You Can't Go Home Again: Our Fiji House Is History

Some nameless group of undergrads taking a shot in front of our Sig Fiji House.

I'm not the kind of guy who dwells on the past. For one thing, at my age I find myself with more history than I have time to contemplate. For another, there's not much that can be done about it. I must admit, it's also a bit painful thinking about the steady diet of fun I had for decades, as compared with my rather sedate life style today. One word pretty well sums up my life today by its standards three decades ago: BORING! Yawn.

I was forced to mull over a chunk of my past a couple of weeks ago while visiting a fraternity brother who resides near Dayton, Ohio. Of course, whenever any of us get together, conversation always lands decades in the past, reliving antics revolving around our membership in the Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji) fraternity at Wittenberg University. Ours is Sigma Chapter, identifying it as the 18^th chapter formed of a fraternity dating back to 1848. Today there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 undergraduate chapters and colonies. Not bad in an era of a dying Greek system.

To say that Sigma Chapter had a rocky year in 2019, would be an understatement of Biblical proportions. A major fundraising effort to rebuild the fraternity house, which apparently was no longer habitable, came up short. There wasn't the money to demolish it and then rebuild it. The fallback plan was to demolish the old chapter house, relocating the chapter to the former Chi-O house next door. Sitting next to one another, both houses were former mansions on a hill overlooking downtown Springfield. Not much of a view, I'll grant you; but certainly a prime location, removed a few blocks from campus, for a fraternity house.

Yep, this is the fallback. The former Chi-O house.

Today, the Chi-O house is no prize either. It's in need of a lot of work, but evidently not in as bad as shape as the old Fiji house. Decorum prevents me from going into a lot of detail about our relationship with the Chi-Os when I lived in the Fiji house in the early 1970s, but I did chuckle at the prospect of that house being converted into the new Fiji house. I will say, though, that one of my fondest memories involving a Chi-O sister was standing on the porch roof (Sunova Beach, we called it.) of the Fiji house and dumping a full beer on the head of a Chi-O standing on the front porch steps 10 feet below as she was delivering a load of crap to one of my brothers. She had screwed him over in some way that now escapes me. But, being me, I determined that having wronged a brother, she deserved a Schlitz shower. Ah, the good old days.....

Otherwise, we would always scoop up a couple of the Chi-Os who were studying late when we would make a midnight run to the donut shop in Yellow Springs. It opened at midnight with fresh donuts rolling right out of the oven. And, yes, it is that Yellow Spings: home of Antioch College. We would pile six or eight of us, and a couple of assorted Chi-Os. into a car and drive the 20 minutes to Yellow Springs.

Bluto: "Christ, seven years of college down the drain."

Back to the story. So, after sorting out the bulk of the house renovation issues with scores of graduate brothers kicking in all sorts of cash to the project (Disclaimer: I wasn't one of them.), the current undergraduate members managed to get the fraternity booted off of campus. Yep, officially, there's no Fiji chapter at Wittenberg until the last undergraduate member graduates in 2022 or whenever. If there's a Bluto among them, it could be even longer. 2025?

Now you have the pertinent background.

This is the driveway into the back parking lot blocked by flotsam from the now torn-down house. That's The Shanty in the background.

So, my fraternity brother Ports and I decide we would take a stroll (or in this case drive) down memory lane and visit the Wittenberg campus. Springfield is a 30-minute drive from his home. Our first stop was at the Fiji house. This being late May, the school year was already over and most of the students gone. Driving up what used to be the house driveway we found an empty lot where the house once stood and our path blocked by a pile of discarded furniture and mattresses in the driveway. We had kidded earlier that we should find an old sofa to take with us, dump it on the driveway and set it on fire. We did that very thing with one of our sofas at the end of our senior year. We dragged it out a third-floor window, tossed it off the roof onto the drive way and set it aflame. Good times, right?

I can't tell you the sense of loss we both felt as we stood on the driveway looking at a blank space where the house once stood. The finality of it was almost too much to ponder. All that remains of the original structures is a small three-person residence building called The Shanty at the rear of the property.

We were both spring pledges our freshman year. The next three years were three of the best years of my life. I'd go back and do it all over again in a heartbeat. Seeing the house gone, cut a chunk out of me.

We wandered around the empty lot and then around the old Chi-O house in a fog. It was utterly disturbing. I hadn't been back to Wittenberg for any of the annual Fiji events aimed at graduate members in well over 15 years. At this point, I doubt I ever will again. For ever and ever, Amen.