I already knew I was going to rush a fraternity before I set foot on campus for my freshman year, but the New Student Record was a useful tool for background on Greek-letter organizations.

The book’s opening pages gave an overview of fall rush and what to expect from the bidding process. It also included a Q&A page on costs, what fraternities and sororities do on campus, etc., as well as the Greek alphabet and terminology related to the Greek system.

Up until then, my only interest in joining a fraternity was the parties. The New Student Record also did a good job of introducing freshmen to brotherhood and sisterhood, leadership, philanthropy, and intramurals. Still, the parties were the main attraction for me then.

That information was useful, but as I looked through the pages, the real draw for me was seeing my fellow incoming freshmen and wondering which ones I’d meet.

The picture I submitted was a grainy shot of my high school graduation, and my interests were music and soccer – some things never change.

As I started college, my plan was to be a journalism major, as I listed in the New Student Record, but I never made it out of Pre-Journalism, because I got a 1.0 GPA in my first semester. From there, I meandered into Radio, TV, and Film as a major for a time, but ultimately graduated in Communications.

It was pretty remarkable to me that the bulk of students in the book were from New Jersey and New York. Even though I grew up ten miles from campus, there weren’t many people from my high school at the University of Maryland. I think I ran into maybe a dozen of my high school classmates over my five years at Maryland. That’s probably not a big surprise, since Laurel, MD was a working class town.

Paging through the New Student Record now, the people I recognize are mostly my brothers in Pi Kappa Alpha, and others who were in the Greek system.

Every once in a while, it is fun to look back and see all of the big hair on the girls and the mullets on the guys – what a magical time. But I do also wonder how things turned out for all of these faces. Did they stick with their major? Did they move across the country or world? Which of them are no longer with us?

Those pictures of the 1988 freshman will always be the age in the pictures to me.

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If a sorority hosted them, crush parties were typically in a bar; if a fraternity hosted them, they were in the house. Each member would get a few invites to send anonymously to people you had a romantic or platonic crush on.

When a batch of crush party invites was dropped at our fraternity house door, the guys would scramble to see if they were invited. For guys with a girlfriend from the sorority hosting a crush party, it was clear who invited them, but it was fun to guess who invited the others.

The whole surprise was fun, and we hoped we knew who invited us, but we didn’t always know for sure, even after the party happened.

One crush party I remember our Pi Kappa Alpha chapter hosted was in spring 1989, I think, and the invites were sent as a can of Orange Crush soda with a sticker on it that had the name of the person invited.

This was around the time R.E.M.’s song “Orange Crush” came out, so it was fun to tie the invite to the song.

In some cases, when it was a platonic invite, it was still fun to go hang out with someone you knew from classes, work, or whatever, and the free drinks were a nice perk.

I had a couple of long-term girlfriends in college, so there were brief windows when I could invite crushes who didn’t necessarily know I’d invited them. One problem was that invitees might not come, but having a few invites to use generally meant at least one or two crushes per person would turn up.

Crush parties often had awkward moments, since some people hoped they were invited by one person but were invited by someone else. There wasn’t really any big reveal to tell guests who had invited them, so navigating mixed signals could be tricky.

And sometimes a couple or more guys would invite the same person. This could lead to embarrassment and grudges. Overall, these were fun events, and it was awesome to see your name on an invite.

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One of the many decisions I had to make early on was choosing a Big Brother in the fraternity. I got to know some guys during rush and came up with my list of three potential Big Brothers.

Looking back now, I am really glad I got my top pick of the bunch… Hank.

We liked a lot of the same music and had a good vibe together, which translated into years of being good friends, getting into some mischief together, and staying in touch for decades.

While some of the Big and Little Brothers never quite connected during the semester, there were always some who had fun and spent lots of time together during the school years.

And then, during Hell Week, it was a really important move, because one of the work days, Hank kidnapped me and let me chill for an afternoon, instead of being hassled and doing thankless, and sometimes pointless, manual labor.

After college, in those pre-social media days, we fell out of touch for a while, but then reconnected on Facebook, or maybe it was Instagram.

Later in my college career, I was picked by a pledge named Jason to be his Big Brother. This was my final year of school, so we didn’t have as much time to hang out, but it was a lot of fun getting to know him.

I still have the Big Brother paddle that Jason made for me in the fall 1992 semester. It lost a letter over the years, but it’s still in good shape and fun to have a look at.

Jason and I crossed paths a couple or three times after graduation, but then we went our separate ways. I was in New York City two years after graduation, and later moved on to Austin, TX.

But then I was on LinkedIn last year, and I happened to look him up. I sent a message, but didn’t expect to hear back, because if he was anything like me, he didn’t really check LinkedIn messages, since they were mostly strangers promoting their businesses.

A few weeks later, I heard back from him, and he was living just 25 miles away from me. So, we made plans to meet up for lunch and caught up over some Tex-Mex. Just a couple of Maryland guys who knew each other in the 90s and then both made our way to the Texas Hill Country.

We plan to get together again soon.

The post The Fraternity Choice: Big Brothers and Little Brothers appeared first on Shawn Collins' Blog.

Cisco, also known as Liquid Crack, was known as a cheap and fast way to get drunk back then. You could get a 12-ounce bottle for like $1.50 and it was 20% alcohol by volume. One bottle contained the alcohol equivalent of five shots of 80-to-100-proof vodka,

One problem was that it tasted awful—just too sweet and artificial. So we also got a 40 of malt liquor (I chose Private Stock, “the malt liquor with the imported taste”) to chase that nasty sweetness.

All of that alcohol content got us pretty ripped. Around that time, I even went as a “Cisco Kid” on Halloween.

Because of the high alcohol content, Cisco was known to lead to blackouts and violence. The odds were about 50/50 that a guy would break up with his girlfriend on a night of Cisco drinking, yet we persisted.

In 1991, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Antonia Novello, spoke out against Cisco after it caused alcohol poisoning for more than a dozen teens. In January 1991, she denounced Cisco’s packaging and marketing and demanded repackaging so it wouldn’t be mistaken for a wine cooler.

Dr. Novello also pressured retailers to stop carrying it, and 7-Eleven removed Cisco from shelves nationwide. This negative attention was positive for us. A cheap and possibly dangerous drink appealed to a bunch of dopey guys in their early 20s.

Cisco was such a cultural touchstone that I wrote an article about it in The Greek Times, a newspaper I published at the time.

In the fall of 1992, I needed to come up with a cocktail for our Pi Kappa Alpha room-to-room party, where each of the 14 rooms in the house featured a different drink. I chose a Cisco Spritzer: a big container of Cisco mixed with 7-UP. My room was the most popular at the party.

Plus, this drink was pretty contained and didn’t make a mess, unlike my drink the previous year: Lemondrop Shooters. The next morning, when I woke up, there were ants all over my desk from the spilled sugar and simple syrup.

Like many fun, reckless things, I moved on from Cisco after I graduated college. I made it through my Cisco days without any arrests or other hassles. During that time, I wore my room key around my neck so I wouldn’t lose it.

It was a good time to stop, since I wasn’t really dealing with hangovers at that age. But just thinking about drinking a Red or Peach bottle of Cisco now gives me a headache.

Then again, if I saw it on the shelf at the liquor store, I might pick up a bottle for the nostalgia, and see how it tastes these days.

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The cover looked so cheesy that I couldn’t resist getting a copy.

The record came out in 1964 for the Pi Kappa Alpha 96th Anniversary National Convention. Even then, I have to imagine this twelve-track LP looked and sounded outdated.

It took a while for Brothers Sing On to arrive to me. They probably had to dig through some dank basement to find a copy, because who was seriously ordering this in the early 1990s?

After I got it, I couldn’t listen to it, since I’d moved on from records in high school and only had a cassette and DVD player. But when I went to my Dad’s house to visit a while later, I had to bring it along and put it on the turntable.

Let me preface this by saying I bought a lot of music when I was young. I literally spent all my money on recorded music or concert tickets, so even though I had steady jobs from the time I turned 15, I never had enough money for a car.

I didn’t get a driver’s license and a car until I was 23, because my hunger for music was so strong.

Anyhow, I bought all of the music I could get my hands on. When I was low on cash, I’d go to the cut-out bins at record stores and buy cheap tapes for less than a dollar based on the covers and song names.

Most of the time, these were awful picks, but I kept doing it. I also published a music zine in high school, and I got review copies from so many bad punk bands. Still, nothing in my whole music collection (including the really bad stuff that I tossed in the trash over time) was ever as bad as Brothers Sing On.

Maybe I would have appreciated some of these tunes if our fraternity chapter sang any of these traditional songs. But when we serenaded sororities, the songs we sang were pretty vulgar and inappropriate. It’s a good thing we threw awesome parties, because our songbook was very lacking.

To give you an idea of how these songs sound, the singers were undergrads and alumni from the Pi Kappa Alpha chapter at Birmingham Southern College, and they sounded like a 1940s boy band singing in the style of a barbershop quartet. It makes Lawrence Welk sound like death metal.

Here is how the liner notes of Brothers Sing On introduce the record:

Fellowship is the hallmark of Pi Kappa Alpha. It flows into deep and abiding friendship and brotherhood.

Singing is man’s natural expression of fellowship. Chapter and group singing are both a cause and a result of fraternalism. Since 1868, the bonds of brotherhood in Pi Kappa Alpha have been strengthened and hearts made glad by the chorus of voices lifted in songs of fellowship.

This recording will bring many moments of listening pleasure. It is also designed to make participants out of all of us. This singing, by the men of a single chapter, demonstrates the musical potential in every chapter. Our many beautiful Pi Kappa Alpha songs can come alive only as we sing them.

A singing chapter lives in harmony. Listen and sing the songs of brotherhood!

It’s no wonder college fraternity membership declined significantly in the late 1960s and 1970s, with this corny stuff going on and anti-establishment sentiments among college students.

If anyone wants a copy of this record, Columbia Special Products released it (Catalog No. 99021); you may be able to find one on eBay. But don’t come for mine—these wax tracks will stay with me to the end.

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The book was known as a Harvey T. Newell book, or Harvey T. for short. The name was in recognition of the National President of Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity, Harvey Thornton Newell Jr., who held the office when the University of Maryland chapter was founded in 1952.

The brother interviews during our pledging semester helped us learn names and personal details of brothers in the house.

Each interview included a series of questions, and we had to have the interviewed brother sign the back of the page afterward. Some guys would just sign it right away, but others would make us do a task or say we would have to do something later to get their signature.

A common task was to find a brother’s girlfriend and get her to write a love letter to the brother. I also had to memorize the Budweiser preamble, go to the local Chinese restaurant and get an employee to write some goofy sentence in a Chinese dialect, and to find out various trivia about the house.

One guy said I’d have to tell him the name of any woman he wanted to meet at a party. I did this each time he asked. He never signed my book.

We had weekly pledge class meetings where we were tested on fraternity history, and we also had to show that we had secured five new interviews each week. I forget what happened to pledges that didn’t get their required signatures.

In each interview, we had to ask the following:

1. name
2. nickname
3. home address
4. home phone
5. local address
6. local phone
7. year in school
8. major
9. favorite drink
10. girlfriend’s name, if any
11. hobbies and/or interests

And then there was a question that changed over time…

• What does brotherhood mean to you?
• What was your most memorable moment as a PiKA?
• Where was the strangest place you ever got laid?
• Now that you’re a brother, what advice can you give to me as a pledge so that I don’t get blackballed?

I typed the original questions on my non-electric typewriter, which I used for school assignments for a couple of years, until I discovered the computer lab.

This book was just one more stressor during my pledge semester, but it ended up being a useful tool for getting to know a lot of the brothers at the time, and it’s fun to look through it now and see what guys had to say back then.

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The 1992 Reggae Sunsplash tour was at the Merriweather Post Pavilion for the day, so we decided to head over for some Irie vibes in the sunshine.

There was a mostly full box of Franzia White Zinfandel in the fridge, so we grabbed it and a few red Solo cups and headed out to the festival. It was $20 to get in, and we figured we’d pre-game with our boxed wine and then fork over the money to chill on the lawn and feel the music.

When we got to the parking lot, it was a big party, and after we made our way through our box of white zinfandel, we wandered around to see what was going on. The crowd reminded me of a Grateful Dead show, with all sorts of cool stuff for sale and lots of music, dancing, and smiling.

Then we heard it… the familiar sound of balloons being filled up. We wandered over to see some guys selling brightly colored balloons filled with nitrous oxide (N?O) for $3 each.

None of us had tried nitrous balloons before, but we were curious after watching people sucking in the gas, so we each got one. It was fun, but it was short, so we each got another one.

We continued this balloon party until we’d spent all of the money we brought… enough for a festival ticket and a couple of drinks each.

By the time the effects of the final balloon went away, we were still wine-buzzed and headed over to the gate to listen to the music from there. It was ok for a few songs, but we really wanted to be inside.

So, we came up with a plan to sneak in. The concert venue was surrounded by a chain-link fence that wasn’t much different from the fences I’d grown up climbing as a kid, so we decided to space out and make a run for he fence, jump over, and mix in with the crowd on the lawn.

The liquid courage had us all primed, and when we nodded to each other to start the sprint, we took off. I was impressed with myself and how cleanly I made it across, and then I took off my shirt and blended in with the other concertgoers.

As I caught my breath, I looked around for the rest of the crew, and they were being given a talking-to on the other side of the fence. Neither of them made it safely over, so I figured I’d sweet-talk the security into letting them in.

I walked over with a swagger while Pat looked at me and subtly shook his head no. Undeterred, I kept at it until I reached the fence and explained that the two of them were already at the concert, but they had to run out to the car to get some medicine.

Then I waited for security to accept my story and let them through. Except that didn’t happen. Instead, I got bounced out of the concert, and we were told to leave the premises immediately.

With our heads hung low, we walked away, grateful not to be arrested for our goofy breach attempt, and relaxed a while away from the fence so they couldn’t see us. We could still sort of hear the music, so we settled for that.

Also, being responsible college students, we needed to kill some time, so it was safe to drive back to school.

We were feeling good by the time Aswad hit the stage, and we headed back to the car as we heard “Don’t Turn Around” drifting through the night sky. I guess we sort of accomplished our goal, since we had a good time, heard lots of music, and got some sun.

The next summer, I was back at Merriweather Post Pavilion for UB40 and the Gin Blossoms. This time I’d gotten tickets in advance, stayed away from the balloons, and had a different kind of great night.

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I figured it was some tradition that carried over from the 1970s but wasn’t actually happening anymore. And I don’t remember any dorm streaking while I was living in Cumberland.

But while I was pledging, there was one night when we had to go to the Testudo statue in front of McKeldin Library, and all of us had to strip naked, pose around the giant Terrapin, and sit all over it.

After taking a picture of the undressed pledge class around Testudo, we looked to the pile of our clothes, and they were gone. We had to run naked back to the fraternity house to get our clothes.

Sorry to the students who would rub Testudo’s nose for good luck before an exam. There were lots of naked guys on there before the rub.

Then, during Hell Week, we went to the Sigma Kappa sorority, where we had to wear Speedos under our clothes as part of a pledge activity. After we arrived, we were ushered into their TV room and told to take off all our clothes and run around the sorority house — somehow, this was a sanctioned event between our frat and the sorority.

Again, as we returned to the TV room, our clothes were all gone. Another naked run from the sorority back to our house. We had to run across Route 1 and past all of the bar-goers on the way back.

Naked Stuff After Becoming a Brother

I didn’t really have a choice about stripping naked when I was a pledge. Those were times when we had to do it as part of the pledge class. It was sort of funny and ridiculous, and after a while we just had no shame.

But I was also in my birthday suit in public a number of times after I became a brother in Pi Kappa Alpha (PiKA).

There was a tradition where anytime one of our brothers got lavaliered (a little gold pendant with our fraternity letters on it) or pinned (a pin with our fraternity crest) to a girlfriend, the pledges would kidnap us and tie us naked to the big anchor in front of the Delta Gamma sorority.

I was on that anchor a few times, since I gave lavaliers to two girlfriends and also a pin to one of them. Each time I got tied up, I had to wait for my girlfriend to come and untie me.

Fortunately, this was long before everyone had a camera phone in their pocket, so I don’t think there is any photographic evidence of it.

However, another tradition we had was that pledges would kidnap the fraternity President-elect, and I was that guy for fall 1992. After I was kidnapped and made to drink silly amounts of alcohol, I ended up back in my room in the frat house in nothing but boxers.

I got up to go pee at some point and decided to take a seat because of my booze fatigue, and I was oblivious to a camera in my face as I settled onto the throne. While I was wearing nothing at that point, I ended up angled in a way that the picture was rated PG.

In 1992, I also started up a Greek life newspaper called the Greek Times, and one of the cover photos was a naked brother of mine who had just been crowned the Alpha Phi Silver Sweetheart, and a bunch of brothers stripped him down and brought him to the sorority.

I am not sure whether using this picture on the cover was the reason this was my second-to-last issue of the newspaper (it was funded by the Panhellenic Association and Interfraternity Council), but I thought it might be a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize for Photography, so I went with it.

It was a fun time while it lasted, but I’ve been happy to navigate the world with clothes on since those days.

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The swamp was framed by wood and a layer of plastic to keep the water in, and there were wood pallets to walk on, so you didn’t have to get your shoes swampy. Based on the picture I have from building it, I think the swamp must have been about 18” or so deep.

Apparently, this was before people were lawsuit-happy, because this swamp was enclosed by walls and a roof and poorly lit, so it would be really easy to lose your footing, fall into the water, and get hurt. I guess someone could even drown if they were drunk and/or bonked their head on the way down.

Anyhow, it was a fantastic party. It was a 4-way event with two fraternities and two sororities. In the case of the Swamp Water that I still have a shirt from, we did it with Alpha Phi, Kappa Alpha Theta, and Delta Tau Delta.

The band for Swamp Water in 1990 was Honor Among Thieves, which was formed that year by students at the University of Maryland. Frontman Mitch Allan was a Theta Chi at Maryland, and they often played local bars and frats at that time.

In the years after all of this, Honor Among Thieves evolved into another band called SR-71, which had a hit single, “Right Now,” which was featured in movies such as American Pie and Dude, Where’s My Car?

Mitch Allan also wrote the song “1985”, which was on an SR-71 record, and he later gave permission to Bowling for Soup to record it, and they had a massive hit with it. Allen also wrote popular songs for Kelly Clarkson, Miley Cyrus, Jason Derulo, Demi Lovato, and others.

Those parties were amazing, with the beer flowing, fun people, great music, and a backyard swamp. I miss those days.

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But that wasn’t all. In addition to lots of acts on the side stage, we were treated to an unannounced performance by Temple of the Dog! During the Pearl Jam set, Chris Cornell joined them for an absolutely kick-ass version of “Hunger Strike.”

The experience had my head spinning, and I wondered if we could do something similar, but on a much smaller scale, at the University of Maryland. Since the Lollapalooza name was so big at the time, and our fraternity went by PiKA (Pi Kappa Alpha), we went with the name PIKAPALOOZA.

The price of the Lollapalooza ticket included a donation to charity; I decided to do the same and make our event a benefit for SOME (So Others Might Eat), based in Washington, DC.

I can’t remember what we charged, but I think it was either a couple of cans of food or a few dollars to attend the whole festival. These were popular bands that had played at our fraternity house before, but this time there would be a bigger crowd in our parking lot.

There were the acts that day…

• Sean & Dave
• Black Sheep
• Faceplant
• Sorry About Your Daughter
• Avogadro’s Number
• The Unworld
• Lazy Suzan

I got a bunch of sponsors to help cover costs, and the bands donated their time for the good cause. It was an exciting event to put on shortly before I graduated.

One of the sponsors I brought on was New Edge and Beyond, run by a guy named Cosmic Dot. I have no idea what they did or how I even met him, but he was a fun character who helped make the day happen.

One of my favorite acts that day was Sorry About Your Daughter, and their badass rendition of Prince’s “Purple Rain.”

PIKAPALOOZA went off without a hitch, and we gathered plenty of canned goods to bring over to SOME. There were big crowds dancing, singing, drinking, and smiling. Overall, it was a fantastic event, and I was looking forward to other PiKAs taking over for future editions.

In the days before I graduated, I went down to the fraternity basement for something, and when I opened the door to our boiler room, I saw boxes and boxes of food we had collected to donate. Whoever was going to drive it over to SOME never did.

I didn’t have a car or driver’s license, and with the semester wrapping up, I wasn’t able to find a volunteer to drive the food into DC. After that, I got caught up with moving out, trying to get a job, and all of that, and the food just sat there unused. That part of PIKAPALOOZA sucks, but it was a good day otherwise.

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