In 1963, when I was a sophomore at Williams, fraternity rush happened, and Phi Gamma Delta happened to me. I had no idea what this event would mean for me, still haven’t, in any but the crudest sense. As I talk now with classmates, though, it seems as though many others felt I had entered The Cabin in the Woods.
“The Cabin in the Woods” is a film made at least partly by Joss Whedon, a writer/director best known for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The X-Men” movies. Released in 2012, fifty years after I graduated from my Maine high school, TCITW depicts five feckless college students that go to the woods to spend a weekend in a remote cabin. At first the place seems innocuous enough, but after they stupidly go down into the creepiest cellar in Christendom, they are attacked by zombies and other horrible creatures – the entire environment controlled from deep underground by mysterious labcoated adults with great power. (Sigourney Weaver is the college president of this unpleasant faculty.) None of the kids survives.
As I consider this scenario, I wonder if maybe it is a fair analogy of my fraternity days.
My pledge class was – and still is, I believe fervently – constituted of kind, intelligent boys, who have pretty much without exception grown into kind, intelligent men. (By now they are becoming kind, intelligent old codgers.) Phi Gam had a sort of Cabin in the Woods reputation before we arrived, but we were pretty nerdy, if truth is told, and had no idea what it meant. A couple of us graduated Phi Bete (though not I, not by a long shot). Still, there were no extraordinary athletes among us, no theater stars, no apparent future Nobel laureates: just a bunch of pretty Average Joes.
The Fiji Brotherhood ahead of us had some Figures, however. Among the seniors stood some legends. Quentin Murphy was a massive lineman on the football team, who used to walk around wearing a wife-beater tee shirt with the motto, “Dirty Old Men Need Love Too.” Dick Hubbard was brilliant, writing Pulitzer quality economics papers while quaffing drafts of Budweiser down at the basement bar. The bar, by the way, operated 24-7 on the honor system: draw a cup and check your name.
The senior that everyone all over campus knew was Al Hageman, football and rugby player. Hageman was a legend on campus, a proto-Bluto Blutarsky from “Animal House.” The truth about him, though, is that he was, and remains, an extraordinarily generous, kind, and smart man. My pledge class was awed by him until we discovered how nice he was. Still, in social situations he could be daunting. I recall in the spring of junior year entertaining a very cute date in my Phi Gam study when he appeared, back on vacation from the Peace Corps, and enthusiastically told us how to say, “I want to eat you out,” in Swahili.
Hageman, Murphy, and Hubbard lived together in a triple over the kitchen. It was there that they brought the pig. It was young, mostly pink, some hair, with the requisite curly tail. For the spring of our sophomore year this creature oinked around the house, trying unsuccessfully to ingratiate itself with the rest of us. It thought it was a dog. Now I had a dog named Rufus living in the house, a real dog, and he knew this thing was no dog at all. He both hated and feared it, with its little sharp hoofs and its hard rooting nose. Rufus was housebroken; the pig was not. One day it went next door to the Northside Motel – owned by the Nagys, whose son was also a Phi Gam – and began rooting up the lawn. Mrs. Nagy came outside and began shouting at the pig in Hungarian, whereupon it came up to her and began rooting at her foot. This was pretty much the last straw. With a heavy heart, Murphy searched out a farm where the pig could live out his days. The farmer promised he would not end those days prematurely, which the rest of us felt could not possibly happen. During our junior year – the Phi Gam house’s last – we did not have a pig.
Most of the time I suspect the interior of the Fiji House was pretty much like all the others. Parties occurred on weekends, but I cannot believe that they were much different from what went on at other houses. The practice of keeping the beer tap open during the weeks was different from others, but normally the privilege wasn’t hugely abused. Games of Wales Tails (Whales Tales?) went on during weeknights at a basement bar built of glass bricks, but these games usually ended before any real damage occurred, either to players or property. I recall one notable exception to this observation, when following a noisy game, a group of exuberant players drove to Amherst to the Amherst version of Phi Gam, stole a jukebox, and attempted to bring it back to Williamstown. This event did not end well. The raiders were discovered siphoning gas out of some western Massachusetts homeowner’s car, and police and brief incarcerations and the ire of deans ensued. Owing to a great stroke of fortune, I was not a part of this project.
But mostly things there seemed quite harmless. Well, mostly. One day a rat hunt took place. The trash/garbage behind the house had not been removed in a timely fashion and eventually rats were noted. After lunch one sunny day the Brotherhood assembled with bats and sticks and a bizarre weapon that somehow shot beer cans into the air using blank cartridges. The trash/garbage was roiled – and actually set afire. As the rats scuttled away towards Kappa Alpha, bats and sticks flailed and beer cans banged after them. It was a revolting moment.
As my junior year approached, the College decided that fraternities were incompatible with the intellectual life it wanted to foster. Who could imagine that? So the deans created new rules that made fraternity life less attractive: no sophomores would be allowed to eat meals or to party at the house, for instance. Toward the end of sophomore year a fellow Phi Gam and I were named Rush Chairmen. And something else happened to me. One afternoon I invited a kid from a class to come back to the house for a beer. He was bright, funny, interesting. He was also African-American. One of the seniors took me aside later and explained that this guy would not be allowed to join the fraternity because he was Black, and there was a racial exclusion clause in the national Phi Gam charter.
I had never known this fact, had never even guessed that it might be true. I don’t think anyone in my pledge class was aware of it either. With both anger and relief that I wouldn’t any longer be a part of such a policy, I talked with the co-chair and we said, the hell with it. Nobody in his right mind would want to be in a fraternity with the College’s new rules, and even more importantly I could not ask anyone to join a group with this racial exclusion. So we did not rush the rising sophomores. I never paid dues to the national fraternity again. With just two classes Phi Gam staggered through 1964-5, and then we sold the house to the town of Williamstown to be used for its municipal building. With the proceeds we retired our mortgage and had enough left over for a party during senior fall.
Last year I went into the Williamstown Municipal Building to pay a parking ticket. I discovered that – like all respectable Cabins in the Woods – there is an excellent jail in the creepy basement, two small puke-yellow cells made with many small bars. And way in the back, past lots of junk, still stands one more bar, our big old glass-bricked one, with ghosts of Fiji brothers – every one of them of course a ghostly white – still bellied up, still calling for more ghostly Wales Tails.
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