We ended up with a fairly large class of pledges, fifteen in alclass="underline"
Bruno Cowling — a civil engineer in ROTC. He was from Maine and talked funny, like everybody else from Maine. Ay-yuh!
Joe Bradley — a math major like myself, in ROTC. More about him later.
Leo Coglan — an aeronautic engineer in Navy ROTC. Leo had several misfortunes. For one thing he actually took a black girl out on a date (quite unusual in 1974, when it happened) and got all sorts of shit over that (“Once you go black, you never go back!” and “You’re not a man until you’ve split a black oak!”) Also, during the final stage of pledgehood, during Hell Week, we were renamed Neos, for Neophytes, and Leo became known forever afterwards as Leo the Neo.
Tony Defrancisco — an electrical engineer. Tony was 6’3" tall, 325 pounds, shaped like a pear, and had a pockmarked face. He was probably the ugliest human being on the planet. Dumbest, too. It took him six years to graduate. Nicknamed ‘The Cisco Kid.’
Joe Brown — a cocky and arrogant pre-med biology major. Got caught cheating in organic chem lab when synthesizing caffeine, after he ground up some No-Doz and submitted it. Still graduated and actually went to medical school — in Guadalajara!
Bill Pabst — electrical engineer, nicknamed ‘Pigpen’ after his room condition.
Bill Schlitz — electrical engineer. Pabst and Schlitz became best friends and roomed together. Every Christmas during gag gift giving, Schlitz would get a bottle of Pabst beer and Pabst would get a bottle of Schlitz beer.
Jack Dawson — mechanical engineer. Had an expensive stereo system and held himself out to be an expert on all things audio, even though he was deaf in his left ear.
Barry Lewis — chemistry major. Turned out to be a major league asshole, but he was quiet and we all just ignored him when he was being a dork.
Homer Simpson — yes, that was his name, but this was long before the show ever got on TV. Homer was a computer science major. He was also a concert pianist. He had turned down a full scholarship to Juilliard to accept a full scholarship to RPI. As soon as he joined the frat, the brothers went out and bought an upright piano for the house, and he played all sorts of stuff for us. He had a photographic memory for music.
Andy Kowalchuk — civil engineer and doper supreme. Flunked out at the end of sophomore year because he was always stoned and never went to class.
Bill Keswick — chemistry major. Definite doper, he actually ran a hash oil still sophomore and junior years. Made some really amazing stuff! You would see colors unknown after smoking pot laced with his hash oil.
Jerry Modanowicz — electrical engineer and the only guy ever kicked out of the frat that I ever heard of. Pretty much a hose job.
Harry Haroldson — civil engineer, Air Force ROTC. Eminently forgettable. Total zero.
Yours truly!
All in all it was an eclectic group. One major change was in the ROTC makeup. For a number of years, Kegs had been a ROTC house, and roughly two-thirds of the brothers were in ROTC. By 1973 it was obvious the Viet Nam War was over and nobody needed to hide at college from their draft boards. My pledge class was only one-third ROTC, and we were the last to join for a long time. It was very disconcerting to some of the upperclassmen.
We were also assigned our Big Brothers, a mentor among the upper classmen who was assigned to ease us into the frat. Mine was Marty Adrianopolis. I think he volunteered to be my big brother, since he had effectively left home like I had. His parents were divorced, his father was long out of the picture, and his mother had remarried a few years ago to an asshole Marty couldn’t stand. He knew some of what I was going through. He never went home either.
The semester ended with a final round of F-Tests for my fellow pledges, and finals for everyone, and then most people went home for a few weeks. I ended up sleeping at Kegs in my sleeping bag on a couch, since the dorms and dining hall were completely shut down. I didn’t bother driving back home. They mailed me presents and I returned the favor. Four guys stayed there with me, and I acted as cook. For Christmas I did a ham with horseradish and mustard glaze, mashed potatoes, asparagus with Hollandaise sauce, rolls, and brownies for dessert. It was suggested that next year I try to get in the Sunday rotation for cooking. We had a house mother cook for us Monday through Saturday, at least for lunch and dinner, but Sundays we had to fend for ourselves. Cooks got paid ten bucks, and rotated among three or four guys who knew what they were doing in the kitchen. One of them was Ricky Holloway, he of the dope smoking hall of fame.
I also went over to the school infirmary and got the name of an optometrist. I knew this was going to happen. I started needing glasses by the end of fall semester, both this time and the last time. Before, I had mentioned it to my mother, and I had gotten the glasses back home. Now that wasn’t an option. Further, once I started at RPI, my dad had cut me out of his medical insurance and told me to get the student policy through the college. I was going to have to pay for my glasses out of pocket. I bought three pair, wire rimmed clear, aviators’ frame sunglasses very dark, and a pair of birth control glasses for the Army. These are hideously ugly black plastic framed glasses that are totally indestructible, but so catastrophically ugly that no soldier who wears them will ever have a chance of actually meeting with and talking to a girl.
School restarted in January, sort of. They had a four week mini-semester called January Term, or simply J-Term. You could take a single course for credit, if offered, at a high intensity. A lot of freshman had to take calculus or physics or chemistry if they had flunked it first semester. Otherwise there were some interesting one-off courses you could take, without credit. I once took a class on urban planning, where we actually worked with real politicians and urban planners from Albany. It was actually pretty interesting, and gave me an early appreciation of politics.
This time was different. The military science department (ROTC) was offering a J-Term class on Tactics. They were playing a board game called Panzer Leader, which simulated armor tactics on the western front in WW2. I actually had once owned this game and it was very good. Yeah, I know, board games, the ultimate nerd diversion. Hey, I was a nerd, sue me!
(By the way, the official spelling of nerd at RPI is ‘knurd’, which is ‘drunk’ spelled backwards. Only at a nerd school do you have an official spelling of nerd.)
This was all done before computer games became possible. Boards, physical maps, were carved up into square, hexagonal, or octagonal spaces, and small cardboard counters representing units would be moved around on them. Panzer Leader used a hexagonal grid, and the counters represented various tank, infantry, and artillery units found in the war. A given tank counter might represent a company of American Shermans or German Panthers, and so on. There were elaborate rules about what each unit could do, how fast they could move around the board, and what they could shoot at.
What they did differently was that they had bought a shitload of the games, nine of them. There were three boards to a game and they could be linked in any number of ways. They combined all the parts and boards of three games and set them up in three separate rooms in an identical fashion, one for the Allies, one for the Germans, and one for the umpires, who would be the teachers. Half the students would play the Allies and half would play the Germans, and each team would only see their board, plus what the umpires would show them of the other side’s moves. The umpire’s room would have everything. Each team would move in succession and their move would be duplicated in the umpire’s room. The umpires would then modify the appropriate boards, if necessary in the adversary.