Fraternities

In my college days, fraternities were big things. Social clubs for kids just away from Mom & Dad for the first time, living - more or less on their own (ignoring the being housed and fed bit and all) - exposed to all manner of mood-altering substances, studying to pass challenging classes required for you major, and this sort of thing. 

Fraternities provided structure, a social life and all-around character-building to kids just out of high school. For today's discussion, I won't delve into exactly all the kinds of "character" that fraternal shenanigans of dubious legality actually built, but panty raids on Pembroke, stealing Massachusetts road signs that said "Entering Sharon" for a Brother-in-the-Bond dating a Sharon and the like figured heavily here. My own scut trip hitching to Buffalo and back in one weekend was the piece-de-resistance. (Remember, Brown was in Providence Rhode island - on a generous day, Garmin gives that round trip 950 miles). 

At Brown, each fraternity had a persona. Starting at the bottom of the pecking order, there was an Animal house. Yes, even at an Ivy League school. It was primarily some sort of rehab for rich parents who sort of said "get this kid out of our sight for the next 6 years he'll take to get his Bachelor's degree". Then there was the jock house - more civilized, but pretty much dumb as stumps. If you know anything about Brown football in the day, even sports escaped them. The next two sort of blended together - very wealthy types that had expensive sports cars on campus - sometimes literally - played sports like a rugby and Polo, and wore dinner jackets at parties. Throwing water balloons from their fraternity roof at innocents on their way to dinner was what was known as good, innocent fun.

Moving right on up, there was big brother Buzz's fraternity - sort of more serious (I say "sort of more" but the nuances are getting rather tenuous, I realize). But they DID manage to assemble passing grades without their Daddy's help. 

Finally there was mine: a top drawer Ivy League-type fraternity with only minor quirks - dismantling the bathrooms and throwing them down into the moat that surrounded the fraternity quadrangle. After all, Brown employed "moat moles" to clean that up.

Just youthful fun. And as house treasurer, I would simply periodically give a donation to the moat mole retirement fund. 

Next up: winter sports only America's top-of-the-line schools could invent.