Demon Night

The last party that was held at my Fraternity house at UW was 10 years ago this night. Demon Night. It was big. It was bad. A good time was had by by all, but better by some! A month and a half later, we were clearing things out, and turning out the lights. My house was a casualty of UW's long range plan for getting rid of all of the houses on Fraternity Row. They raised our rent by 40% in 1996, and we could not make the rent. And on that campus, a Fraternity without a house is not going to make it. We tried and tried to get the numbers up so that we could make it, but at the mid-term when rush hadn't gone as well as it needed to, the writing was on the wall, and it was like rats leaving a sinking ship.

To any of the alumni from before me who may think that I, as the last President of the Zeta Upsilon Chapter of Delta Tau Delta, just gave up, I'd like you to know that I would have pissed on a spark plug had I thought that it might help keep the house going. I had a few guys (you know who you are) who were there until the end trying to keep it alive, and there were others that I just could not motivate. But, we inherited a legacy of doing things half-assed and just doing the bare minimum to get by, and that was so hard to get past. So hard, that we didn't get past it.

There is a basketball court now where my house was. I like it that way. A lot of bad karma went away when that house was demolished.