(The following was written by “sd”
prior to September 11th, in anticipation
of the game against his alma mater, San Jose State. In light of
steady demise of the Spartan program, sd recalls a headier,
sudsier, happier time. As another Fall brings another class
of freshmen to The Farm, let’s recall another fall –
long gone, but not forgotten. At least not by sd.)
Silicon Valley and San Jose State U. haven’t
always been what they are today. There was a time when the
Valley was a real place, not just state of mind, and San Jose
State “College” enrolled college-age kids who pulled
college-kid stunts. The beer was cold, the girls were
drop-dead gorgeous (ask the Stanford guys of that vintage who
used to motor down 101 to shamelessly poach), and people actually
attended football games.
I was a freshman in the fall of 1965 and
San Jose State was still living up (or down, depending on your
standards) to its 1950’s reputation as a party school with a
notoriously prominent Greek system. And a big-time sports
scene. Or, as writer Murray Sperber would describe later, a
dubious but festive atmosphere of “beer and circus.”
Stanford was on the football schedule. And Bud Winter coached the
track team. To me, this was a big deal because it validated
San Jose State as a big-time environment. Stanford was a
school whose teams I had followed passionately since grade
school.
OK, San Jose State was no Ivy, but it was
irresistible to a small-town high-school twerp itching to escape
what he considered Hicksville. The SJS student body
in 1965 was bigger than my hometown (20,000-plus students and
counting), had a brand name in the Bay Area, far enough away to
feel like you were going “away” to college and close
enough to be convenient. And my parents could afford it.
And, lest I forget, the academic
curriculum at San Jose State was varied and, in fact, solidly
respectable. Indeed, as I would observe when I got there, a
lot of very capable students couldn’t hack it. The
flunk-out rate was about 50 percent during freshman year. It
was no skate. Temptation abounded. Two good friends
of mine, whom today are wildly successful in their business
careers in Silicon Valley and wealthy beyond most peoples’dreams,
were failed students at San Jose State in the late ‘60s.
San Jose State didn’t care that I
wasn’t high-school class valedictorian. In fact,
during endless, nail-biting weeks following high-school
graduation, it seemed that San Jose State didn’t care about
me at all. Or my pal, Stan Harris, our high-school student
body president, no less.
It wasn’t until late July, in fact,
after countless phone calls and letters to the admissions office,
where our transcripts had apparently been mishandled, that Harris
and I finally received our form greetings-of-welcome, which we
promptly and ritualistically tacked to our respective bedroom
walls. I have never taken such an impersonal letter so
personally. I positioned mine right above the wall-mounted
bikini bottoms that one of my sister’s girlfriends had given
to me as a college going-away present. I could think of no
greater place of honor.
To my wide-eyed wonder and delight, campus
life was absolutely as advertised. In fact, it was better.
There was every kind of temptation to nudge, or shove, a young
guy off the straight and narrow paths led between dorm, library
and classroom. Temptation abounded in the form of keg
parties, small parties, large parties, frat-rush parties and
something called “pre-parties,” which is what you
attended before going to the actual party.
On the 100 block of South 11th
Street stood the campus’s bad-boy fraternity. Since the 1978
movie Animal House it’s become cliché for
practically every guy who was ever in a fraternity, and for some
guys who probably were not, to identify their house, and their
social life, with the antics of the brothers of Delta Tau Chi,
the fictitious fraternity in the movie.
Most of their recollections are inflated,
to say the least.
Take my word, however, that Delta Upsilon
(DU) at San Jose State in the autumn of 1965 could have been the
prototype for the fictitious “Deltas.” As it
turned out, the autumn of ’65 was the last hurrah for the
San Jose State DU’s. It seems that, like the Animal
House Deltas, the DU’s were on double-secret probation,
or something equivalent. And just like in the movie, the
brothers decided to inflict that one, last, debauchery on the
world.
Rumors were spreading during the first
week of Fall classes, that Tara the Snake Dancer, a notorious act
from San Francisco’s Broadway nightclub strip, would be the
headline attraction at the D.U. house to conclude rush week.
Nobody believed it. But sure enough, on a warm Friday
evening in late September, as a climax to the week’s
membership drive, the DU’s outdid even themselves –
already notorious for staking out party territory far beyond the
pale of good judgment, or sanity for that matter.
To the lusty cheers and chants of hundreds
of predominantly male partygoers and rubberneckers, in various
degrees of sobriety, spilling out of the house and onto South 11th
Street (which did wonders for traffic), Tara bumped, shimmied and
undulated on the frat-house roof with a large, live python draped
around her neck and bare boobs while the song “Gloria”
– G-L-O-R-I-A – blared from the stereo speakers at her
feet.
It took about ten minutes before the
arrival of several squad cars and a paddy wagon heralded an
official end to the evening’s festivities. By then, the
crowd had grown from several hundred to a couple of thousand.
But the legend of Tara on the DU roof was
etched forever in the consciousness of Fraternity Row. I don’t
know if there were any arrests made that night. Or if the
SPCA confiscated the snake. But DU was handed what amounted
to the death penalty: official campus probation, which meant no
more parties. No parties meant no pledges, which meant no
revenue. And in the wobbly world of fraternity financials,
this was capital punishment.
All of this actually happened.
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