Bill's Place in Our Community
Fraternities
I figured hey you gotta know the kids. And how better a way to get to know the students than to go where they live and go to things that they are involved with. I did get to know the students and the students got to know me.
People [think] it’s weird, they’ll have friends from other schools come and say--I can’t believe this old man at the fraternity party having a beer with the rest of the boys!
I don’t cook, so unless I go to a fraternity house for supper or I go to a restaurant, I live on peanut butter sandwiches and chocolate milk. Maybe that’s what keeps me young…the peanut butter.
I play cards at three or four of them [fraternities], in fact I have one sorority I even play cards at now. Maybe by the time I’m ninety, all the sororities will be playing cards.
Athletics
I like sports because I know the people playing. I know every single one of the kids on the basketball team- the football team, I know 80% of them. And I have over the years, so I follow them.
Girls’ sports I don’t go to as much, because basketball [at] Rochester High School wasn’t very big, but we had to go support my sister. And my mother was insistent that we go to the games, and we did. I got kind of turned off because it was so bad in high school that it followed me.
Bill was tapped by Skull in 1962
Howard Freeman was our speaker that day at an assembly… and two things happened to me which were unusual. I got the yearbook dedication, and then all of a sudden, I got tapped on the back of my shoulder.
I go to all of the meetings and lunch every Tuesday. We didn’t used to have luncheons but now we do to try to get more faculty and staff who are here on campus to come and join us, because you get to know the kids.
One year we had a non-ribboned group, and the next year they brought the ribbons back I think because Van Blumel and I complained so much about it. Because it was tough for us to know who they were without the ribbons.