A song we often heard on the radio as we journeyed.  What a beautiful remembrance.

Eric Clapton - Layla (1972)

 

I can still hear that big silver Merc of Chip's careening around that curve on West Fraternity Court--clipping a couple of parked SAE and TKE sports cars as he hurried to Meredith to get his date back on time.

Oft blurry days and blurry nights, but how lucky for all of us to have lived those days and nights through high school and college.  And those wonderful songs bring back the memories.

I sometimes think of that dark rainy night as we headed north back through Georgia on our long drive back home from our cruise--the four of us packed together in Tiny's family station wagon--the windshield wipers lightly slapping a slow rhythmic beat to Tony Joe White's soulful tune on the radio.  It really was a rainy night in Georgia....

 

Tony Joe White - "Rainy Night In Georgia" [Live from Austin, TX]

 

It was indeed a Golden Age of Music.  :-)

Dear Danny,

I too made several trips down to Daytona and the Florida Keys while in college. At different times I had a '66 Austin Healey 3000, a '66 VW Camper, and a '70 VW Bug that all made trips south. My Theta Chi fraternity brother and best friend of 50 yrs made many trips with me . We always managed to stay out of trouble and have a lot of fun. It was always so different in Florida where the roads were all white because of the mixture of shells with the concrete. Some of the cities had brick pavement and car tires made a special sound while driving over them. My grandparents lived in Winter Park just outside of Orlando. It was a very special place for my family to spend time with my mom's parents. Orlando and Raleigh were just about the same size back in the 60's.  Nowadays Orlando and Raleigh have grown so much that they are hardly recognizable.  Greenville is the same.  It is a wonder that anyone still lives up north. Seems like they all moved to NC. Now with all the bad winter weather up north and in the midwest, they are moving to Florida by the millions. Construction here is going wild.  

There will never be music like they made in the 60's & 70's.  We had a juke box in the basement of the fraternity house loaded with all the best 45's. I spent hours memorizing the lyrics on it and drinking Ripple wine (a fraternity favorite). 

We were blessed to have grown up the way we did.  Our children and grandchildren will never know what it was like.  The cell phone, video games, computers and other so called "advancements" have changed our lives forever. Have they changed them for the better or for the worse?  You see families sitting at the table in a restaurant. None of them are talking to each other. They are all looking at their cell phones. It's crazy and sad.

Hey Barry,

Good to hear from you. 

I don't own a smartphone and remember when cell phones first came out.  I was one of the last to own one of them.  I preferred a pager (so I could screen my calls and return the call if need be).

You've had a fun life so far.  :-)

Wee hours here. I'll write more later, but just wanted to respond in a timely fashion.

As I  roll over to blissful sleep again, I'm quietly thinking of the lyrics to that whimsical State frat song of ours from 2511 West Fraternity Court:

'Oh the PKT (Phi Kappa Tau) is the best fraternity that ever came over from Old Germany. There's the Highland Dutch and the Lowland Dutch, the Rotterdam Dutch and the other damn Dutch. Singing glorious, glorious--one keg of beer for the four of us...Singing glory be to God that there are no more of us...For one of us could drink it all alone...Damn beer...Pass the beer...Over here Mabel, dear....Rack em up, stack em up--Buy Bud!'

We were a bit of an Animal House.  :-)

Later  :

__________________________________

Dan(ny)

RE: High School Days Became College Days.

I was re-reading some of your posts. Speaking of Animal House, my education in 1972 was broken up by time in the Navy to avoid being sent to Nam as a USMC grunt or Army infantry. By the time I got around to it, I returned to school at the U of Oregon in Eugene in 1979 after establishing my residency. It took me until June of '81 to graduate after I transferred all my credits from ECU. I road my bike to class one day and saw all these people looking in the glass encased student union known as the Fish Bowl. I found a spot where I could look in and there was John Belushi having the food fight. Later I saw that wild and mysterious looking black sedan riding around town and film crews in front of the Chancellor's office and the Delta House.  The head cheerleader for the ECU Pirates was a fraternity brother of mine. He drove an old bomb of a car and he painted "Hemroidmobile" on the sides of the car. We had another brother that would take the Christmas trees light bulbs out of the wagonwheel lamps hanging from the ceiling in the basement and eat them. He couldn't find a date one Friday night so he brought a chicken on a leash as his date.  These are just a couple of examples of the wild and crazy guys we had. Several of them later became millionaires that owned construction companies and golf course design companies in Richmond, Pinehurst, and Greenville.

During Theta Chi Hell Week we had a treasure hunt. One of the things we were supposed to get was the red and white OX rock in front of the Theta Chi house at State. It was too heavy for the 7 of us to pick up and then where would we have put it even if we had?  None of us had a pick up truck. They raided our house once and took a lot of the neat things we had in our party room in the basement  like the Climax, NC and Lizzard Lick, NC city signs. They took some of our brother photo composites from the chapter room upstairs.  It was a while before we got most of that stuff back.  Some of it never was seen again unfortunately. So many people stole the Lizzard Lick signs that the city quit putting them up.  The Good Old Days are long gone!  There is a group of radical students at ECU now trying to destroy all the Greek organizations there. The paper in Greenville publishes every accusation now as soon as someone cries "wolf" without any proof whatsoever. Three fraternites have already lost charters. My fraternity has been accused a total of 3 times for problems related to alchohol or drugs. The school always considered them guilty until proven innocent before any evidence was presented and the articles in the paper were always damaging. After more than 3 years now, no one has ever been able to present evidence that they were guilty. The fraternity's reputation has been destroyed and the school and the newspaper have never apologized!!