This is a brief account of my During College years and of Delta Sigma Phi at New Mexico State University as we went from an interest group to a Colony and finally ended up the Eta Chi chapter of Delta Sigma Phi.

"During college" saw me graduate from a small highschool in New Mexico with 21 other people. I started during the Fall of '84, didn't graduate until December, 1991, and enjoyed every fun-filled moment. (OK, so I lie a little.) During that time, I marched in the marching band (the PRIDE of New Mexico) as a drummer (of course. Is there any other instrument?) for 6 years. The band was good for my recreational beverage consumption skills but not too good for me academically (although I always got an A in band). I also worked for Boeing Commercial Airplanes in Seattle Washington specifying the mode "C" and mode "S" transponder codes used by the Air Traffic Control systems. Three years before I graduated, I became Founding Father, vice-president of the New Mexico State University Colony (yeesh, what a mouthful). We started with 15 members (largest pledge class on campus [brag, brag] ) in the spring of 1988 and initiating all of us that following fall.

Because we didn't have a house to base from, we decided to attempt to display our presence on campus in other ways. One of our attempts was to decorate the entire campus using green helium balloons and chalk on the side walk. All went well except for a couple of incidents. First, Rusty Hazen decided to chalk the letters Delta, Sigma and Phi on the side of the English building. The building is typical of southwest construction in having a stucco (a rough, plaster/concrete) finish on the outside. The assumption was that after it rained on the chalk, it would wash away. Well, it didn't. Rusty ended up having to spend several days in cleaning and actually repainting a portion of the building. Live and learn. The other incident happened when Andy was attaching a couple of balloons to a statue in the middle of a small pond. The pond was surrounded by a small, raised, concrete wall and appeared to only be about 12 inches deep. Well, while Andy was attempting to walk back to the edge of the pond, he lost his balance and started to topple in. Instead of trying to stay on the plank he had walked out on, he stepped off, expecting to just walk over to the edge. Guess what, the pond wasn't a few inches deep. Try a few feet deep! Stomach deep in old, dead, smelly swamp water. With goldfish dung to boot. Pretty amazing what a late night with several bro's can accomplish. :)

During the summer, I stayed in Las Cruces able to obtain a house for our newly formed colony.

This house was one of two that Sigma Nu had on campus. Their numbers had shrunk considerably and they needed to get out of their lease on one of their houses. Of course, the house that we got was their old party house. It required several weeks of cleaning (I think that I actually considered a bulldozer at one point) before we could move in. Why? Well, behind one storage locker, a previous occupant had puked all over the wall. Instead of cleaning the wall, they just moved the locker in front of it. You can't believe what New Mexico heat does for baking that stuff on. Yuck! But, when the brothers returned from summer vacation, we had a house!

Noteworthy things about the house:

We were able to turn the backyard into a sand Volley ball area. (Not too difficult, considering that the house was surrounded by rocks, dirt and sand!)

When the wind would blow, it would rattle the windows and whistle through the house. One evening, I had several newspapers sitting just inside my door. The first wind gust lifted the top layer of papers off the floor, gustily settling them on my bed. The second gust took out the large picture window in the dance hall area. We tried to cover it, but had to wait until several brothers could track down a sheet of plywood. And we thought that parties were hard on the house!

Parties are rough on any dwelling, but not near as bad as faulty plumbing: After one rousing evening of recreational beverage consumption and sorority girl carousing, the NMSU Colony of Delta Sigma Phi turned in for the evening. Unbeknownst to us, someone had bumped the toilet in the restroom ever so slightly, knocking it off of its seal and dislodging the water connection. As the night wore on, the flow of water increased little by little, until about 6am. At that time, the pipe completely burst, flooding the house in about 2 inches of water. It was one of those special feelings, that cold-wet-carpet-between-the-toes one. Almost as bad as finding that the dog didn't make it outside the night before.

All in all, we must have been doing something right. That fall we once again had the largest pledge class on campus.

Yes, and IFC lost our petition for membership (yep, count 'em) 3 times! (We had been having troubles with the Greek Advisor on campus). If it wasn't for smooth talking capabilities of a couple of the bro's, we probably still wouldn't be a member of the NMSU IFC.

Fall of 1988 was fairly uneventful, excluding floods and wind.

The spring of 1989 was to be our first time competing in Greek Week. We knew that we couldn't really compete, but we had a GREAT time participating.

The spring saw us experience financial difficulties and we were unable to keep up with the rent on the house. We discontinued our rental agreement at the end of the semester, owing several months of back rent. (argh!)

(I went on Co-op. with Boeing for 4 months. That is another story in itself. Suffice to say that I now fly on planes that I help design.)

Fall of 1989 saw us going through rush without a house for meetings, recruiting or any other function. We discovered that having a house is not a prerequisite for having a growing, thriving Fraternity. We had several brothers that had large houses and were kind enough to allow the fraternity to use them from time to time. I can honestly say that one of the most fun times I have ever had with the Fraternity was cleaning a brothers house before a Rush event. His house was generally cluttered so we purchased several cases of recreational beverages and obliterated the mess. Yeeeeeeeeee Hah! Our rush once again was a smashing success. It just shows that rushing for quality automatically brings in the quantity you need.

Spring of 1990 was one of ups and downs. We were still basically a small fraternity. Only 30 guys, or so, but we were very committed to each other. We knew that we didn't stand much of a chance of winning the Greek Week Competition, specifically the Games, but we hoped to compete in Greek Sing and in Greek Spirit. We worked extremely hard on our presentation and were able to win, yes WIN Greek Sing. We were riding high. But, unknown to the Fraternity as a whole, one of our up and coming pledge hopefuls (he hadn't started attending NMSU) was living in El Paso at the time and was not faring well. The night before Greek Sing, he pulled his car into the garage, started it up and wrote six pages of a suicide note before dying of Carbon Monoxide poisoning. Tommie Neilson, a little sister of Chad (a brother) was notified just moments before we went on stage. She knew what had happened but realized that telling us before the performance would completely demolish our desire to sing. She held her emotions in check and wished us all well. Immediately after, she told several of us that were Doug's closest friends. Needless to say, it was a rollercoaster of an evening. Luckily we had the close ties of brotherhood to support us through this time of tragedy and triumph.

This spring also started us looking at other accommodations. The University was building Greek housing, and we were in line to get it. Everything worked out, and in the Fall of 1990, we took over one quad of the new Greek Complex.

The early summer of 1990 saw me in Indianapolis at Headquarters for two weeks as an intern. During my time there, I re-wrote the Chapter Advisor's handbook. (not really of too much importance, but I learned a great deal about this position within the Fraternity). I had a nick name of "Andre" - as in tennis. During that time, my hair had grown quite long (say, shoulder length) and all of the National types loved harassing me about it. Not to mention that I bore somewhat (I think very little) resemblance to Andre Agasi (sp?). Can you tell that I'm not a tennis player. All told, I had a wonderful stay at National Headquarters and strongly encourage any brothers that make close to Indianapolis to stop by for a visit. Quite wonderful!!