OK first of all I know that I'm comparing us to that HBO series about the bikers: Sons of Anarchy. They are not our kids, I swear. And there really is no comparison between them and us. I don't think any of us had a tatoo back then or a Harley - a few of us did some light drug dealing (not me mom, I swear) but that's as far as it went. I use the Knights of Anarchy handle because we were KAs and the guys at national said that we were supposed to be "Knights" or something pompous like that. What we were were older boys with a few young men mixed in coming of age at the University of Tulsa in the early Reagan Years. This is the distorted, flawed and for some of us deliberately redacted just short of libel remembrance of that short time when it seemed we could do anything. Or least get away with a lot.
But enough about them let's talk about me: I am descended from a long line of KAs, most notably my Great Uncle Frank who had been a KA at the University of Oklahoma during prohibition, gaining notoriety for the Great Foaming Frat Incident. Evidently to get around the national ban on alcohol and get 'tight' as he so quaintly put it Uncle Frank led the lads at the house in a beer making exercise. They traditionally made their Spring Semester Lager in the winter, hiding hundreds of bottles in between the inner plaster lathe walls and the exterior brick to ferment. Tragically that year saw a series of very early heatwaves with the spring temperatures in Norman soaring into the nineties. And one very hot day the bottles began to burst one, then two then ten then a hundred and then almost all of them blew up in the first, second and third story walls with the beer pouring in a heated foam out through the first floor. Uncle Frank said that after it was all over it was amazing how many drunk dogs they found in and around the house.
This lassiez faire attitude towards alcohol is perhaps why my father chose to pledge the very same fraternity at the University of Tulsa. My father was so determined to have a good time that he actively risked losing his student deferment and being sent off to the Korean war. Indeed, after three grueling semesters - the drinking and partying were grueling, the class work not so much - he succeeded in being kicked out of school and into the Army who luckily for him were winding down the Korea imbroglio and ramping up their deployments to the German Fraulein which according to my father replaced the Siegfried line facing the opposite way. Of course my father was not much into history so he could have gotten his frauleins mixed up. When he finally got out of the Army he rejoined the KAs - this time at OU where any nephew of Foaming Frank Smith was a friend of theirs.
One would think with this rich fraternal ancestry I would have jumped at the chance to pledge good old KA when I matriculated TU and you would be wrong. One reason was because the chapter had just been let back on campus after a fairly large but very fraternal drug dealing ring had been found operating out of the the chapter room. This was at the tail end of the Vietnam war and fraternities were in bad odor, not just because of all the funny smoke rising from them but because they were somehow considered to be warmongering tools of 'the Establishment'. Which I guess judging from my Dad's insouciance at being drafted to man the Fraulein made some sense. Anyway it only had about seven members and the house, well I'll just say that the house was far from being a home. But that's not the real reason I didn't engage in manly fraternization, no that reason was a woman. Or a girl - my first true love - or third - one of them anyway. Unfortunately it wasn't hers - her first true love would come only after she had gotten rid of me. But she was back home and I wasn't so I spent most of my weekends schlepping back to bug her until she graduated and went to college so far away that I had to as she so sweetly put it "leave me the hell alone". That's when I joined the old frat.
Up next: The Un Fraternity
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