Gamma Phi Beta turns 100
A century of change at sorority and in the larger Greek world
Unlike their neatly gloved and Marcel-waved sisters of the 1920s, the more than 300 Gamma Phi Beta alumnae from seventeen states who gathered in Eugene earlier this year to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first sorority at the University of Oregon did not disembark from canoes on the Millrace to take tea on the chapter house’s lawn. Reunion attendees, who spanned eight decades of sorority membership, gathered for open houses, winery tours, and the elegant Pink Carnation Banquet, where UO President Dave Frohnmeyer saluted them. The evening’s entertainment included a slide show of images from the past 100 years, skits, and shared memories.
Gamma Phi Beta, founded nationally in 1874, is currently riding a wave of renewed interest in Greek organizations. Sororities and fraternities peaked in popularity in the early 1900s, with around 400,000 members, but they were subsequently affected by young men leaving to fight in two world wars. In the 1950s, Greeks enjoyed their greatest postwar popularity. Local Gamma Phi reunion coordinator Ann (Henderson) Kershner ’59 acknowledges that, along with the many benefits of sorority life, “snob appeal” motivated many women to pledge in her era.
Increased housing options and broadening social attitudes—seen in the civil rights and antiwar movements—helped make the 1960s a low point for Greek membership. Since then, membership has for the most part been on the upswing. The blockbuster 1978 movie Animal House, filmed in some of the UO’s own Greek houses, helped fuel a hard-partying image of fraternities and sororities in the 1980s and 1990s. Parental concerns over hazing and binge drinking led to a 25 percent drop in fraternity membership in the 1990s. Increased oversight by national Greek organizations helped address this problem and, by 2000, membership had risen back to about 350,000.
Sororities originated in the late 1860s as academic support groups and safe places to live for women scholars, who were vastly outnumbered by male classmates. University administrators have long valued both sororities and fraternities for their positive effect on student retention rates. More recently, Greek organizations have touted the benefits of academic support, community service opportunities, and professional networking for the futures of their pledges—initiatives that harken back to the origins of American sororities. Gamma Phi house director (the new term for “house mother”) Marcia Furtney is proud of the way sometimes awkward pledges are transformed by sorority participation into poised, confident young women suited for exciting careers.
To support the progressive efforts of individual houses at the UO, in 2005 Greek Life, the on-campus office that governs the activities of fraternities and sororities, began aggressively promoting the advantages of Greek living to incoming freshmen. Consequently, fall 2005 “recruitment” (the new-millennium term for “rush”) saw 25 percent more students sign up. House director Furtney partially credits changes in recruitment tactics with Gamma Phi’s increased numbers. In the past, women had spent endless hours creating elaborate one-night performances designed to dazzle potential members. Now, less-stressed “actives” converse with recruits one-on-one. Getting better acquainted with one’s future housemates leads to better matches and, eventually, to higher rates of retention.
Gamma Phis believe they have a special advantage in recruiting because of the chapter’s Tudor-style house on the Millrace at Hilyard Street. The building—the sorority’s third campus home—was completed in 1926 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. Ann Kersh-ner exemplifies the personal attachment Gamma Phis have to the house itself—her parents’ wedding in August 1926 was the first to be held in the now eighty-two-year-old building. Heather Schrag remembers wondering what it would be like to live in the “gorgeous house” even before she visited it for the first time during rush. “I knew I loved it already, and I hoped the women inside it would impress me as well.”
In 1959, a three-story addition expand-ed the house without disturbing the classic lines of the Tudor façade. Since then, alumnae have funded repairs and upgrades ranging from the structural (hydraulically lifting the massive building to shore up the foundation), to the merely decorative—wallpaper has been hung, ripped down, hung again, steamed off, and painted over. Changing tastes led to some intergenerational disagreements regarding upholstery, drapery, and rug choices, but mutual love of the house and the sisters who have lived there always overshadowed decorating trends and, ultimately, brought hundreds of them “home” in 2008 to celebrate those sentiments.
— Kathleen O’Fallon, M.A. ’84, Ph.D. ’88
photo courtesy Gamma Phi Beta
Students James Raley '31 and Carvel Nelson '30 wrote and directed Ed’s Coed, a parody of campus life at the time. Legendary director Cecil B. DeMille lent Raley and Nelson a movie camera and a cinematographer, Frank McBride, to complete their silent film. They wrapped filming on June 30, 1929, and held the movie’s premiere at the McDonald Theater in downtown Eugene the following November, during homecoming weekend.
While the student high jinks in Ed's Coed do not achieve the levels of hilarity and creative gross-out on display in that infamous UO-set film Animal House, Raley and Nelson’s black-and-white “snapshot” pokes good-natured fun at sororities, fraternities, and academic life in general. The film’s villain, Ed’s ne’er-do-well cousin Les, is a snob who borrows money from Ed to pay his debts, then enlists the help of Joanne and his frat brothers in playing elaborate pranks on the gullible Ed. When students are not tormenting unsuspecting freshmen, they seem to be riding horseback—a good opportunity for the women to look chic in jodhpurs—or canoeing down the Millrace.
Hollywood writer and producer Bryce Zabel '76 views the behind-the-scenes story of making Ed's Coed as having such "great heart" that he and his wife Jackie have turned it into a screenplay for a “very hip” independent comedy called Let’s Do It. (The Zabels cowrote the Hallmark Channel miniseries Pandemic, for which they won a 2008 Writers Guild of America award.)
Zabel hopes to make Let's Do It his feature directorial debut. His production company has not yet scouted on-campus locations, so the Gamma Phi Beta women may want to issue an invitation, perhaps by waving their great-grandmothers’ hankies from the tower windows.
The guru of gruesome
Novelist Chuck Palahniuk provokes strong reactions from readers.
It’s hard to remain ambivalent about Chuck Palahniuk ’86. Described by his fans as a postmillennial Jonathan Swift and by his critics as a one-trick pony churning out the same vulgar observations, the man who made an art form out of offense doesn't seem to understand what all the controversy is about: "Where’s the rule that says Oliver Twist can’t sit on the toilet like the rest of us?" he asks.
Palahniuk’s path to profanity began when his first book was rejected by every publisher he contacted, on the grounds of being unfit for public consumption. His response was to write an even more provocative novel—an attempt, he says, to disturb the publisher even more for rejecting him in the first place—the result of which was Fight Club.
A tale of disaffected men who join an underground fighting club as an extreme form of therapy, it later became an acclaimed film and established his reputation as one of America's most edgy writers.
Exploring the darker side of human behavior won Palahniuk a sizable fan base as well as a significant amount of criticism, most of which contends that he is little more than a gross-out artist par excellence, writing each book to the same formula.
Palahniuk says he doesn’t listen to his critics, but surprisingly seems to concede that his novels frequently cover similar ground.
"Variation is such a two-edged sword," he says. "Most readers want more of what they already enjoy. The balance is to keep them happy while offering something different. All of Dickens sounds much the same. When did we get the idea that a writer has to reinvent everything with every book?"
This question is not likely to be settled with his recent efforts.
Rant, published in 2007, is yet another glimpse into the depths of Palahniuk’s twisted imagination. The novelistic answer to documentary film, the book takes the form of an "oral biography" of the now-deceased Buster "Rant" Casey, wherein more than 100 onlookers—friends, family, and enemies—gather to share their recollections of his life. It’s an often contradictory assemblage that, he says, "arrives in tidy, bite-sized chunks you can eat compulsively."
It doesn’t take long, however, to discover that this is no standard-issue eulogy. Set against the backdrop of the near future—or perhaps a reimagined present—the tale follows a restless Buster Casey growing up in a stiflingly banal U.S. town called Middleton, a place that is "four solid days of driving" away from anywhere.
The pressure to "fill up the 100 years of every boring day" sees him embrace antisocial behavior and masochism as a means of staving off boredom.
The destructive impulse can’t be satiated by ordinary teenage flirtations with vandalism, however, and Buster soon intentionally contracts rabies and begins acting as "America’s walking, talking Biological Weapon of Mass Destruction," doing his best to inflict the disease on his sexual partners and, eventually, the entire country.
Having successfully thrown his hometown into chaos, "Rant" (his onomatopoeic nickname comes from the sound his convulsing victims make at the height of their infections) soon moves to a big city where he joins an obscure group of "party crashers," whose members get their kicks by staging and participating in very real car crashes twice a week, often for the benefit of confused onlookers.
Rant is a deeply complex and often cheerfully depraved affair. Its follow-up, Snuff (2008), offers more of the author’s trademark quirkiness. The book is structured around an aging porn star’s quest to break the record for serial sex acts. (Palahniuk's fans have come to expect extremes from a writer whose graphic imagination was responsible for "Guts," an eye-wateringly unpleasant short story credited by the author with causing scores of audience members to faint at readings.)
Palahniuk, though, rejects the idea that his works are merely expressions of an adolescent desire to provoke and disgust.
“The sad truth is, I invent very little. I have been party crashing four times, twice in Portland and twice in San Francisco. My degree is in journalism, and my tendency is to collect true anecdotes and experiences and quilt them together to illustrate larger themes.”
Nowhere are his themes more vividly expressed than in Rant. Palahniuk’s books are explorations of the sense of alienation—particularly for adolescent males—created by an inauthentic society; odes to antisocial mavericks who often band together in violent ways to display their rejection of mainstream morality.
It's a macabre exploration of human behavior that others would prefer remained unexamined, but that, says Palahniuk, who is often mistaken for an angry nihilist, doesn’t mean that his novels don't carry a moral message. "If you don’t value what others value, they insist you value nothing," he says. "If I don’t love exactly what you love, that doesn’t mean I love nothing. I’m actually a hopeless romantic and all my books are romances."
A peculiar brand of romance, to be sure, but one that seems to resonate with his readership—particularly on the Internet, where his aptly named official website "The Cult" (www.chuckpalahniuk.net) averages more than 300,000 hits a day.
A story about love, rabies, sex, violence, and everything in-between, Rant is a typically noxious and sometimes beautifully bleak Palahniuk novel. Many readers will be repulsed by its flagrant embrace of the perverse, but that alone, he says, should not obscure its underlying value: “Much of my work takes a profane path to arrive at what I hope is a profound place. I try to engage the reader on a gut level. Most books engage your mind. Some engage your heart. But I want it all; your mind and heart and stomach. My characters go to the bathroom, fight, get sick, take drugs, have sex, but they go on to do so much more. Don’t we all?”
— James Robertson
A Brass Anniversary
If twenty-five is silver and fifty is gold, one hundred must be mother-of-pearl-inlaid spit valves.
Yellow chrysanthemums bloomed brightly on the chests of proud Oregon supporters that chilly November afternoon. The rooters had turned out in force for the 1908 Civil War game—more than 400 of the University of Oregon’s 526 students crowded together in raucous glee in the stands of Portland’s Multnomah Field. But the students’ exuberant presence was increased in shine and bravado by the accompanying clamor of a small group of students armed with drums and horns: the UO’s very first band.
Carey V. Loosely, Oregon’s student yellmaster, surveyed the packed stands with pride. The Oregon gridders didn’t get a chance to settle the score with that team from Corvallis (known then as Oregon Agricultural College) every day—and for the past two years, the UO had come up short. Today, though, as the leather-helmeted teams scrapped on the wet, heavy sawdust of the field, 10,000 spectators were treated to selections from the book of chants and lyrics the Oregon students fondly called “Loosely’s hymn book.” A special contest, offering cash prizes for the best new school songs and cheers, had been promoted for weeks by the campus newspaper, the Oregon Weekly. One writer even went so far as to suggest that “anyone who can write Spencerian verse in English literature class ought to be able to write a yell.”
Armed with new rooting material and with a lucky rabbit’s foot tucked into his vest pocket, Loosely thought the Oregon students just might be able to cheer their beloved team on to victory. But the bright din of the musicians was his ace in the hole—a band of their own, at last.
In September, amid back-to-school notices and ads for $18.50 tuxedos, the Weekly had announced, “A band has long been needed, and every year an attempt has been made to establish one. This year, the demand is stronger than ever, and those interested are confident of success.” The University was home to excellent musicians and sponsored a well-loved Glee Club for singers and a Mandolin Club for the UO’s finger-picking enthusiasts. A brass band, like those gaining prominence at universities to the east, would not only encourage the wind players on campus, but would surely raise the already-formidable Oregon spirit to an even higher pitch (and greater volume) at rallies and games.
At the inaugural meeting, “more than a score of men signed the list pledging themselves to play in the new band,” the Weekly happily reported. Cornets, trombones, one flute, two drums, and a collection of other horns and reed instruments made up the infant ensemble.
Luckily, a student trombonist from Monmouth named Burns Powell had two years at the helm of the Monmouth Cadet Band under his belt. Powell’s experience leading bands and orchestras, along with his noted prowess on his own instrument, made him the natural choice for bandmaster despite his lowly status as a freshman.
Powell and his “Boola Band” (named in homage to the famous Yale fight song) had only two weeks to prepare their repertoire for the first football game of the season. “Mighty Oregon” wasn’t present in the stack of sheet music they rehearsed—the theme song to all Oregon athletics wouldn’t be composed until 1916. Instead, selections from John Philip Sousa’s arsenal of inspirational marches, such as “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Liberty Bell” (more fondly known by modern ears as the theme to Monty Python’s Flying Circus), echoed across campus.
By the time the much-anticipated match against OAC was upon them, the Boola Band was ready to support the Oregon fans in high brassy style. On that November afternoon, Loosely’s planning, the band’s rehearsals, and the ardor filling the chrysanthemum-festooned chest of every Oregon fan were rewarded: the team claimed victory in the fourteenth Civil War, crushing the Corvallis squad 8-0.
From these humble beginnings, the student brass band took root in Eugene, swelled, and prospered. Today, the UO is home to seven bands, four brass ensembles, three jazz bands, two percussion groups, and numerous upstart student ensembles. This year, at Civil War number 112, a band more than eight times larger than the Boola Band will blast “Mighty O” with pride and ridiculous frequency. While swoosh-emblazoned uniforms and the chorus of “Louie Louie” may bear little resemblance to their 1908 counterparts, if you listen closely, even 100 years later you can still hear the legacy of twenty-some scrappy students who decided to form a band to play Old Oregon on to victory.
—Mindy Moreland
UO Libraries Special Collections and University Archives
The Boys of Summer University of Oregon baseball players, probably taken between 1908 and 1913
A Sporting Year
More than just changing the soundtrack to Oregon sports, 1908 was a banner year for athletics on numerous fronts. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” made its debut, and Oregon added baseball to its official sports roster for the first time. That summer, the length of the modern marathon was accidentally established at the Olympic Games in London after the Princess of Wales requested a slight addition to the twenty-five-mile course so that her children could watch the start of the race from the lawn of Windsor Castle. Track Town legend Bill Hayward was in attendance at the Games, cheering on former Oregon track star Dan J. Kelly to a silver medal in the long jump.
-MM
DUCK TALES
A Ken Kesey Legacy
For many years, my old friend “Tiger of the Alps” and I planned to climb Mount Pisgah, the small mountain near Eugene where the Coast and Middle forks of the Willamette River meet. Tiger makes that climb at least once a week, year-round, and he always wears a lanyard with a picture of his son, Torry, lost many years ago in a bout with cancer. Last summer, with my wife and a group of old friends, I finally joined Tiger on that trek.
It was one of those beautiful August days in Oregon. My bad knee, a recurring memory of high school football, was acting up, so I let the others go ahead. I paused often, leaning on my hiking poles to eat wild blackberries, crushing them against the roof of my mouth as I always had as a boy. The oak trees were draped with silver moss. Even the poison oak looked beautiful, bright red and gold, winding through the lichens on the tree trunks.
I had never seen the monument that Ken Kesey had commissioned sculptor Pete Helzer, M.S. ’77, M.F.A. ’83, to build on Mount Pisgah’s summit in memory of his youngest son, Jed. In the winter of 1984, a van carrying the UO wrestling team crashed while traveling to a match at Washington State University. Jed and fellow wrestler Lorenzo West died in the crash.
I got to know Ken and became his friend in the early 1960s at Stanford, where he was a postgraduate fellow in creative writing and I had a fellowship in international relations, studying the causes of war. Both of us were from the Eugene area. Our families knew each other and our fathers were friendly competitors in the ice cream and dairy products business.
I was several years younger than Ken. I had seen him perform as a ventriloquist and as a magician when I was a kid, but was most impressed when I later witnessed the quickness, guile, determination, and guts he displayed as a Pacific Coast Conference champion 177-pound wrestler at the UO.
When we became acquainted at Stanford, he was working on a new novel, after the successful publication of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Periodically over two years, until I left graduate school to enter Army basic infantry training in 1962, I visited Ken and went to picnics and parties on Perry Lane, where he lived with his wife, Faye. This was before the Bus and the book that made him a legend, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
My most memorable afternoon with Ken was when he handed me a pile of yellow typed pages and asked for comments. It was a draft of the beginning of Sometimes a Great Notion, a story about a determined logging family in Oregon, struggling to succeed. I have always viewed those discussions as my one significant brush with American literary history. We discussed the requirements for a “great American novel,” with Huckleberry Finn and especially Moby-Dick as examples.
Now I was climbing up the east slope of Mount Pisgah, not far from the Kesey farm near Pleasant Hill. I wanted to see the memorial. I knew how devastated Ken had been by the loss of his son. Our hope to have sons someday was one of the things we had discussed in our conversations as young men on Perry Lane.
As I walked along, I also thought about how many times Ken must have walked up this hill, telling stories about animals and trees to his kids, and later his grandkids. I thought about Jed—taken away in that crashing moment on a mountain. Could I have withstood the loss of one of my children? I hadn’t seen Ken for many years, but why hadn’t I sent the letter I wrote to him and Faye after the accident? It seemed so inadequate. I felt so sorry, and so lucky. How could you abide the loss of a son?
My wife and my friends walked ahead of me. From time to time I paused to look down in the valley, back at the Kesey farm. From our past discussions, I figured Ken would have a message on the monument, even if it were in the form of a mystery to be unraveled. Ken believed in the power of mysteries.
We got to the top. The monument looked like a bronze tree stump. It had vertical slots on the side, not horizontal grooves like the ones cut by loggers so they could insert planking to stand on while felling huge spruce and fir trees with crosscut saws. The bronze sides of the stump featured reliefs forming fossils of ancient mollusks and crustaceans, leaves, and ferns, correlated to time periods 10 million to 200 million years ago. Notes gave the longitude and latitude. But there was no name, no mention of Jed.
On top was a relief map of the Willamette Valley, the Promised Land, showing the river, the cities of Eugene and Springfield. The volcanic Cascades were to the east. The Coast Range Ken wrote about, whose timber had supplied much of the lumber to build homes throughout America, was to the west. To the south, I could locate on the bronze relief the cemetery hill below Spencer Butte where my parents and grandparents were buried.
But I believed there was more. Tiger helped me as I dropped down to the ground where I could look through the vertical slots, which I concluded were for catching the sunlight of the winter and summer solstices.
My solstice theory will have to be tested another time, but through the slot I could see, more than a mile away, the house, barn, and fields of the Kesey farm, the farm where Jed was buried—and now Ken, too. Here was the connection I was looking for in the memorial to Jed. Around us were the Oregon mountains, below the valley, the river, and the land. Here from Mount Pisgah was the great sweep of the Oregon story, and the heart of what Ken considered his greatest novel, Sometimes a Great Notion.
John Gustafson, a member of Friars, the university honorary society, edited the Oregon Daily Emerald editorial page in 1959. He retired from public service in 2005 after receiving the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s highest honor, the EPA Distinguished Career Service Award. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area.
