Boom on Fraternity Row

Hazing had been particularly rough that Hell Week night. Next morning at one University of Washington fraternity house, a dozen "pledges"--all overseas veterans--packed their bags and walked out. Said a spokesman: "No 18-year-old kids are going to warm our bottoms." At Northwestern University, a sophomore "active" ordered a pledge to light his cigarette for him. The pledge, an ex-major in the Air Forces, gave the sophomore and his brothers heated and specific instructions about how they could dispose of his pledge pin.

On campuses all over the U.S., it had been like that ever since the war. Some of the horseplay had gone out of fraternity life; and so had a lot of comradeship. It was the veterans who had made fraternities a different place. Most of them had too much on their minds--their grades, their families, and their futures--to be fraternity "brothers" in the prewar sense.

Though chapter houses were crowded, many married brothers now lived in Quonsets, trailers and boardinghouses off campus; they had little time for the old casual touch-football games on the lawn, or the beer & bull sessions. Even at Western and Midwestern campuses, where fraternities usually had been taken more seriously than in the East, actives were not as active any more. Were fraternities themselves on the decline? According to a survey of 17 big-time college campuses last week, the answer was decidedly no.

Burning Mortgages. Fraternity memberships, like university enrollments, are at an alltime high--in most cases, nearly double prewar. This fat income has put the fraternities in the black, many for the first time in years. The heartening aroma of burning mortgages drifts up from Fraternity Rows all over the nation. At the University of California at Los Angeles, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter was 13 years ahead on its mortgage payments. The University of Southern California's Phi Kappa Psis had just dedicated a new $120,000 house. University of Michigan fraternities were overflowing into nearby rooming-house "annexes."

Reported one University of Denver fraternity man: "It's getting like Union Station. You can't tell whether the guy lounging in the living room is an active, a pledge, a rushee, a visitor or somebody who got into the house by mistake." Complained one of 135 Sigma Nus at Northwestern: "I'm pretty good at names, but it took me a full three months to learn everybody's first name."

Practical Hazing. Hell Week had been banned on some campuses--notably at Indiana University, after nine Theta Chis were jailed for breaking into a grocery store on a Hell Week scavenger hunt. At Tufts College in Medford, Mass., which first abolished and then restored Hell Week, "practical hazing" (e.g., cleaning and polishing the houses) had replaced such schoolboyish stunts as measuring the Charles River bridges with 13-inch codfish. Everywhere paddling (also known as "boarding," "hacking," etc.) was about as out-of-date as bell-bottom trousers.

Alumni returning to their old fraternity houses looked in vain for the old trappings: the college pennants, no-parking signs, barefoot Petty girls and dirty shirts that had once adorned their rooms. The social chairman on coed campuses no longer had apoplexy if a pledge dated a "barb" (non-sorority girl).

But nobody was taking any bets on how long the subdued spirit would last. Already the veteran strain was thinning out; 17-year-olds and the old enthusiasm seemed to be on their way back. At Stanford, when members of the Class of 1951 were rushed recently, only 12% proved to be veterans. Said one fraternity leader: "We'll have to rebuild our rushing strategy around hamburgers and milk shakes, instead of beer and pretzels."

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