The first social event Frances Haven (Moss) attended after enrolling in Syracuse University in 1874 was a church oyster supper. Her father, Dr. Erastus Otis Haven, was recently elected Chancellor of the university. At that supper, she met the man who would become her husband, Charles Melville Moss. She also met two members of Alpha Phi, a women’s fraternity founded at Syracuse in October of 1872. Instead of accepting the invitation to join Alpha Phi which had been offered to her, she joined with three other women – Mary A. Bingham (Willoughby), E. Adeline Curtis, and Helen M. Dodge (Ferguson) – and they founded an organization of their own. The date was November 11, 1874. The organization is Gamma Phi Beta, the first of the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) organizations to use the term “sorority;” Syracuse Latin professor Frank Smalley suggested the word to the young women.
A Minnesota Gamma Phi
I was looking at a century old Crescent of Gamma Phi Beta and this entry caught my eye. Of course I had questions about it.
1920 Crescent of Gamma Phi Beta
Did Miss Duesler, a member of the University of Minnesota chapter, perhaps meet Mr, Aurness on the ship? How romantic was it that they married at the “little church round the corner,” the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration at 1 East 29th Street.
Some research found that the bridegroom wasn’t a shipboard suitor or European friend. He was a Delta Upsilon from the University of Minnesota who was two classes ahead of his new wife.
The three Gamma Phis on the Philadelphia. Ruth Duesler is in the middle.
Duesler won the 50-day trip to Europe in a Minnesota Daily News subscription contest. She was one of a dozen winners and she set sail on July 1. On her return trip aboard the steamer Philadelphia, she posed for a picture with two other Gamma Phis. Minnie Brewer from Upsilon chapter at Hollins College had been sightseeing, too. Della Brunstetter from Psi Chapter at the University of Oklahoma had been studying abroad. They considered it “a coincidence that Gamma Phis from the east, north and south could meet in such happy circumstances.”
The Aurness family
The Aurnesses had two boys, James and Peter, born in 1923 and 1925, respectively. The couple divorced in 1948. James and Peter became actors. James changed his last name to Arness. He played Marshall Dillon in Gunsmoke. Peter’s stage name was Peter Graves. An initiate of Phi Kappa Psi at the University of Minnesota, he starred in Mission Impossible.
Photo from an article in the August 25, 1958 edition of the Minneapolis Star
In 1957, Ruth Aurness married Maurice Eugene Salisbury. She died in Calfornia on September 14, 1986 at the age of 87.
