Living at the Tri Sig house

I just received an invitation to join an e-mail list with my old sorority sisters. The last time I saw any of them was at a reunion in 1986. Now it's 40 years since I lived in the sorority house on the campus of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston. I was reminded that 22 girls shared a house with one bathroom. I remember the time the pledges stole the bathtub plug (there was no shower) and the actives made them sit in the tub with their clothes on to plug the drain as we each took our bath. As pledges, we had to wear white sailor hats decorated with purple Sigmas on which we had to collect the signatures of as many fraternity boys as we could. It was a fairly easy, and fun, task.

One of my fondest memories was the Easter break that six of us drove to Daytona Beach and then flew to Nassau for a few days. We called out the window of our hotel when we arrived to three guys who were on the street waiting for a taxi to take them to the airport. They were boyhood friends who had taken a trip together before going into the Army during the Viet Nam War. When we told them to come see us, they ditched the taxi and ended up staying with us for our visit. They even followed us back to Daytona Beach but these boys didn't fit in with our college friends who had come to Florida for spring break. I often wonder what happened to them.

Now the sisters share stories of illnesses, deaths, children, husbands. It seems such a long time ago that I lived at the sorority house where my friend Marion and I knew every word to every Simon and Garfunkel song and even sang backup in a local fraternity band. One night I woke up to the sound of screams in the third floor sleeping dorm of the house. There was a wooden stairway on the outside of the house and someone had come up the stairs and was banging on the door. He ran away before anyone could identify him, but we were all terrified. We might have overreacted because, at the time, Richard Speck's murder trial was page one news. He had killed several student nurses in their townhouse in Chicago.

We grabbed suitcases from the closet, the only thing we could think of to use as weapons, and ran down the stairs en masse. When we reached the first floor, our sorority housemother was stomping around with a shotgun and the police had just arrived. Their first order of business was to get her to put the gun down. Then they searched the premises and assured us there was no one around.

From then on, until the end of the semester, we slept with our sorority paddles next to our beds. Some people shared beds they were so afraid. And the last person upstairs would put a coke bottle tied to the doorknob on the step so if the door opened, we would be alerted. It was only years later that someone finally admitted it was a drunken prank and not a serial killer at our door.