Animal House
I hadn’t watched the movie National Lampoon’s Animal House for many years. To people of my generation and background, this 1978 movie staring John Belushi, is a classic. While the movie was supposedly written about Dartmouth, the similarity to my experiences at Cornell in 1971-1975 are quite startling. Having seen this movie so many times over the past 45 years, I know most of the gags by heart (and made sure to preview each and every one for Kim, who was quite patient with me about it), so I could spend the time looking specifically for all the similarities with my Cornell experience. The movie is set in 1962 at fictional Faber College, which is depicted by the University of Oregon in Eugene. The writers of the movie (Harold Ramis, Doug Kenney and Chris Miller) based it on their college experiences with Miller’s Dartmouth days being a key part of the backdrop.
When I got to Cornell in the fall of 1971 we were in one of those strange transitional times in American life. The hippie anti-war culture of the late 1960’s had started to fade even though we were still in Nixon’s first term of office and Watergate hadn’t yet happened. On the Cornell campus, tensions had peaked in 1969 with the take-over of the Willard Straight Student Union by black militants led by Eric Evans and Tom Jones. By my freshman year at Cornell, students were busy trying to organize to help George McGovern and his running mate Sargent Shriver win the Democratic nomination for the 1972 presidential campaign. There were still vestigial anti-war protests like the takeover of the engineering library, Carpenter Hall, by something called the Giap-Cabral Movement (Nguyen Giap being a North Vietnamese general and Amilcar Cabral being am activist from Guinea-Bissau) and we all got a taste of tear gas after having pizza for dinner in Collegetown. But for the most part, we had started the process of moving on to a more normalized American life with other priorities.
Strangely enough, that made the decade separation between the Animal House setting of 1962 and the Cornell freshman fraternity rush setting of 1972 less distinct than you might imagine. Both eras were transitional, one from bobby socks and chinos to bell-bottom jeans and love beads and the next from those jeans to plaid pants and burgundy blazers. But what hadn’t changed was the fraternity culture in these old-line, remote universities. At Cornell there had been few dormitories built since WWII. There were enough for incoming freshmen, and by senior year, most guys wanted to live with their buddies in some Collegetown apartment that gave their mothers the hebbie-jeebies, but would prepare them for their post-graduate living arrangements. That meant that sophomores and juniors needed a place to live and both the inventory of dorm rooms and proper apartments was woefully short. When people think about the Greek System, they think fraternities and sororities are all about parties. That may be true on some campuses, but at places like Cornell and Dartmouth, fraternities and sororities were about much needed communal living venues. In 1971 there were 56 fraternities on campus. Today there are 31, but that is due to a number of factors including a lot more dormitories that have been built in the intervening fifty years. Simple math would suggest that 60% of the sophomore and junior men lived in fraternities when I was at Cornell. In other words, frat living was more the norm than not and it was more out of necessity than not.
The fraternity that I pledged was called Phi Sigma Epsilon and it had originated in Kansas. I don’t know how many national fraternities there were in 1971 but there are, strangely enough, only 56 today, which would imply that most of the existing organizations had chapters at Cornell back in those days. The Cornell chapter of PhiSigEp was not exactly one of the power fraternities on campus. It had a decent house, but almost no status. It was known for having the highest GPA among fraternities on campus (not much of a fraternity badge of honor) and was perhaps ⅔ comprised of Jewish guys from the metro-NYC area. That made it very unlike the national fraternity that it was a member of, but that didn’t really enter into the equation of our existence very much. There were 17 of us from our freshman hall that pledged PhiSigEp together that year and our composition more or less mimicked the profile of the chapter overall. To us, PhiSigEp was a place to live with a bunch of like-minded guys who cared about their college experience, but not to the exclusion of their college education.
That would imply that we were not at all like Delta house in the movie, but, actually, there were many similarities. Our rush “smokers” were more like those at Delta house than those at the Omega house. We had our own version of Blutarsky and he was a physics major who wore a t-shirt with Maxwell’s Equations on the chest and hung a sign around his neck for prospective freshmen that declared that he was a deaf mute and that they should speak slowly so he could read their lips. When D-Day rides his motorcycle through the frat house, I was reminded that I did the same thing with my Triumph 650. The pledge night festivities that end in a beer fight was spot on for what we did on our “Zilch Night” even though we made everyone think they were getting left out in the wilderness somewhere with a pillowcase over their head. Meanwhile, the Omega house pledge night was an exercise in formality and solemnity involving corporal punishment in the purest of hazing traditions. That was pretty much what we were told went on in the “goat houses” of the fancy and formal fraternities, many of which could date their origins back to the early Nineteenth Century. And as for the parties and goings on at the frat house, the movie is all very familiar to me right down to the characters and gags.
Take the road trip to Emily Dickinson College to pick up unsuspecting co-eds. Wells College, an all-girls school in the 1970’s (It first admitted men in 20014), was 26 miles away in Aurora, New York, just up Cayuga Lake a short ways. It so happens that our road trips tended to be more often to SUNY Cortland, where three of us eventually found our future wives. I’m not sure any of those trips took us to see Otis Day and the Nights, but I’m sure we used some brother’s brother’s car to get there and the scenes and dialogue in the car sounded awful familiar. I seem to remember one road trip to a hockey tournament in Boston where one of the guys in the back seat blocked the shot while I was putting the change into the toll machine. We had to stop the car and search around for the money while everyone behind us was honking. You can’t buy those experiences.
It’s not the fundamental story of Animal House that I connect to, but really just the scenes and circumstances at the fraternity house. I don’t think of myself as a fraternity guy, but I spent four years as a member of good old PhiSigEp. I lived in the frat house for two school years and four summers. I was even the house manager during those summers. I ran for two offices at the fraternity and lost both times, which was probably for the best. I attribute that to having been the Steward, and no one ever likes institutional food service, right. It was either that or I just wasn’t very well-liked. That doesn’t add much to my positive thoughts about the fraternity. Nonetheless, I did get the Greek initials of PSE encrusted in silver on my Cornell class ring, which sits tarnishing in some obscure jewelry box somewhere in my office.
Ten years after graduation, PhiSigEp national was merged into Phi Sigma Kappa (are Greek fraternities related to one another?). We were all contacted and asked if we wanted to join the newly merged fraternity. I thought it was a joke, but they were quite serious. I am still friends with lots of the members of the fraternity, but the only thing about the fraternity itself that I have left is what I see on the screen in Animal House.