Page 236 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Roger was a good guy, probably smart (our interactions were not usually intellectual), a skilled beer drinker, and occasionally volatile; he once got into a fistfight with Richard LeFrak, the son of the New York builder, over LeFrak’s show of disrespect toward the Phi Gam 1928 red fire engine, of which Scott was the driver during his senior year. (I don’t know what Roger did after he graduated, but I do know that I immortal- ized him at Amherst for a period of at least three years. When I roomed with him and ordered pizza by phone, as I often did, at the Tower of Pizza, I got in the habit of using “Scott” rather than “Yaverbaum” when I called in an order. A lot of other people saw what I did and followed the practice. Thus, there would be evenings when you would go to Tower for a pickup, the guy at the microphone would announce, “Pizza for Scott,” and three or four different people might converge on the counter.)
In 1957, Amherst College’s Phi Gamma Delta had taken in its first African American member and was accordingly jettisoned by the national fraternity at a trial at which there was no mention of admitting the new member as an actionable violation. It appears that the blatant failure to have maintained a stuffed owl in the Goat Room was. It was then and thereafter, until the college eliminated fraternities in 1984, that Phi Gamma Delta became Phi Gamma Chi, a local. Nevertheless, it maintained its universally acclaimed (that is, out of control and raunchy)—and presumably now inappropriately named, if not inappro- priately existing—Fiji Island party.
To make matters much easier than they were when I was a sopho- more, I was entitled to have a car at school—and I did: my 1958 Chevy Impala convertible, which was conveniently parked in Phi Gam’s park- ing lot. Even though the car seldom started without my having to open the carburetor and use a pencil to keep the air intake valve in an open position while turning on the ignition; and even though, when I took the car to the filling station, I felt as though I should be asking the attendant (yes, there were attendants) to fill me up with oil and check the gas, I loved the freedom and the social mobility that it afforded me. I could come and go as I pleased: to Smith, to Holyoke, to anywhere. I know that
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