College. A time to study hard, prepare for a future, prepare for a career, grow in maturity.

I did none of these things. I joined a fraternity and did more than my share of drinking.

We were too cheap for name brand Everclear, I believe this is the brand we used, but my memory is hazy for some reason.

A little backstory. Our fraternity had a party and got busted a couple years before my arrival. The university put the fraternity on double secret probation. Ok, the name was different, but they weren’t allowed any recruitment for two years. Clearly the college was trying to shut them down without pulling the charter. They also made them a “dry” house. When I joined, there were only four active members. Three juniors and a 5th year senior. They lived in a house that was made for at least 40. Those four, and some alumni, knew the house would be shut down if they didn’t get new members as soon as the restrictions were lifted. So they decided to throw the wildest parties they could, at least three days a week. Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday were crazy, every week. The alumni with real jobs paid for most of the beer, parties went until 4am. They got a reputation as the house where anything goes, and the party doesn’t stop until at least 4am. My friends and I wanted to live off campus starting our sophomore year, the only way to do that was greek life. So what did we do? We joined that fraternity and had a whopping 11 members. We carried on the tradition of wild parties and no rules, none. I’ll probably tell more stories about that in future, but back to the main story.

We decided it was time to throw one of our best known parties. The Pink Panty Pulldown Party was one of our signatures, we usually threw it about once a semester. It was just a trash can punch. Pink lemonade and Everclear, mixed with a paddle. We needed a new trash can to mix it in, we had used the previous one we bought for actual trash. On the way home from the hardware store, several folk were riding in the truck bed. As we passed some groups of people, they yelled out “Pink Panty Party at Delta* House Tonight!” No big deal. And the party was a hit. I don’t remember a lot, par for the course I suppose. But nothing out of the ordinary happened that night. I was house manager at the time, and we had fairly strict rules about cleaning up on Sunday mornings. We did well at that. The house got cleaned up and looked good. So, we did what we did every Sunday afternoon, started drinking. It was just a normal day.

Then came Tuesday, yes Tuesday. There was a knock at the door about 9am. Tom, our president answered the door. Three cops (including the chief of university police) and the head of greek life were at the door. They stated that there were complaints about us throwing a party the previous Saturday and they needed to search the house. Part of the deal that was made for the previous raid was that they could search the house common areas. In they came. As they looked around the main floor, beer bottles and such were all around from our Sunday afternoon. One of the cops remarked,  “well, they must’ve thrown a party, if they drank this much without throwing one they’d be a bunch of alcoholics.” I thought to myself how that was just from a typical Sunday without guests, hmm . . . maybe we DID drink too much. . . nah.

We knew we were going to be in trouble for the beer being around, but that wasn’t the big concern for them. They wanted proof we threw a party. More importantly, they wanted proof that we had a party with open cups. See, if you don’t know, frats today don’t usually have kegs or parties with open cups. It’s a liability thing. Handing a girl a red solo cup has more risk than a closed beer. Plus if we bought cases of beer, we could claim it was all BYOB, we weren’t the suppliers, we just kept it behind the bar for them. “I don’t know why everyone at the party bought the same brand of beer officer, it must have been on sale.” National fraternities usually ban kegs for these reasons and our university had a strict policy as well. Even wet houses were supposed to be BYOB and we were not to supply anything. They needed more than beer to shut us down.

These were not allowed, used regularly, but not allowed.

 

As they combed through the basement looking for evidence, they found what they wanted. A trashcan with a paddle sticking out the top, and stick residue on the sides. They asked us if we had used “grain alcohol” in it. “No Sir, I’m not really sure where that trash can came from,” replied Tom. One officer that was with them, we’ll call him Dick, had a long history of arresting people from our house. 9 of the 11 of us were arrested that year at some point (more on that in future stories) and Dick was part of at least 8 of them. As they searched further, Dick went behind the bar. He opened the cabinet, there was what they wanted, empty bottles of Everclear. It probably would have shut us down, if the university didn’t pull our charter, there was a good chance our national headquarters would (for insurance reasons). But Dick decided not to be a dick that day. He did something that surprised all of us, he said to his boss, “nothing back here,” and shut the cabinet.

Without enough evidence to prove we had an “open container” party, they decided to leave. The head of greek life told us she would be back at 3pm to search again for any alcohol. Since we were a dry house, we would be in trouble for having some there and she wanted it all to be gone when she returned. After they left, we began the process of moving the alcohol down the street to a friends house. It was amazing all the booze we had stashed that we didn’t even know about. A few weeks later the Panhellenic Council held a hearing to discuss our infractions. We were put on triple secret probation or something we ignored. We went back to the house sober, with no booze in sight. Apparently, booze kept us in check, because we got much more stupid without it (who hasn’t sledded down the stairs, crashed, and had to throw away a motorcycle helmet that broke in two?)

 

One more note. Officer Dick, got much better after that. Routinely, he would stop by as we were grilling. We’d put the beers behind our back and he ignored them entirely. Maybe he felt bad about sending the majority of us to jail throughout the year. I don’t know the answer, but he ceased being a problem for our membership.

 

 

*Our name wasn’t Delta, but that works for the story