Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society and Its Cottey College Connection

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Phi Theta Kappa  is the international honor society for students in two-year college programs. Eligible members can be enrolled in programs at community and junior colleges or in Associate’s programs at four-year institutions. Patterned on the four-year senior honor society, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Theta Kappa has its roots in Missouri and specifically at eight junior colleges for women. Only one of those first eight chapters is still in existence; it is the Epsilon chapter at Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. Cottey College* is the only college for women owned by women (the P.E.O. Sisterhood, a Philanthropic, Education Organization, oversees the college).

The idea for Phi Theta Kappa came out of an organization, Kappa Phi Omicron, founded by six charter members in 1910 at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. Similar honorary groups sprang up on the two-year campuses across Missouri. When, in 1918, the presidents of Missouri junior colleges for women met they took on the task of creating a new organization that would honor the outstanding students at these two-year women’s colleges. In the early 1900s, a four-year degree was not necessary to teach and a good many of the women who attended these institutions became teachers. November 19, 1918 is the day the organization was founded; today the date is celebrated as Founders’ Day. Phi Theta Kappa was incorporated in the state of Missouri on April 29, 1920.

The first eight chapters were: Alpha chapter, Hardin College, Mexico, Missouri; Beta chapter, Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri – it became Alpha chapter when Hardin College became a four-year institution; Gamma chapter, Christian Female College, Columbia, Missouri; Delta, Howard Payne Junior College, Fayette, Missouri; Epsilon Chapter, Cottey College, Nevada, Missouri; Zeta chapter, Lindenwood Female College, St. Charles, Missouri; Eta chapter, William Woods College, Fulton, Missouri; and Theta chapter, Central Female College, Lexington, Missouri. Seven of these eight institutions either closed or became four-year institutions.

The Cottey College chapter submitted the Phi Theta Kappa song, which starts with the words “Give Us Wisdom.” It was adopted in 1923 and remains the organization’s official song.

In 1924, Phi Theta Kappa’s constitution was amended to include all two-year colleges bringing into the fold those that were all male and co-educational. In 1929, the American Association of Junior Colleges (now the American Association of Community Colleges), an organization formed in 1921, recognized Phi Theta Kappa as the official honor society of two-year institutions.

The first chapter charted outside of the United States was founded in 1987 at the University of Maryland’s Mannheim campus in Germany. A year later, when the Alpha Xi Beta chapter was founded at Clark County Community College (today known as the College of Southern Nevada), it marked the first time there was a chapter in all 50 United States. The first Canadian chapter was installed in 1991 at Medicine Hat College in Alberta, Canada.

In 2006, the membership roll of Phi Theta Kappa reached two million. Phi Theta Kappa chapters are located around the world including the United States, Canada, Germany, British Virgin Islands, the Republic of Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and the United Arab Emirates.

The opportunity to apply for an array of scholarships totaling $37 million to be used for further study is one of the benefits of membership. In 2007, CollegeFish.org debuted. It is a web-based transfer and educational platform for community college students. Phi Theta Kappa powers it.

In 2011, the first chapter of the International Society of Baccalaureate Scholars (ISBS) was chartered at Florida’s Broward College. ISBS recognizes the accomplishments of top-ranked upperclassmen pursuing baccalaureate degrees at community colleges.

While once students had to wait until graduation to be inducted as members, today first-year students are eligible for Phi Theta Kappa membership. There are more than 1250 chapters and about 100,000 students become members each year.

* For more information on Cottey College, please see http://wp.me/p20I1i-h3

To read more about the history of the Illinois State Chapter of P.E.O. visit the link to the page about it and Lulu Corkhill Williams  http://wp.me/P20I1i-Qf .

  © Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com

 

 

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Evelyn Peters Kyle, My Link to ΠΒΦ’s Founders

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

The history of Greek-letter organizations is sprinkled with the stories of men and women who have given of themselves, devoting their time, talents, and treasures to the organization they joined as college students. My Pi Beta Phi friend Evelyn Peters Kyle was of these special people.

Evelyn was born on March 26, 1911. On October 9, 2009, she passed away at the age of 98. I was blessed to have had her in my life, even if it was for a relatively short amount of time.

I have always treasured my Province Chapter Service Award, a simple hand-crafted silver arrow.  I became a Collegiate Province President in the fall of 1991. One of my duties was choosing the Province Chapter Service Award winner. It was then that I learned Evelyn’s husband Stan made all the Province Chapter Service Award arrows. I wrote him a thank you note telling him how much I loved my Chapter Service arrow. Evelyn wrote a note back telling me how much my letter meant to Stan.

I finally met Evelyn in person at the 1993 Pi Beta Phi Convention’s Officer Dinner in Orlando. We wrote each other frequently, and I loved getting her envelopes in the mail. There were treasures tucked inside – things she knew I would enjoy. And she told me Pi Phi stories. Evelyn was initiated into the Illinois Alpha Chapter in 1930, a few years after the chapter was reinstalled at Monmouth College (Pi Phi’s founding campus). She was in the chapter with several of the founders’ granddaughters and she met a few of the founders. She was my own personal connection to them. In reading her college scrapbook, I had a glimpse of what life was like on the Monmouth College campus in the 1930s.

Recently, Denise Turnbull, the Holt House Curator, and I were trying to figure out which house next to Holt House belonged to founder Clara Brownlee Hutchinson and her husband. The house numbers had changed at some point and Clara’s house number in old directories did not coincide with any of the numbers currently in use. I mentioned to Denise that Evelyn would know, since she was the person who told me Clara lived next to Holt House, but we didn’t have her as a resource anymore.  A few months later, I was in the archives and I was looking at a scrapbook Evelyn created after the 1967 Centennial Convention. There on the pages with pictures of the convention trip to Monmouth was a picture of the house with Evelyn’s caption noting it as Clara’s home. I smiled as I sent Denise a scan of the page and told her that Evelyn had come through for us after all.

Her grandmother was a member of the fraternity’s short-lived third chapter so her Pi Phi lineage went back to almost the founding. Evelyn grew up in Pasadena, California. When she went to Monmouth College, it was in a time when getting to and from college meant several days travelling across the country on trains. In 1956, she received Monmouth College’s Distinguished Alumni Award.

Evelyn attended her first convention in 1940, and yes, her scrapbook from that convention is in the archives, too. That convention was an interesting one because of an incorporation challenge. That is a story for another time and place, but I always found it interesting that Evelyn’s first convention was filled with such drama. She became a member of Grand Council after she was nominated from the floor of convention. She treasured her days serving Pi Beta Phi from the chapter and club level to Grand Council. An alumnae club service award is named in her honor. The Pi Beta Phi Foundation has a giving society named in her honor reflecting the spirit of generosity with which she supported the foundation.

Evelyn lived in Pasadena for more than 90 years, She was active in many organizations including P.E.O., Pasadena Public Library, Pasadena Historical Society, Women’s Civic League, and the San Gabriel Valley Area Council of Women’s Clubs. She wrote Dreams of The Pioneers: A Brief History of the Early Days of Pasadena. For many years, she and Stan coordinated the library book sales and she passed on to me copies of  Baird’s Manual of American College Fraternities and the Sorority Handbook that she had rescued at the sales decades before. They were also involved in the Tournament of Roses parade.

She was a prolific writer and was named Pi Phi’s first and only Poet Laureate in 1993. In the picture below she is wearing the special pin that Stan made her when she was given this honor. Evelyn is one of those women whose service to Pi Beta Phi spanned her adult life. I feel indeed lucky that I had the opportunity to be her friend and to paraphrase a beloved Pi Phi song, “the joy of having known her will last my whole life through.”

© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com. All rights reserved.

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Happy Founders’ Day Sigma Delta Tau!

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

March 25, 1917 is the date that seven female Cornell University students founded Sigma Delta Tau. Their organization was originally called Sigma Delta Phi, but when they discovered the name belonged to another Greek-letter organization they changed the “Phi” to “Tau.”

Sigma Delta Tau’s founders are Dora Bloom (Turteltaub), Inez Dane Ross, Amy Apfel (Tishman), Regene Freund (Cohane), Marian Gerber (Greenberg), Lenore Blanche Rubinow, and Grace Srenco (Grossman).

There was also a male involved in the beginnings of Sigma Delta Tau. Bloom asked Nathan Caleb House  to write the ritual. “Brother Nat”  is the only man to honored with the organization’s gold membership pin. As the story is told on the Sigma Delta Tau web-site, “After leaving Cornell University, Brother Nat was ‘lost.’ In a chance look through the New York City phone book, Nat was ‘found’ and brought as a surprise to the 1958 National Convention. From that time until his death, Brother Nat attended almost every Biennial Convention and maintained correspondence and visits with many alumnae and collegiate chapters.”

Happy 96th Birthday Sigma Delta Tau!

© Fran Becque  www.fraternityhistory.com

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From the Saltine Warrior to Otto the Orange at Syracuse University

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Syracuse University is the only university whose mascot started as a goat, became an Indian, had a quick flirtation with a Roman gladiator, and finally became a citrus fruit – namely a round orange called Otto.

Syracuse’s school colors started out as pink and pea green in 1872. In 1890, when intercollegiate athletics was in its infancy, the student body realized that colors associated with babies might not be the best choice. After researching other college and university colors, orange was chosen; while other schools used orange in combination with another color, no one used orange alone.

During the 2004-2005 academic year, the teams formerly known as the Syracuse Orangemen and Syracuse Orangewomen became collectively the Syracuse Orange.

Syracuse’s football venue, the concrete Archbold Stadium, opened in 1907. Vita the Goat was Syracuse’s first mascot and reigned during the 1920s. Vita attended games and often wore a sign imploring the Syracuse team to beat its opponent.

In 1931, an article published in The Syracuse Orange Peel, told of finding the remains of a 16th century Onondaga Indian chief in the excavations for a campus building. Soon, the Saltine Warrior, named for the salt deposits in the area and nicknamed Big Chief Bill Orange, became the mascot. The 1951 Senior Class commissioned a statue as a gift. Ivan Mestrovic, the famed Croatian sculptor, was on the faculty and a competition was held among his students. Luise Kaish’s design won.* An Onondaga Nation member posed for the statue that is still display on campus near the Shaffer Art Building.

For more than 40 years, a Lambda Chi Alpha member served as the Saltine Warrior. The tradition came about because a Lambda Chi’s father owned a cheerleading camp and made a costume for his son to wear.

Onkwehonwenha, a Native American student organization protested the use of the Saltine Warrior as a mascot in the late 1970s. Their voices were heard and the Indian was sidelined at the end of February 1978. That football season a Roman gladiator tried to fill the Saltine Warrior’s shoes. He failed miserably and was subjected to taunts and ridicule. After the fall 1978 football season, Archbold Stadium was demolished and replaced with the covered Carrier Dome.

In 1980, cheerleader Eric Heath designed and crafted a costume for an orange. It wasn’t an ordinary orange. It was an orange with “appeal.”  For ten years, the orange was unnamed, although the people who wore them had named the costumes – the first was called “Clyde” and the second was “Woody.” When a third costume was made the cheerleaders came up with two possible names, “Opie” and “Otto.” Thinking that even a second-grader would naturally rhyme the former with “dopey,” the latter was chosen. It apparently fit the round orange colored citrus fruit like a glove.

In 1995, an 18-member committee was appointed to recommend a logo and mascot. The committee offered three choices – a lion, wolf, or the orange that was already in use. The committee recommended the wolf. A successful campaign by the students who had worn the orange costume led Chancellor Ken Shaw to name Otto as the official mascot in December 1995. Each year, students audition to wear the Otto costume. Two to six students are chosen.

And so this is the story of one of the more unusual college mascots. I hope Otto gets to lead the singing of all celebratory songs and all toasts with a citrus drink. Happy Birthday to my alma mater!

The Hall of Languages, 2010


 

*Mestrovic spent four months in jail as a political prisoner during the Italian Army’s occupation of Croatia in the early 1940s. A former student of his, Malvina Hoffman, helped persuade the Yugoslavian government to release him to the Vatican. After spending more than four months in jail, he was sent to Rome to work on several projects. Hoffman also had a hand in Chancellor William Tolley’s invitation to Mestrovic to teach at Syracuse. Mestrovic’s student, Luise Kaish, later taught at Columbia University.

 

© Fran Becque  www.fraternityhistory.com

 

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Happy Birthday Stephen Sondheim, Musical Theater Genius and a ΒΘΠ

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Happy Birthday Stephen Sondheim! He is one of my favorite composers and I have wonderful memories of attending Sondheim shows on Broadway with my daughter while she was at Mount Holyoke (who says college family weekends need to be spent on campus?). We called them Sondheim Saturdays.

While at Williams College in Williamsport, Massachusetts, Stephen Sondheim became a member of the Zeta Chapter of Beta Theta Pi. The chapter was founded on February 5, 1847. Sondheim is the only Beta Theta Pi member to have been awarded three top entertainment honors –  Oscar, Grammy and Tony. He also has  a Pulitzer Prize, a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, and a Laurence Olivier Award.

Beta Theta Pi chapter house at Williams College with snow dragon guarding the premises, date unknown. (Courtesy of Williams College Archives)

Sondheim was one of 24 pledges in his pledge class. Sophomore year, along with roommate and fellow Beta Josiah T.S. (Joe) Horton, the campus humorist, he wrote a campus musical, Phinney’s Rainbow. It was the first musical presented by Williams’ undergraduate drama society Cap and Bells. The title was a take off on Finian’s Rainbow and it harkened to Williams’ President James Phinney Baxter III. Sondheim wrote 25 musical numbers for the show.

The plot of the satirical look at campus life centered on the efforts of a Swindlehurst Prep School fraternity, Dogma Nu, to replace the compulsory physical education classes with more house parties. Their motto was “strength through sex.” Two of the songs from the show “How Do I Know?” and “Still Got My Heart” were his first published songs.

The book Stephen Sondheim: A Life, offers a glimpse of the play: “A ‘Goat Room’ was where all the rituals of initiation were performed,” Sondheim said, and so he took Beta Theta Pi’s ceremony “with just a slight smidgen of variation and exaggeration and put it on the stage. All the brothers were horrified, but of course everybody else thought it was screamingly funny; it seemed like a work of the imagination. And I told everybody at the house ‘Don’t get into an uproar. If you don’t tell anybody, it’s real, they won’t believe it.'”

Williams College was then an all-male institution, and the women’s roles were played by men (picture a chorus line of football players in a-line skirts and demure crew neck sweaters). The four performances in April and May of 1948 made a profit of $1,500.

The following year, he wrote the music, lyrics and book for the Cap and Bells production of All That Glitters. It was based on the play Beggar on Horseback by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly; Sondheim received permission from Kaufman to perform the musical at Williams’ Adams Memorial Theater.

Sondheim graduated magna cum laude. He was awarded the Hutchinson Prize, a $3,000 cash award, renewable for a second year, for further study of music. The Prize Committee certainly got their money’s worth!

Sondheim turned 80 on September 15, 2010. To celebrate the occasion, the Henry Miller Theatre located in New York City’s theater district at 124 West 43rd Street, between Broadway and 6th Avenue, was renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theatre.

Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim

© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2013. All Rights Reserved. If  you enjoyed this post, please sign up for updates. Also follow me on twitter @GLOHistory and Pinterest www.pinterest.com/glohistory/


 

 

 

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Perpetual Scholarships – Higher Education’s Answer to Money Woes in the 1800s

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Many colleges sold perpetual scholarships in the first half of the 1800s. It was a creative, yet poorly thought out scheme to bring in much needed funds. According to historian Frederick Rudolph, the perpetual scholarship idea was “particularly attractive idea to the colleges because it promised to solve their basic problems: it would give the colleges the funds that they badly needed in order to stay open, and it would provide them with an immediate supply of students who would justify their being open at all.” The idea might have worked if the institutions had invested the funds prudently instead of using the income for operating expenses.

The Perpetual Scholarship pictured below was sent to me by a friend who asked me to get it to Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The $1,000 given to the college in 1879 is more than $22,700 in 2013 funds.  The certificate states:

Whereas, (insert name) has paid to the Trustees of Shurtleff College, of Alton, Illinois, the sum of One Thousand Dollars, the receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged, the said Trustees do hereby grant, sell and convey to the said (insert name) heirs, executors and assigns, a Perpetual Scholarship in said College, entitling the legal owner hereof to perpetually send one student, free of tuition, to any and all departments now established in the said Institution or hereafter to be established by said institution.

In Testimony Whereof, The President of said Board of Trustees, by them duly authorized, has hereto set his name and affixed the seal of this Corporation, this Twenty second of January A,D, eighteen hundred and seventy nine.

Many of the institutions that offered these perpetual scholarships no longer exist. Shurtleff College is among that list, although it lasted decades longer than some of the other small colleges that sold the scholarships. In 1827, Baptist Minister Reverend John Mason Peck founded Alton Seminary, named for the Illinois town in which it was located. Dr. Brendon Shurtleff of Boston donated $10,000 to the college and, in 1836, it took on his name. Sigma Zeta, the science and mathematics honor society, was founded at the college. The organization’s founders were young Shurtleff faculty members Elmer E. List, Ralph K. Carleton, and J. Ellis Powell, at whose home the organization was founded on Thursday, October 1, 1925.

At the time that it closed, Shurtleff had the distinction of being the oldest Baptist college west of the Appalachians. On June 30, 1957, the school became part of the Southern Illinois University system. Although a record number of students, 700, were enrolled in 1950, the last 28 students graduated in 1958. The SIU campus in Alton saw an influx of students, however, in 1965, SIU opened a campus in Edwardsville (now Southern Illinois University Edwardsville – SIUE). Seven years later the Board of Trustees made the decision to use the Alton campus for the SIU Dental School.

McKendree College in Lebanon, Illinois, broke even on the sale of perpetual scholarships, according to Rudolph. For every dollar it raised by selling scholarships, McKendree lost  a dollar. He also noted that Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was running at a $3,000 deficit after only four years of selling the scholarships. The college was full of students not paying tuition and the money raised by the scholarships had long since been spent.

From 1853-1867, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, sold $75,000 worth of perpetual scholarships in order to fund building construction. Most of Northwestern’s perpetual scholarships cost $100 when they were sold. About 350 students have made use of those scholarships, one graduating as recently as 2002.  Barrett Bridenhagen’s great-great-grandfather purchased one of the scholarships and because all the strict guidelines placed on the scholarships in 1959 had been met, she was able to use the scholarship. Potential recipients need to meet all admission qualifications. Other rules made in 1959 state that the scholarship covers only tuition, not room, board or fees and only one family member per generation may use the scholarship.

After I posted this, Kylie Towers Smith, Kappa Kappa Gamma’s Archivist/Museum Curator, sent me this scan (below) of a Simpson College Scholarship Contract. ” I went to Simpson College on the hopeful promise of a perpetual scholarship, but my outstanding student loans attest otherwise. It’s a good thing my experience was priceless!”  

 

My thanks to a friend who sent me the Shurtleff certificate to give to the archives at SIU. I remember Dr. Jeff Aper discussing them in a History of Higher Education class but I never thought I’d see one up close and personal.

© Fran Becque  www.fraternityhistory.com


 

 

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Iota Alpha Pi, Founded in March 1903, Is the Only NPC Group to Disband

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

The National Panhellenic Conference began in 1902 with seven founding members. In its first ten years, additional groups joined quickly . At the 1951 meeting, the six Association of Education Sororities (AES) and five other groups received full membership. In 1957, NPC reached an all-time high of 32 members but by the next meeting in 1959, the number was reduced to 29 due to the union of several of the groups. NPC currently has 26 members. That number has been constant since 1971 when Iota Alpha Pi disbanded.

Iota Alpha Pi, the first college sorority for Jewish women, was founded on March 3, 1903, at the New York Normal College  (now Hunter College).  The founders were Hannah Finkelstein (Swick), Olga Edelstein (Ecker), Sadie April (Glotzer), Rose Posner (Bernstein), Rose Delson (Hirschman), May Finklestein (Spiegel), and Frances Zellermayer (Delson). Zellermayer’s brother Maurice was a founder of Zeta Tau Beta; she married Rose Delson’s brother.

It began as a local organization, J.A.P., pronounced “Jay-ay-peez.” According to a 1942 initiate interviewed by Marianne R. Sanua for her book Going Greek: Jewish College Fraternities in the United States 1895-1945, J.A.P. stood for  “Just a Plain” Sorority. Sanua does not believe the name is in any way connected with the current meaning of those letters. It took on Greek letters when a second chapter was founded in 1913. The first six chapters were all in the metro New York area. These campuses were Hunter College, Brooklyn Law School, New York University, New Jersey Law School, and Adelphi College. The Eta chapter was founded in 1925 at the University of Denver. The organization went international in 1929 with the installation of the Kappa Chapter at the University of Toronto. Mu Chapter was installed at the University of Manitoba in 1932.

The Pi Chapter was installed at Syracuse University (my alma mater – Go ‘Cuse!) in 1942. The group purchased a home at 403 Comstock Avenue, near the corner of East Adams. It had been the home Syracuse architect Albert L. Brockway designed and built for himself in 1912. It was Alpha Iota’s Pi’s home until 1972 when the organization disbanded. Syracuse University purchased it and it became Whitman Cottage, a small group residence for women.

Its flower was the red rose and its colors were red and black. The estimated total membership in May 31, 1967 was 6,300. The badge is below. It is a badge from the years after Iota Alpha Pi joined NPC because it has the roses on the horizontal points. They were added because the original badge looked too much like Alpha Delta Pi’s badge.


© Fran Becque  www.fraternityhistory.com


 

 

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Happy Founders’ Day Delta Phi Epsilon Albeit a Bit Bittersweet

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

On March 17, 1917, Minna Goldsmith (Mahler), Eva Effron (Robin), Ida Bienstock (Landau), Sylvia Steierman (Cohn) and Dorothy Cohen (Schwartzman), students at New York University Law School, founded Delta Phi Epsilon. Five years later, the organization was formally incorporated in the State of New York.

Delta Phi Epsilon became a full member of the National Panhellenic Conference in 1951. Forty years later, in the 1991-93 biennium, Delta Phi Epsilon assumed the chairmanship of the National Panhellenic Conference. Harriet Block Macht, a charter member of the Delta Delta Chapter at Indiana University, represented Delta Phi Epsilon as its first NPC Chairman. Her death about a week before Founders’ Day likely makes it a somewhat bittersweet one.

Macht studied music and opera at Indiana University. A longtime resident of the Miami area, she was a member of the Delta Phi Epsilon’s Greater Miami Alumnae Association. The Harriet Block Macht Outstanding Alumnae Panhellenic of the Biennium Award is given to a top performing Alumnae Panhellenic. Delta Phi Epsilon members can purchase an Edwardian inspired pendant named in her honor.

© Fran Becque  www.fraternityhistory.com


 

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The Story of Kappa Tetarton, SIUC’s Phi Sigma Kappa Chapter

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

The April 3, 1956 edition of the Egyptian reported that the Interfraternity Council had admitted Alpha Sigma to membership on a trial basis. The local fraternity had 24 members; it was founded on October 18, 1955 (Obelisk, 1959). The fraternity was interested in affiliating with Sigma Phi Epsilon. On May 7, 1956, it became a Sigma Phi Epsilon Colony.

The chapter was on the verge of becoming the Illinois Epsilon chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon when the Office of Student Affairs rescinded its permission (Obelisk, 1957). Sigma Phi Epsilon’s ordeal is chronicled in Chapter VI of this paper. The chapter returned to its former local status, this time taking the name Alpha Sigma Epsilon.

Instead of completely disbanding, the chapter decided to again pursue national affiliation. George Hand, a Sigma Phi Epsilon member who was privy to the first affiliation process, wrote a letter of support to a Phi Sigma Kappa national officer: “Since my son is a member of this group, I have been in close contact with them for more than a year, and I feel that I am well acquainted with them. I have a high opinion of the character of the group. They have given evidence that they have principles and are ready to stand by them. The group is quite active as evidenced by the fact that seventy-five percent of the members are on campus committees. The group has grown in number, in prominence, and stature on the campus, especially in this past year.” (G. Hand, personal communication, 1957)

Alpha Sigma Epsilon’s petition for membership in Phi Sigma Kappa was approved in May, 1957. Davis notified Roger Gordon Bush, Alpha Sigma Epsilon’s president, that the Administration had given permission for the local to affiliate with Phi Sigma Kappa (I. C. Davis, personal communication, June 18, 1957). The first pledging ceremonies occurred in September.

Alpha Sigma Epsilon became the Kappa Tetarton chapter of Phi Sigma Kappa on November 23, 1957. An installation team from the University of Illinois chapter arrived to perform the ceremonies. Forty-one undergraduates were initiated along with three SIU faculty members and two Carbondale residents who were receiving associate status. They included George Hand, Vice President for Business Affairs; Max Turner, Assistant Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; John Hopkins, Assistant Professor of Geography; Henry Engel and Alvy Smit (B. Lyon, personal communication, November 5, 1957). The chapter celebrated with a banquet at Engel’s and the following day it was honored at a tea at the Sigma Sigma Sigma chapter house (Obelisk, 1958).

Phi Sigma Kappa was founded in 1873 at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, now the University of Massachusetts. The official badge consists of the three Greek letters (Anson & Marchesani, 1991).

In June, 1958, a lease was signed for a house at 401 West College Street. In what remains a confusing situation the lease was entered into with “the Sigma Phi Epsilon Southern Illinois Corporation (parent corporation of Phi Sigma Kappa Fraternity), of SIU.” The members of Alpha Sigma Epsilon endured the process of becoming a national fraternity and settled into being a part of the SIU fraternity system.

Among Phi Kappa Sigma’s traditions was a pinning ceremony in “which the couple wears a ball and chain for 24 hours and the fraternity burns the Greek letters on the sidewalk” (Obelisk, 1959, p. 192).

This excerpt of from my master’s thesis, A HISTORY OF THE FRATERNITY SYSTEM AT SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY FROM 1948 THROUGH 1960 by Frances DeSimone Becque, 1995.  © Fran Becque  www.fraternityhistory.com

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Happy Founders’ Day Delta Gamma and Phi Delta Theta!

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

March 15 is the day on which both Delta Gamma and Phi Delta Theta celebrate Founders’ Day.

It is the birthday of Robert Morrison, one of Phi Delta Theta’s six founders. The organization was founded on December 26, 1848 at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Morrison proposed the organization; along with John McMillan Wilson, he chose the name of the fraternity. The other founders are Robert Thompson Drake, John Wolfe Lindley, Ardivan Walker Rodgers, and Andrew Watts Rogers. Miami University was founded by an act of the Ohio general assembly in 1809. Phi Delta Theta’s second chapter was chartered in 1849 at Indiana University.

Delta Gamma was founded at the Oxford Female Institute, also known as the Lewis School, at Oxford, Mississippi. The school was established before the Civil War and eventually was absorbed by the University of Mississippi. Delta Gamma’s three founders, Eva Webb [Dodd], her cousin Anna Boyd [Ellington], and Mary Comfort [Leonard], all from Kosciusko, Mississippi, were weather-bound at the school over the Christmas holidays in December of 1873.

Mrs. Hays, the lady principal, hosted the girls for the holidays. She had a son who was a fraternity man at the University of Mississippi. He and the women’s other gentlemen friends may have imbued the girls with the idea to start their own Greek-letter society. Founder Eva Webb Dodd later told this story: “When the idea first came to three homesick girls during the Christmas holidays of 1873 to found fraternity or club as we then called it, little did we realize that we were laying the cornerstone of such a grand fraternity as Delta Gamma. The school we attended at Oxford, Miss., was not much more advanced than a high school of today. During the week we decided on our motto and selected the Greek letters to represent it. We did not know that there were any other fraternities for girls in the United States known by Greek letters when we gave our club its name. We spent the holidays deciding on our pin and initiation and writing our constitution. In January 1874, we had our first initiation. We initiated four girls. The initiation was in one of the rooms of the house where we were boarding. We were careful to select only the girls we thought would be in sympathy with us and make our fraternity worthy of its name.”

Delta Gamma’s Founders’ Day is celebrated on March 15 because on that date in 1879, the Eta Chapter at Akron University was founded. Coincidentally, it was a man, Phi Delta Theta George Banta, who took Delta Gamma to the northern states. That story of George Banta, Phi Delta Theta and Delta Gamma, is told in another post at http://wp.me/p20I1i-AS.

George Banta, Phi Delta Theta and Delta Gamma

© Fran Becque  www.fraternityhistory.com, 2013. All Rights Reserved.


 

Posted in Delta Gamma, Founders' Day, George Banta, GLO, Greek-letter Organization, Greek-letter Organization History, Miami University, National Panhellenic Conference, NIC, North-American Interfraternity Conference, Phi Delta Theta, Sorority History, Women's Fraternity History | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Happy Founders’ Day Delta Gamma and Phi Delta Theta!