At the start of the year, I was a second-semester freshman. F&M had an all-male student body of about 1200, who supported no fewer than 11 fraternities. I pledged Phi Kappa Psi, the animal house located about two blocks from the campus. Watch the movie "Animal House" and you can see exactly what Phi Psi was like at the time I pledged it. Pledging was a rough and tumble experience then. I suffered a broken nose during hazing. Every character in the film had a counterpart in the Phi Psi I joined. Every antic depicted in the movie had its parallel in my fraternity... with the sole exception of the film's climax, when the brothers trash the homecoming parade. The homecoming parade had been done away with at F&M a year or two earlier, or we probably would have trashed it.
But, despite how my experience with Phi Psi resembled the frat world depicted in the movie, change was "blowin' in the wind." A year earlier, Bob Dylan had released two milestone albums, "Bringing It All Back Home" and "Highway 61 Revisited." In '66 he followed up with his remarkable double album, "Blonde on Blonde."
Following a summer of work as a bricklayer's helper ( the bricklayer was my dad), I returned to a campus that was on the cusp of change. The question circulating among the student body was "Have you turned on?" To what? Mainly marijuana... but LSD was also making the rounds. One classmate, whose long hair made him look a lot like Jesus, invariably thought he could fly when he dropped acid. He proved himself mistaken from the roof of his residence hall and from a balcony on my own dorm. On a third occasion, he crashed through a plate glass window while tripping. Fortunately, the window fronted the emergency room of the local hospital.
The advent of drugs on campus coincided with the decline of the fraternity system at F&M. But it didn't go down without a fight. Although at Phi Psi we filled our soda machine with beer bottles, we voted to ban drugs. This wasn't out of a sense of good citizenship. It was out of fear of arrest, as uncover cops posed as students and infiltrated less cautious frat houses. A half dozen brothers resigned as a result of the vote and rented a house of their own, where they could smoke dope and drop acid as they pleased.
Students for a Democratic Society started a branch at F&M around this same time. The SDS guys weren't all that radical at conservative F&M in conservative Lancaster. But the SDS president did walk into the F&M president's office with a pig on a leash... more of a sh**-in than a sit-in, I suppose.
For Phi Psi, psychedelic was more of a curiosity than a life style. A "Phi Psychedelic" themed party was about as flower-powered as we ever got.
In the years immediately following, pledge classes declined in size, and some fraternities disappeared entirely... although to this day, they persist at my alma mater despite sporadic administration efforts to eradicate them totally, once and for all.
Change didn't come to such tradition-bound schools as F&M in a tsunami. It happened more gradually... and some traditional features, including frats, have never entirely vanished, But 1966 was without a doubt the tipping-point year.
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