The evening march to the Randolph-Macon College cafeteria is halted by a white sheet hanging from the third floor window of the Kappa Alpha house bearing the spray painted red letters “Death to Iran”.  

 

 

 

The campus was in a pre-Thanksgiving lull recovering from Hampden-Sydney weekend, the oldest football rivalry in the South and an apt excuse for the biggest party of the year.  I had followed my boyhood friend Stanley Brownell south to R-MC, a small liberal arts school near Richmond which had originally been chartered by Albemarle planters in the 1840s as a Methodist enclave for their soon to be slave-holding sons.   In the late 1970s Ashland’s proximity to DC and the quaint campus with old brick buildings and stately oaks attracted children of various politicians, military personnel, and diplomats as well as the Virginia small college party crowd. 

 

The weekend before the flag unfurling we had beaten H-SC for the Old Dominion Athletic Conference championship in what would prove to be my last football game.  After a miserable first half in which we’d been silenced by their swarming defense and I’d dropped a wide-open screen pass, I vowed at halftime to swallow my fear and go all out one last time.  We came back to win and I contributed a hundred tough yards and a touchdown to the second half effort. 

 

PHOTO: Swarmed

 

When the game was finished the already inebriated students wove down fraternity row stopping at Phi Kap for classic rock and Schlitz, Phi Delt for swing and Heineken, or Lambda Chi for metal and Michelob.   Then they swerved across campus for Busch and southern rock at Kappa Sig before stumbling through the white columns of my house, KA.  The house reflected the fraternity’s antebellum roots with field stone walls, slate roof, and Negro help in the form of a local cleaning man.  An underlying loyalty to the Confederacy was not initially apparent to would-be pledges but the KA fight song taught during initiation should have given it away:

 

In eighteen-hundred and sixty-five at Washington & Lee

There was a band of soldier boys as brave as they could be

They’d  fought with Lee and Jackson

from the mountains to the bay

And when the war was over they founded old KA.

 

We have no chapters in the North nor any in Japan

We have no need for chapters in any foreign land

We live and die in Dixie

So give a rebel yell (insert a resounding “Ya-hoo”)

And if you don’t believe it you can simply go to hell.

 

Even though many of the brothers had been drawn to KA by this southern sentiment, they still welcomed northerners as long as they were oblivious like me or kindred in spirit like Stan Stocklinski.   He was a hulking guy from just above the Mason-Dixon line with an unpredictable nature, shifting without cue from weeks of silence to loud exuberance.   Stock had not yet discovered rugby or  Marine officer candidate school as outlets for his aggression so he reigned as king of the KA foosball table and bar room.

 

At KA’s Hampden-Sydney party an all-black Richmond funk band was jamming on the stage as students bounced on the wooden dance floor of the big hall.  I was taking my turn tending one of the kegs at our open bar when Mike McHenry reached his cup across to Stock at the other keg.  Mac is a quiet black guy I know from the football team.  Stock shouts “Bar’s closed to other frats”.   Mac starts to object with “But I’m not in a …” before sinking back into his parka and slipping out the back door. 

 

PHOTO: Grey

 

After the big party weekend the campus is catching up on classes when sixty-six Americans are taken hostage at the embassy in Tehran.   I’m heading to dinner after a pre-med society meeting when the banal banner is unfurled.  I freeze along with the ragged lines of students from Moreland Hall, Mary Branch, and New Dorm.  An image of that empty cup reaching across the bar stirs my inertia.  With trepidation, I start for the KA house when someone grabs my shoulder from behind.  I whirl and Mac whispers “It’s OK, let them go.”  We turn to see the makeshift rebel flag yanked back into the usually locked chapter room of the oldest fraternity on campus.  The lines of students continue on to supper unaware that something is starting to change on campus, in America, around the world.