University Missourian. [volume] (Columbia, Mo.) 1908-1916, 1909-09-18

Were you ever Hamburgered by
real, live college fraternity? I mean,
were you ever initiated into full brother
hood by Greek-letter society with the
aid of baseball bat, sausage making
machine, a stick of dynamite and corn
shelter? What's that? You say you be-
long to the Up-to-Date Woodchoppers
and have taken the josh degree in the
Noble Order of Prong g-Horned Wapiti?
Forget it. Those aren't limitations.
They are rest cures. l went into one of
those societies which give horse-play in
itiations for middle aged daredevils last
year and was bored to death because l
forgot to bring my knitting. They are
bad enough for fat business men who
never do anything more exciting than to
fall over the lawn mower in the cellar
once year; but compared with a gen.
uine, eighteen-donkey- power college frat
initiation with Spanish Inquisition at
tachment, the little degree teams, made
up of grandfather, feel like a slap on
the wrist delivered by a young lady in
frail health.
Mind you, I'm not talking about the
baby ribbon affairs that the college boys
use nowadays. 1t doesn't seem to be the
fashion to grease the landscape with
freshmen any more. limitations are get
ting to be as safe and sane as an ice
cream festival in village church. When
frat wants to submit neophyte to
trying ordeal it sends him out on the
| campus to climb tree, or makes him go
to a dance in evening clothes with red
necktie on. A boy who can roll a pea
nut half mile with a tooth-pick, or
can fish all morning in a pail of water
in front of the college chapel without
getting mad and trying to thrash any
one is considered to be lion-hearted
enough to ornament any frat. These are
mollycoddle times in all departments.
Pm glad Pm out of college and am
catching street cars in the rush hours.
That is about the only job left that feels
like the good old times in college when
muscles were made to jar some one else
with.
Eight or ten years ago, when col
lege fraternity absorbed freshman, the
| job was worth talking about. There
was no halfway business about it. The
freshman could tell at any stage of the
game that something was being done to
him. They just ate him alive, that was
all. Why, at Siwash, where 1 was lap
welded into the Eta Bita Pies, any fra
ternity which initiated a candidate and
left enough of him to appear in chapel
the next morning was the joke of the
school. Even the girls fraternities gave
it the laugh. The girls used to do a
little quiet initiating themselves, and
when they received a sister into men,
bership you could generally follow her
mad career over the town by trail of
hairpins. rats" and little fragments of
dressgoods.
Those were the days when the pledg-
ling of a good high pressure frat wrote
to his mother the night before he was
taken in and telegraphed her when he
found himself alive in the morning
There used to be considerable rivalry
between the frats at Siwash in the mat
ter of giving a freshman a good, hos
pitable time. I remember when the
Sigh Whoopsilons hung young Allen
from the girder of an overhead railroad
crossing, and let the switch engines
smoke him up for two hours as they
passed underneath, there was a good
deal of jealousy among the rest of us
who hadn't thought of it. The Alfalfa
Delts went them one better by tying
roller skates to the shoulders and hips
of a big freshman football star anc
hauling him through the main streets Of
.Jonesville on his back, behind an auto
; mobile several miles above the speed
limit, and the Chi Yi's covered can
didate with plaster of Paris, with blow
! holes for his nose, sculptured him artis
, tically, and left him before the college
r chapel on a pedestal all night. Th'
Delta Kappa Sonofaguns set fire to thei
: house once by shooting Roman candle
2 at row of neophytes in the cellar
and we had to turn out at one a. m
one winter morning to help the Delt'
Flushes dig freshman out of thei
chimney. They had been trying to lie
him down into the fireplace, and whel
. he got stuck they had poked at him wit
= clothes pole until they had musse
him up considerably. This just show
>, you what gay life the young schola
led in the days when every ritual ha
claws on, and there was no such thin
-. as soothing syrup in the equipment Q
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