Pledging 1966
Kate recently had a picture of her trip to Washington in her blog. It showed her standing on the ellipse across from the White house, with the White House in the background. It brought back great memories of my pledge trip to Washington DC in 1966.
At that time, there were three active social fraternities at Oneonta. Since I had managed to do so well in my first semester Freshman finals, I turn a “guaranteed” 3.8 grade point average into a 2.0, joining a fraternity in my Freshman year, seemed stupid even to my somewhat impaired brain. So I waited a year and “rushed” my Sophomore year.
Rushing involved lots of harassment, both physical and emotional. We were beaten with our wooden paddles, awakened in the middle of the night and dumped in the woods, forced to carry yellow buckets and recite ridiculous poems on demand. In general, it was three weeks of nonsense. But during that time, each of us was assigned a pledge trip to some part of the country to do some silly stunt. Someone was sent to a New York State Indian Reservation to get a picture of a teepee. Imagine the surprise when all they found were regular housing developments. Some one else was shipped to New York City to do something equally stupid. I was teamed with Paul “Rac” Lansperry and Tom Rabidue to steal a garbage can from in front of the White House. I think there was a fourth person, but for the life of me I can’t remember who it was. It might have been the legendary Vinnie White. At any rate, the trip to Washington in Rabidue’s car was uneventful. We stayed at American University on someone’s floor. We attended the coolest bar I ever saw, filled with Georgetown University students. There was a great band playing and I remember having a really good time. Then , the next day we buzzed over to the White House to snag a garbage can.
We got there, chatted up the guard who I noticed had a really large gun and a really small sense of humor. It was pretty evident that he would not mind shooting me to protect government property. SOOO we jumped back in the car, sped around the White House circle, and just at the point where Kate is standing, we snapped several pictures of what we thought were the Kennedy dogs still in residence at the White house. Since, unlike Kate, we were moving at about 40 miles an hour, our pictures were somewhat fuzzier. I spent two days going through the attic to see if I could find those pictures, but then I realized that even if I did find them, they would not fit in any of the orifices we put things into the computer, so I couldn’t share them anyway. But they do exist.