Way Back Wednesday - Fraternity Style

This week Mama Duck has chosen a fraternity/sorority/drinking theme for WBW and I am happy to play along. Would you believe I couldn't find a single picture of me drinking an alcoholic beverage? Probably because I was taking all the pictures. Anyway my first fraternal experience in college was my co-ed dorm floor, because I chose to live in a special floor exclusively for University Scholars, otherwise known as snobby geeks. There was a whole separate dorm building for these Scholars, but for some reason I ended up on the 5th floor of Beaver Hall (quit laughing). We were the only fully co-ed dorm on campus at that time and we were the renegade Scholars that did lots of cool things together, including party. Here's a picture of the girls at one of our formals. I'm on the far right, second row from the bottom. Sadly, I can't remember half of those girls' names.


Very shortly after starting school at Penn State I figured out that the place to be on Friday and Saturday nights was at the fraternity parties. My roomate and I ended up frequenting one such fraternity so often that we became something like little sisters. I was good friends with a guy that rushed said fraternity his freshman year and eventually became their chancellor. He was an all around BMOC (big man on campus) being a University Scholar like me, eventually becoming IFC president and a Lion Ambassador. Click on the links if you care what that is. Anyway he was hot too. That's him on the lower right in this picture:



In researching this post I Googled him and found some interesting info. More on him in another post. Anyway Tau Epsilon Phi had some awesome parties, including "hotel parties" where each brother served a different drink in his room, and lots of mixed drink parties, a rarity at frat houses. Funny story, there's a picture hanging in the house of the brothers from the 1970's that includes PA Senator Rick Santorum sporting a nice afro. One reason I campaigned for his election to the Senate in 1994 was that he was a TEP brother at PSU. More on him in a future post too.

Here's a picture of some of my TEP friends building our homecoming float. Our theme was Sesame Street and I stayed up all night one night "pomping". Pomping is sticking little squares of tissue paper (pomps) into chicken wire.



So that's my fraternity life at Penn State. I scoffed the sorority girls as snobby alcoholics that lived in dorms. At PSU sororities aren't allowed to have houses due to a city ordinance that defines any house with more than 5 unrelated women living there as a brothel. Well anyway, have a fun Way Back Wednesday!!