Northwestern State, Kappa Alpha, Being a Pledge and staying out of trouble.

I had to go to summer school at Byrd because of a shitty six week period my senior year. Despite that, Northwestern had a summer class that I also made so I was familiar with the campus by the time the fall session began.

My brother Leland, and sister Elaine, had already attended NSC so I felt very comfortable there even though my original intent was to go to Louisiana Tech in Ruston to enter their Professional Aviation program. My sister Linda advised me to go to Northwestern first because she knew that it would be two years before Aviation students actually started flying. I had a track scholarship offer at Northeast in Monroe but didn't take the interview because some of the guys from the track team at Byrd were going to Northwestern. One of them was Dick Brook.

He explained "RUSH WEEK" to me and I made a run at Kappa Alpha and was accepted. A couple of years later, I discovered that would be a decision that was more useful and important to me in Vietnam than all the other courses I took during my days in college. I chose KA because of the "Old South" traditions that they had. More than anything, it focused on being a Southern Gentleman and not the loudest drunk at any given party.

We had to earn "pledge points" and earning them was a bitch. Shine shoes, wash cars.....that kind of thing. Being the innovative kind of guy that I thought I was at the time, I made a decision that would totally eliminate me from ever shining another shoe or washing a car.

Our chapter didn't have a cannon but I knew where one was. John Wayne made a movie in Natchitoches called "Horse Soldiers" and they had left a cannon on a small piece of land just off the Red River, real close to school. My room mate and I snuck out one night, took a "John Boat" that was common in that area, paddled to the site of the cannon, took it apart, loaded it in the boat and hauled it back to my car. It took several trips as the wheels were more difficult to move than the cannon itself. In any event, we made it and the Active Brothers pronounced us as having all the pledge points we needed to go Active.

We assembled it the next couple of days, rammed a gun powder charge down the barrel, loaded it with a golf ball, aimed it at the closest girls dormitory and fired the first shot. When the golf ball hit the dormitory, I felt a great degree of comfort knowing that I wasn't the one that lit it. Despite getting away with it and earning all the pledge points that I needed, I was asked to come up with another plan to steal the charter of a brother fraternity at Lamar University in Texas. It wasn't a negative thing but one that was often done between KA houses to show something or another that I've long forgotten.

My room mate and I made it to Lamar and checked into the frat house as welcome guest from the NSC chapter. I told some jokes and before I knew it, one of the Active KAs took me upstairs to the roof top for a treat. When we made it to the top, we were told to look across the street to another girls dormitory. They had the old style windows there that were made with slats that you could crank up or down. Since the girls didn't want anybody looking in the windows while they showered, they had them cranked up, a perfect position if you were looking down from the frat house across the street. While that was going on, my room mate went into the President's office and removed the Charter while the rest of us were upstairs enjoying the "nekid show".

There was one last prank involved before the Christmas Holiday and it involved the kidnapping of an Active Brother by the Pledges. They took him to Natchez, Mississippi and left him at the airport. He arranged a ride back to campus but before he left, he ripped one page out of the phone book in the pay phone at that airport. When he made it back to campus he had the authority to order the pledges to retrieve the other half of that page and return it to the KA house before the week end was over.

I knew a pilot at the airport, scrounged the money to rent a Piper Cherokee 140 for a round trip flight to Natchez and back, took the entire phone book out of the pay phone booth and returned to campus with it before the day was done. That was 3 days ahead of schedule and I was a hero for pulling that one off. I forgot to mention that when we initially started flying around Natchitoches during the summer session, when I discovered the pilot, we flew over the girls dorm to check the rumor that they were sunbathing topless. I will neither admit or deny that they were but let me say that after that first flight, there was a panty raid the following day.

I guess that this one will take two pages so I'll close for now and finish this one later in the day. I have to go to the VA today and will be hung up till noon.