Have any questions? Please give us a call at 907-561-7737
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
Your purchase was successful, and you are now logged in.
A receipt was sent to your email.
I could be wrong about this, but my recollection is that it was in 1959, my junior year at Anchorage High School, the school was ranked as one of the best in the country academically. It was also simultaneously ranked as one of the more prominent drinking schools, the latter credential being the one that received the most applause from me and my classmates. And my extracurricular activities certainly contributed more to that latter achievement than my scholastic achievements did to the former.
Many high schools and universities in America have had to deal with unacceptable hazing practices in athletic letter clubs, fraternities, and sororities. Anchorage High School, which became West High in 1961 the year after my graduation, was no exception. To the best of my knowledge Anchorage High School, or West High’s, last issue with hazing occurred in 1958, the year I was initiated into the Athletic Club after having lettered in hockey. I remember parts of the hazing well, and not just because it created a scandal and was the last year athletic hazing was allowed at the school.
The most personally humiliating event in the initiation was what is sometimes referred to as the “elephant walk,” but which we referred to as the “Choo-Choo Train.” If I’m not mistaken, it was overseen by our coaches. We were forced to crawl naked, through an obstacle course of benches, chairs, netting, and various other obstructions with one thumb up the rear end of the guy in front of us and the other one in our mouth.
When a whistle was blown, we were ordered to reverse the position of our thumbs, in the process yelling “Choo-Choo!” My thumb was folded into my hand and never got into the rear of the guy in front of me. Fortunately, the guy behind me was employing the same subterfuge. Under such circumstances one does the best one can.
Another ritual I remember having to perform was wandering around the lobby of the still-functioning 4 th Avenue Theatre on a crowded weekend night eating popcorn out of a Kotex box. Given the choice of looking silly at the movies or playing “Choo-Choo Train,” I’ll take the former every time.
There was also a car wash in the school’s rear parking lot in which we initiates were required to wash the cars of letter club members, all wearing their letter jackets. Most of the lettermen came with various solids and liquids, as well as individual preparations for us to ingest upon command. The solids consisted generally of red peppers, the liquids being Liquid Smoke, Tabasco sauce and the like, while the individual preparations were usually some vile green concoctions. One of my fellow initiates was forced to drink and eat too many of the proffered delights for his system to manage and ended up hospitalized in a coma, creating the scandal that ended the whole affair.
During my freshman year at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (1960–1961) I lived on campus in Stevens Hall, and there wasn’t a lot to do socially. Since an enthusiastic counselor had signed me up for nineteen credits my first semester—despite my never having cracked a book in high school—it was just as well. It was time to apply myself.
In addition to that academic load, I was a starting defenseman for the school’s hockey team, the Nanooks. I also became proficient at table tennis and even better at playing pool, tutored by a fellow freshman exiled by his parents straight from the mean streets of Baltimore. For an outdoor diversion from our normal activities, including drinking liquor or beer whenever we could locate either, we would go rabbit and ptarmigan hunting on weekends.
Since UAF was a land grant college, my male classmates and I were required to participate in the ROTC program, and I even found myself on the drill team pledging for the Pershing Rifles, the only collegiate level military fraternity. The University of Alaska, in college, just outside of Fairbanks, was listed as Company A-11. I was a very committed trooper and I loved studying military tactics and military history, especially from the Civil War era, one of my favorite subjects to this day.
As I recall, the initiation, which was totally proper, took about a week during which we had to paint a brick blue on one side and white on the other with “PR” painted on each side in the opposite color. This brick had to be always with us, and I still have it in my home at age seventy-eight. If we encountered an officer we were required to come to attention, salute and have ready from memory any one of several ditties to deliver upon demand. I remember them well.
Q. How’s a cow? A. Sir. She walks, she talks, she’s full of chalk—the lactic fluid extracted from the female member of the bovine species, highly prolific to the Nth degree, Sir.
Q. What time is it? A. Sir. I apologize for the fact that my chronometer is in such inaccord with the great sidereal movement by which time is commonly reckoned that I cannot with complete accuracy state the exact time, however, without fear of being too far wrong, I will state that it is approximately (look at watch and state the time), Sir.
Q. What is leather? A. Sir. When the fresh skin of an animal, cleaned and divested of all hair, fat and other extraneous material is immersed in a dilute solution of tannic acid, a chemical combination ensues. The gelatinous tissue of the skin is converted into a non-putrescible substance, impervious to and insoluble in water. This, Sir, is leather, Sir.
If you got any little detail wrong, especially forgetting Sir where required, you were in for further grilling on the spot and perhaps some pushups.
The ROTC program was well run, producing an excellent drill team. I found myself at the University of San Francisco, also a land grant college, for my sophomore year, and though everything else was more to my liking, their ROTC program was not. It was slipshod and chock full of favoritism. Toward the end of my sophomore year, when we had to decide whether we would participate in upper division ROTC or not, I chose not to. I had taken and already passed the written and oral tests and had been accepted. All I had to do was put my signature on the dotted line, but I got so pissed off at an inspection when I saw one of the favored, ass-kisser officers brush-polishing his shoes before the inspection, then receiving a higher inspection score than I did, that I marched into the colonel’s office and told him he could take his “chicken-shit” program and "shove it."
It was happenstance. I was lucky not to have gone into upper division ROTC because it kept me out of Vietnam. I already had a scholastic deferment and, as fate would have it, I fell in love and got married during my junior year. The military didn’t start drafting married men until things got pretty heated over in Southeast Asia, and by then I had a child. When the military started drafting even men with children, they didn't make it retroactive.
My battles were fought in the corporate world, being seventeen credits short of a college degree, trying to provide for my growing family by doing sales work, first for New York Life Insurance Company, then for Hallmark Cards, and finally for Gillette Safety Razor Company, Toiletries Division. But it was better than getting shot at.
I was annoyed when the practice of hazing was eliminated by the Anchorage School District because I was never going to be able to be the hazer. I had been required to go through it and felt that I was being cheated out of “getting even.” I know it was an immature reaction, but I was a sophomore in high school. The word sophomoric, according to Webster’s Dictionary , is derived from the thinking of a sophomore in school, meaning someone who acts self-assured and opinionated, but is in reality inexperienced and immature. My sort of immature reaction is what, unchecked, helps perpetuate these degrading and potentially harmful practices.
The reality is that I was lucky the hazing ended since I have never had to deal with the moral predicament of having participated in the role of hazer. However, in retrospect I certainly was not as lucky missing out on being a hazer as I was not having to participate in our divisive and disastrous activities in Vietnam.
Despite sometimes getting it totally wrong, I have never been afraid of making big decisions, even on the spur of the moment. For the most part I believe it is better to do so than to be frozen with indecision and procrastination. Taking action exposes opportunities; indecision dispels them.
Copyright © 2004- • Anchorage Press • 731 I St, Suite 102, Anchorage, AK 99501 | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | The ANCHORAGE PRESS is owned by Wick Communications.
Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.
Please disable your ad blocker, whitelist our site, or purchase a subscription
Your account has been registered, and you are now logged in.
Check your email for details.
Invalid password or account does not exist
Submitting this form below will send a message to your email with a link to change your password.
An email message containing instructions on how to reset your password has been sent to the e-mail address listed on your account.
Your purchase was successful, and you are now logged in.
A receipt was sent to your email.