Wood's Words: The Brotherhood
Jim F. Wood ‘64
The stairs leading to the third floor are narrow and rise steeply in a way that prevents people from passing each other; the only other egress from this floor is the external iron staircase that descends to the driveway on the south side of the house. In this unheated attic thirty young men sleep in two rows of bunk beds. The floor is thick with extension cords as each man’s bunk needed to power an electric blanket and many had an alarm clock taped to the headboard. In the darkness you could hear a strange music; the wind bending old oaks in the yard, time ticking, deep and harmonic breathing rhythms of sleep, an occasional murmur about love lost or won and the ping of springs supporting a thin mattress whenever someone changed position. Alarms begin sounding at 6 am when the House Manager would rise in darkness to be sure fresh eggs, milk and produce had been delivered; at 7 am came those with 8 o’clock classes, and eventually the last few who were able to grab an extra hour’s sleep. The Buddy Board at the top of the stairs, dimly lit under a red bulb, somewhat assured that each departure from the attic included a quick scan of the other sleepers to be sure no one had extinguished his alarm, gone back to sleep and would miss an important lecture or exam.
The routine was the same for each man: a mad rush to the narrow stairs that led to the second floor bathroom and… to heat! Even men who trod silently announced their presence at the top stair tread, which creaked loudly when subjected to weight. By 7:30 am, the bathroom resembled a steam room- and in winter there would be a thick layer of ice on the window. In that morning warmth was a mixture of aftershave, toothpaste, and the wafting of fried eggs, toast and fresh-brewed coffee from the floor below. The front door opened and slammed shut as a wave of 8 o’clock classes left. The house was alive.
With the exception of one room, all the men slept in the attic but studied, dressed and socialized together in seven rooms on the second floor. In these rooms were second-hand desks, third-hand couches, pictures of family and girl friends, text books, “men’s” magazines, clothes, skates, lacrosse sticks, baseball mitts and wall hangings- a modest number borrowed from local bars. Inevitably, the wall hangings in each room included elaborate hand-made paddles created by each roommate’s Little Brother, and the organization’s current composite photograph. One room had window access to a balcony that faced the main street: really nice in spring and fall. Another room had a cozy reading nook thanks to the copula design of the Victorian tower on that side of the ancient house. From the copula window you could view the public phone across the street. Hours were spent calling that phone as unsuspecting passersby stopped, answered the ring and reacted to the strange requests- like free the caller from the basement of Snell Hall.
On the first floor was the formal living room, with deep couches and reading chairs and a fireplace, where membership meetings were held each Tuesday night behind thick curtains pulled tight against outside eyes seeking the room’s important secrets, a common dining area consisting of four long tables with small red slotted containers on top and fifty folding chairs, the kitchen, which was the domain of the cook and mother-awayfrom-home, affectionately known as “Ma”, a powder room used by women guests, and Dave’s Room dedicated to past intramural victories, national awards and honoring alumni members or friends who merited special remembrance. In the entrance hall was the brass bell used to announce meetings and the presence of women in the house. The bell could be heard on the third floor, but, more importantly on the second floor where young men expressing opinions in rather direct language on unfair hour exams, or a recent breakup, or an intramural hockey game would quickly adjust their verbal attitude out of respect for the unseen visitor. It also saved many from an embarrassing moment, warning young men hell bent down the front stairs in less than full dress- determined to check mail or make a sandwich- to reverse course and add a missing garment or two. In the basement was the bar, and above it an intricately woven paper mach⎡ ceiling in the organization’s colors done by the current pledge class, and attached to heating pipe insulation with staples as every class had done for the past fifty years.
It was the bitter winter of 1979, and I found myself on campus in February doing college recruiting. Two days of full schedules meant I would talk with 16-18 seniors about their career aspirations, and the positions available in my company. Interviews were conducted in a series of adjacent, usually windowless, rooms located in a remote section of Snell Hall, above and behind the stage, adjacent to the heating plant. Students would sit in the drab, long sparsely lit hall outside the interview rooms and when you opened the door ten or twenty faces looked up, tried to smile- and waited for you to call a name. Even having read their resumes the night before, I learned a lot just chatting about their favorite classes, campus activities, why they had selected Clarkson and their parents. Clarkson long has been a unique home to a middle class student body that turns an educational experience into something of extraordinary value. Thirty percent of Clarkson graduates are business owners or senior executives. Many of the students I have interviewed are the first in their family to attend college. In their young faces, and their sometimes-uncertain voices, I saw people like me years earlier, looking forward to graduation, starting a career, enthusiastic, worried… and naïve. Rarely would I acknowledge my own prior campus affiliations during an interview. But sometimes, when an interview was over and the door was not yet open, and if it seemed right, I’d offer the gesture that every member understood: the secret handshake!
It was a week before Ice Carnival, and all Greek organizations were in the midst of building ice statutes. Interviews finished at about 5:30 pm and it took me an hour to complete paperwork: would it be an invitation to visit, or a rejection letter. I had had my share of both and knew well the wall in the house where the recipient would tack either with an impertinent comment quickly scrawled on the letter in his own handwriting. After dinner, it seemed appropriate to walk past the house and see what the theme of the statute was this year. At 8:00 pm, there were six young men outside with buckets of slush, broom handles, and a mechanical drawing of a mechanism the senior MEs had designed that would cause one feature of the statute to move. Spotlights were strewn all over the snow-covered yard and inside the partially build statute causing it to glow aqua and the shadows of workers inside to appear ghostly. I imagined they all were working the evening shift- to be followed by another five or six who would work until 2-3 am. This routine would continue until an hour before the judges began their rounds of the statutes.
It was cold. Not just cold- but really, really cold. The kind of cold that makes breathing an activity best done inside your coat. The kind of cold that makes the snow squeak when you walk. The kind of cold that seeps up your shoes enters your legs and bones through your soles and chills you silently. As I walked up to the statute, two of the workers turned, smiled, put down the steam irons they were using to smooth ice surfaces and sculpt details of faces and came over to say hello. We introduced ourselves with names, class years and… the handshake. Almost generation older than they, but the handshake felt good. As we talked, we walked over to the statute, stopped at a slush bucket by the porch, where I reached down and grabbed the bottle of schnapps. It was thick and syrupy- as I remembered it might be. The two young men stood- their mouths agape eyes wide open. How did I know the bottle was there? Well, that’s where it has always been. We talked for a while and shared a bit of the syrup. They asked if I was coming to reunion next July. I didn’t know. They pressed hard: the house looks great, going to paint it this spring; great pledge class, keg on tap, you gotta come. But, the cold had beaten me. So, I promised I’d come back in July, maybe just to be able to leave graciously and get back to the Inn and warm up.
Now it was July as I climbed the steep stairway, the top tread creaking at my weight. The attic was hot and musty- and quiet. Members who would return in the fall had shoved stacks of books, clothes and other personal effects into attic corners. In my day, the only room where men both slept and studied was on the third floor, adjacent to the open attic. It was a two-man room with beds on either side of a brick chimney, a desk at the end of each bed and a window overlooking the backyard behind each headboard. By 1979, this room had been renamed the “hump room”, not for any carnal prowess possessed by its residents, but because the entrance to the room included a step up-step down arrangement needed to scale an eighteen inch support beam that spanned the width of the entrance. These steps were particularly interesting to negotiate after a late party.
I made my way over the hump, sat at a desk, pulled out the writing slab over the top drawer, turned it over and read “JW ’64” inked in the middle. Next to this were 5 or 6 other initials and years representing men who had bunked in that room over time. I walked over to the bed and sat looking at the back yard 30 feet below. I opened the window and let in a rush of cooler air filled with summer sounds and smells. It was a green lawn now, but I could see in my mind the bare lights strung overhead from the back porch to the rear fence rail, the plank sideboards and the two inches of ice covering 1000 sq ft and representing our backyard hockey rink where we would play broom ball and skate after dinner. And where many neighborhood kids came to skate in safety and listen in amazement to the young men who lived in the house regale them with stories like Gump Worsley leaving in the middle of the second period to get his eyebrow sewed up, then returning to win the Ranger game with an amazing kick save in the third period.
I lay back on the mattress remembering my roommates: Joe, who built the room and who had invited me to room with him; Doug, who asked to room with me because I had legacy rights to the room after Joe graduated. Joe was a chemistry major from New Jersey who dressed in a jacket and tie each time he took an hour exam. A genuine and honest man, Joe surprised me when he asked me to be his Little Brother and I retain the scar in my left palm where the chisel entered as I tried to scoop out a chunk of hard mahogany while making his paddle. He was a handsome guy with a great smile who reminded me of Frankie Valle. Doug was a bright civil engineering major from Buffalo who roomed with me our senior year. He took snoring to a new level. It mattered not whether he slept on his back or side; when the snoring started, even the giant timber at the entrance would vibrate. This problem eventually was solved when I removed my lacrosse stick from the closet and kept it next to my bed. In the days before Brine and Warrior, all sticks were entirely made of seasoned ash by an Indian tribe that lived on a reservation near Montreal. A good whack on Doug’s chest or rump usually would encourage him to cease snoring: Even better if a clump of dirt remained from that day’s practice. Eventually all that was required was to move the stick against the chimney bricks or my headboard; subconsciously he knew what was coming and rolled over.
That there were fifty seats in the common dining area was an accommodation to the members who did not live in the house, but wanted to eat lunch and dinner there. Ma arrived every day about 10 am and began preparing lunch, which was served promptly at noon. Often guests would join us, including professors, members of other organizations and sophomores whom we were rushing. It was first come for seating, except for the master at each table whose job it was to pass out fines to anyone overstepping the general etiquette of our day. This usually involved language and by today’s standards would be considered quite strict. The better linguists tried innuendo and timing to the great delight of everyone when the table master failed to pick up on the joke. A favorite phrase was one man asking another to “please pass the salt peter”. If the questionee was not named Peter, this generally cost the questioner a nickel and he would be required to put a nickel in the aforementioned red container nearest his seat, or write his name and a five cents symbol on a milk bottle cap and deposit it in the container. Each week, the Treasurer would empty the fine cans and debit the account of each offender, for rarely were there real nickels ever placed in the containers.
Parties took place in the basement with students and dates from several campuses. The music was loud and the beer was cold: Stones, Beatles, and, of course, Dylan. Interestingly, several members of the faculty would usually stop by for a beer and if spouses accompanied them, they often enjoyed trying the twist or the fruge with the younger crowd. Women faced a curfew in those days, so after they had been escorted back to their dorms or off campus housing, men reconvened at the after party in the basement where more beer led to stories, none of which were remotely factual, which led to singing, much of which was, in fact, quite good.
There is nothing like thirty men serenading a sorority at 1 am. The residents never turned on lights, and tried hard to hide behind the curtains, but you knew they were there listening and laughing at the wild songs and strange harmonies that a combination of beer, hormones and camaraderie induces on a weekend night. It was a civilized courting and often the next morning we would find a box of candy or home made cookies on the fireplace mantle in the living room with a thank you card signed by all the members of the Sisterhood.
Occasionally a member would pin his girlfriend. This was a symbol to all that they were moving down the path of long-term commitment. In order to memorialize the event, the member would invent an excuse to return to the house with his girlfriend to get his wallet or tickets. He would ring the bell loudly and excuse himself to run up stairs to retrieve the forgotten item. She remained in the entrance hall- alone- and since the curtains had been drawn tight, she would not have known the bell had been our signal to sneak out the rear door, circle silently around to the front yard and assemble by the large bow-shaped porch. Each of us in our blazer, white shirt and a tie, we waited for the couple to reappear on the porch, while a lone note rose from a pitch pipe in the middle of our group cued us to begin singing the evocative melody of the “Sweetheart” song. The girl usually broke into tears and when the last note of the last song had been sung, we held a long hum while the president of the membership emerged from the choral group and presented her with a dozen roses, then gave her boyfriend… the handshake. We would line up along the sidewalk as they left, wishing them good luck, and immediately they were out of sight head for the basement, because the quid pro quo for the serenade and roses required him to buy the house a keg of beer.
On that warm July afternoon, my mind slipped back to Hell Week. We were a large pledge class, and the first inducted after a name change and national recognition. Pledging has changed a lot since those days, but the one certain outcome of the old pledge process was you knew the members of your pledge class as well as you knew your own family. You knew where they were born, what schools they went to, what sports they played, what food they liked, the names of their siblings and parents, deep secrets too, that they probably had not shared with many other people. From the Hump Room, you knew who was climbing those narrow steep stairs by the cadence of their step and by the sound of the squeak before they announced themselves with their presence at the room door. The week before Hell Week, several of us made a trip around town pasting quarters and dollars under the shelves of various phone booths, just to be sure we had money to buy or bribe items that would be on our scavenger list. Every pledge knew where the money was and how much was in each location. And apart from the usual nonsense required to be gathered during the hunt, one member required, “a pound of toe nails”. Creatively, one of the pledges went to a phone booth, extracted $1.50 and purchased a pound of ten penny nails which he brought to a sorority where several of the sisters helped him toe nail the steel into a piece of two by four plank. The member requesting this item was not pleased by the result and it cost the pledge 100 demerits (each demerit was one paddle whack), but we laughed ourselves unconscious at his solution. By the end of Hell Week, each pledge had an astronomical number of demerits written in his pledge book. Math majors loved to give out demerits using complicated formulae. The enforcement by paddle was, however, never egregious, and usually each pledge’s Big Brother would see to it that a sufficient number of “white merits” were earned to offset the demerits, even those encrypted by some future Einstein.
Then there was the matter of the tattoo. After a week of little sleep, none of it in a bed, each pledge was blindfolded and brought somewhere in the house, forced to lie on his stomach and tattooed on the left rear shoulder. I found myself in the pantry after this event, with Tom, who had received his tattoo earlier. We were given the job of arranging hundreds of canned goods and other supplies in the pantry. Tom was a strapping guy from Ossining who was majoring in mechanical engineering. We took an immediate liking to each other and shared many stories and dreams. His dream was to fly jet fighters for the US Air Force. We were talking about it when we happened to figure a way to close and lock the pantry door from inside. Having accomplished that miracle, we stood watch for each other while we both caught an hour of sleep. Then we peeled back the large bandage on each other’s shoulder to reveal- nothing- where a tattoo should have been! In the ceremony, while several members held you down in mock reaction to the impending pain, one other member would strike a very hot iron on a piece of raw liver placed by your nose, while another member took a piece of dry ice wrapped in aluminum foil and simultaneously placed it on your shoulder blade. In your fatigued state, you were sure a pair of Greek letters now existed on your back. The large bandage had been elaborately put over the “wound” and you were told it would be removed at the sacred induction ceremony two nights hence. Tom left Clarkson at the end of our sophomore year and entered the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. That must have made our Hell Week look like a birthday party.
The Brotherhood bond became strong and we grew together as close as men are able given the uncertainties of life. On November 22, 1963, we found ourselves in Dave’s Room between classes- mesmerized in front of the TV watching the president’s funeral and the live assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald. We all remember where we were that day- we were together.
The sounds of music and cars arriving in the parking lot below drag me away from my dreams. The afternoon open house and porch party has begun. I close the window and walk downstairs onto a crowded bow-shaped porch. It was full of men and women, children and history: Here, among others, were Ed Misiaszek, associate dean of Engineering, Brad Broughton, author of A Clarkson Mosaic and ever-forgiving neighbor, Robert John McGill III, associate professor of Humanities and a long-time college Marshall, choral director and advisor to the members who had retired that year, Bill Fiesinger, ’33, another long-time advisor, Clarke Joy, ’29, and Stub Baker, ‘27. Old stories were being retold, and many “do you remembers…” mixed with singing and laughter, and then I said, “Whatever happened to Tom?” The porch became quiet and several looked away as Charlie said, “Didn’t you know? Tom was killed on his first mission over ‘Nam.” Almost immediately, I thought of the famous, hand-lettered sign posted during the invasion of Iwo Jima in the graveyard where the US Marine Corps 5th Division buried their dead: “When you go home, tell them for us and say: ‘For your tomorrows we gave our today.’”
The brass bell in the hall rang loudly. It was time for the annual Alumni Meeting. More than 100 men, women, alumni, children, and friends piled into the house. The curtains were open wide during this meeting and the summer sun and breeze swept through the assembly as each person stood and gave their name and class year; smiles and applause for those who had traveled far, or who had not been heard from in years. Then the business of the meeting was conducted there in the open and votes recorded for posterity. The meeting adjourned after 50 minutes and folks ambled away to enjoy other weekend events.
It is November 1985 and I am in Washington, DC. Late in the afternoon, with the setting sun illuminating Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, I walk south to the Reflecting Pool then turn west. My coat collar is turned up and my hands are buried deep in my pockets against the cold wind. After 15 minutes, I am in front of Panel 5 West, carefully counting down to Row 129 where Tom’s name is engraved in the black granite alongside 6 other names. I reach to touch the name- my eyes full of tears. A man standing nearby, clothed in army surplus with a scruffy white beard and a beret, is watching me, studying me, and finally asks if I want a rubbing of the name. No, thank you, a rubbing is not what I want. What I want is time together to sing songs and time together to reminisce about tattoos and talk about our terrific kids and what it’s like to fly at mach 2. I want the time forever taken away on 3 February 1971, and I want… the handshake.