Chapter 1, Part 2

So when I graduated and applied to OSU, I had a pretty impressive resume of grades and activities and I was awarded the Regent’s Distinguished Scholarship, a full academic ride. I was majoring in animal science with a pre-veterinary option and was excited to be leaving home for college, except for one small problem: I didn’t know a soul on campus. So when I was approached by the members of Alpha Gamma Rho, a fraternity that was made up of kids from farm backgrounds majoring in agriculture-related fields, I jumped at the chance. Their slogan was, “Building Better Men,” and my parents were impressed by the clean-cut appearance of their members and their impressive record of Top Ten Freshmen recipients. The reality of fraternity life with the AGR’s was a bit like Animal House meets Green Acres. But there were definitely some achievements that I made at the collegiate level that I owe to the support of my fraternity brothers and I definitely, without a doubt, had a good time.

I was pretty straight laced in high school, a good kid who never drank and my biggest vices were committed in the back seat of cars with girls and dipping Copenhagen snuff at livestock shows. At our fraternity initiation party we floated six kegs of beer and killed a bottle of Jack Daniels. I had never seen a keg party and I have never been one to miss out on an experience if I can’t see the harm in it. I did my share of partaking in the evening’s festivities and I found myself drunk for the first time in my life. It was at this party that I saw a sight that I will never forget. Do you remember the scene in Animal House where Belushi shotguns the fifth of Jack Daniels? An upperclassman in the fraternity, who didn’t weigh 150 lbs soaking wet, repeated the act, downing a full bottle in one prolonged series of gulps. I saw him fifteen minutes later in a corner unable to stand. I think he did go on to graduate college, but it might have taken him a few extra years.

I was also to discover that fraternity parties attracted coeds like flies to honey. My high school was pretty small (I graduated with 70 people) and the variety of dateable girls was a bit limited. I now found myself in a veritable Mecca of short skirts and tank tops. School hadn’t even started yet and I had to admit that this whole college thing was looking pretty good.

That said, I was there for a reason, and that was to get into vet school. I knew that this was an extremely selective process and I could not afford to bomb my Friday morning exam because I was still hung over from a Thursday night keg party. College is like high school, if you do your homework and study for your exams, you will probably do alright. It’s just that there are way more distractions in college and it is a lot harder to find the balance between work and play. From the first day of school, I studied first and played later and was able to find the right balance to make the grades I needed and still enjoy fraternity life.

An interesting aspect of living in a fraternity is all of the crazy stupid traditions. One of ours was that when a guy turned 21, the freshmen members had to catch him, strip him down to his underwear, and throw him in Theta pond, the duck pond in the middle of campus. If they fail to do this, the entire freshmen class is forced to swim to the island in the middle of Theta pond and back in their skivvies. While they are thus engaged, the upper classmen kindly give their clothes to the nearest sorority house. My freshman year, an upperclassman turned 21 and we tried to pond him. He played lineman for a college football team in Nebraska before transferring to OSU. We were not successful in getting him anywhere near that damn pond. That is why I can tell you how deep the water in Theta pond is, and how I found myself one day standing in my underwear, dripping with slimy water and covered in goose shit, ringing the doorbell of the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority house to ask the young coeds that answered if they could kindly return my clothes.

Another time-honored AGR tradition occurred every year right before Christmas break. After the last chapter meeting of the semester, the freshmen had from sundown to sunrise the next morning to go out in the country outside of Stillwater and locate, cut down, and bring back the biggest Christmas tree they could find and plant it in the front yard of the frat house. Of course every class’s tree was bigger and better than the year before. The catch was that you couldn’t use a chain saw to cut it down, only axes. So we scouted around the country a few days before and found an enormous cedar tree in a pasture owned by relatives of a classmate, about twenty miles outside of town. We left a few guys behind to dig a big hole in the front yard to plant the tree in and the rest of us loaded up on a flatbed trailer and drove into the country to get our tree. We spent the next four hours taking turns swinging axes at the trunk of the biggest cedar tree I have ever seen. The trunk was large enough that a man couldn’t put his arms around it at the base. We finally got it cut down and managed to drop it with the help of a wench and cable onto the flatbed. We then hauled it back into town, but the tree’s canopy is so broad that we ended up knocking down every road sign on both sides of the road all the way back to Stillwater. There we spent another two hours maneuvering the behemoth into the hole that has been dug and plant it upright in the front yard. When we are finished you can stand in the backyard of the three story fraternity house and see the top of our tree above the rooftop as the sun is coming up. Why did we spend so much time on such a stupid, futile errand? Tradition, man. And it still makes a good story to tell.

It was around this time when I had my first encounter with a bearded and pierced guy with his arm on fire in the chemistry lab and started flirting with a cute blonde in Freshman Follies practices. Those early years of college were a blast, but it was the long, grueling years of vet school that I count as some of the best of my life. This was mostly because of the friends I had at the time. Our core group consisted of Emily and I, Trent and Shalyn, and Moose and Amber.

I first met Moose in undergrad. Trent and I had joined the Pre-Vet Club, which was committed to helping its members apply and get accepted to vet school. Moose was this tall, lanky biology major who always attended the meetings with his girlfriend, Amber. She was a cute, bubbly brunette who was also a biology major, but actually had no interest at all in veterinary medicine. Moose came for the meeting. Amber came for the free snacks and to spend time with Moose. I remember that they were a little hard to get to know at first, partly because I have never been that outgoing about making the first move to meet new people, but mostly because Trent is so good about making the first move but makes the wrong first impression by saying whatever crazy thing just happens to pop into his head, no matter how socially awkward or radical it might be. People usually either crack up or get offended, loving him or hating him based off first impression alone. I was guilty by association. I don’t think Moose or Amber knew what to think of him, so it probably took them a while to warm up to us, but by the time we applied to vet school, we were all friends. We were all accepted and Trent and I decided to be roommates. Moose found out that he had been accepted a little bit last minute and was without a place to stay for the first semester of school, so he ended up bunking in with Trent and I in the two-bedroom trailer house. This resulted in a bit of a cramped living arrangement, but we made it work, and became life-long friends as a result.

Incidentally, Moose did not get his nickname because of his size. He is tall, but fairly thin. It was actually a play off of his last name, Stachmus, which is pronounced Stosh-mus. His friends in undergrad called him, “Crotch-mus,” which Trent and I changed to “Moose-crotch” and then “Moose-Balls” or “Moose-Penis” because it would make him blush bright red in embarrassment, which was pretty damn funny. When people would ask us why we called him that, we would hint that it was because he was actually hung like a moose, which would make him blush redder still, which was even more funny. After several semesters, the joke finally got old but the nickname stuck, although shortened to just “Moose.” In case you were wondering.

All through Vet School, Trent, Shalyn, Moose, Amber, Emily, and I were an inseparable sixsome. Trent, Shalyn, Moose, and I studied for tests together. When the test was over, all of us would go out to eat at a local favorite such as La Vaquera or Hideaway Pizza, and then meet up with the rest of the vet school gang at Murphy’s Bar for beer and darts. Some of my best memories are of meeting at Trent and Shalyn’s, watching Friends on TV while eating Shalyn’s pepper bacon potato soup. She is one of the best cook’s that I have ever known, serving up real southern home cooking. Just the thought of her cooking still makes my mouth water. The six of us vacationed together, taking ski trips to Red River and Breckenridge. The three respective couples were all engaged in the same summer and were all married the next. We were all members of each other’s wedding parties. So although the majority of the vet school years were incredibly hard, what I remember most about this time is that this was the last time the six of us were all together in the same town, where literally every minute that we weren’t studying, working, or sleeping was spent hanging out with our best friends in the world.