CityView Magazine

10 | November/December 2018 I M C F A D Y E N ' S M U S I N G S I Thought It Was Just a Party BY BILL MCFADYEN I t would never happen in today's more compet- itive world but somehow, in 1979, I managed to secure a spot as a freshman at the prestigious Davidson College. eir expectation was that I be a part of the graduating Class of 1983. e miracle is not that I got in; that was just a mistake on the part of someone in the Admissions Office who was foolish enough to be swayed by my application. e miracle is that I did indeed get out with a degree four years later. ey were four long, grueling years of academic hell, where I spent a considerable amount of time look- ing for a major out of which I could wrest a degree. Math? I flunked calculus in my first quarter. Econ? D in 101. Biology? e professor said he would give me a C instead of the earned D if I would move on to an- other major. Philosophy? Dr. McCormick, who had seen my work in the humanities curriculum from my freshman and sophomore years, ushered me out of his office door before I could even take a philosophy course. en I found history, where the heaviest weight- ing was given in response to the papers one had to write. Somehow, as a junior, I found a stride. With time served in summer school to atone for the F as a freshman, I le Davidson at the back of the pack, but proximal to the same folks with whom I had arrived. Interestingly, no one important since then has ever asked me my class ranking. In those darkest Davidson days closest to the time that Dad denied my request to drop out, I literally wandered in search of my place at that school. Even- tually, I found it. e music was loudest at the Phi Delta eta fraternity house. It was the place cred- ited with inventing Headball, where you dug a clay rectangle and served a soccer ball (using your head) across a rope laid through the middle of the water- saturated course. e intent was for a volleying of the ball back and forth to ensue. Failure to serve or return into the other half of the court resulted in a point for the other team and in a beer-chugging pen- alty for the mud-caked losers of the point. (Needless to say, the game has since been outlawed on college campuses.) Margaret Sloan was our cook, and she excelled at fried. Chicken, pork chops, cube steak. Fried. Steamed broccoli and melted Velveeta were commonly consumed under the moniker "Trees and Cheese." e fraternity house became my where; the other men became my who. Aer being elected treasurer at the end of my sopho- more year, I discovered that the social line item was the only one over budget, but to such a degree that we were in effect bankrupt. For both fiscal and behavio- ral reasons, we faced dissolution at the hands of an administration that saw opportunity in silencing our oversized Marantz speakers, while also potentially dispersing the band of misfits that congregated with such decadent density in that place known as the Delt House. Yet, through a fortitude that was possibly the common thread of fiy, we each raised about $350 extra over that summer before my junior year to save the organization. We bought stupid lamps made of miniature corn liquor jugs that said Phi Delta eta or sold cutesy animal posters to co-eds, all from trite fund-raiser magazines. We truly gave our life blood to the effort. Well, actually we sold it to some plasma company that came from Charlotte to our frat house in a mobile MASH unit. ey paid us $10 a pint. In all of the time that I was with those guys, I really thought that we were just having a years-long party to divert our attention from the near impossible-seem- ing grind of getting a degree from what was a rigor-

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