a mop bucket full of water over my head. I turned and starting chasing him around and around the basement, with him screaming with laughter as he ran. The 138
Page 1 and 2: Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Ri
Page 39: Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Ri
Page 91 and 92:
Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Ri
Page 93 and 94:
Page 95 and 96:
Page 97:
show all

Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy-2.pdf - Microelectronics ...

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?