BEFORE DEKE AT UBC

With the expansion of the economy in British Columbia in the late 1920's came many DKE alumni to partake in the many new enterprises opening up out west. These alumni were from all parts of North America and were joined by the common bond of the fraternity. Needless to say, they soon began to associate with one another on both social and business levels, meeting monthly at the Terminal City Club as the British Columbia Association of DKE. From their association came the capability and desire to found a DKE chapter here in Vancouver. In 1946, after extensive discussions with UBC undergraduates and considerable investigation, ten students were finally selected to form the nucleus of the proposed UBC chapter. The alumni association worked closely with these ten individuals until the informal stages of organizing the UBC chapter were complete. By the conclusion of the 1946-47 winter session, this group adopted the Greek letter name of Beta Chi which stood for " British Columbia."

Beta Chi was formally recognized as a local fraternity by the Interfraternity Council at UBC in September of 1947. On December 15th of that year, Beta Chi, now thirty members strong, petitioned Delta Kappa Epsilon for acceptance and an International Charter. However, this petition was turned down as it was felt that Beta Chi was not yet strong enough to support a chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon. Undaunted and determined to become a part of North America's most accomplished fraternity, Beta Chi continued to grow and prosper and petitioned again in 1948. On November 19, 1948 the Executive Council of DKE International approved Beta Chi's petition.

 

EARLY YEARS OF PHI ALPHA

Three years of intensive effort culminated on February 26, 1949 when thirty-seven undergraduates were initiated into the mysteries of Delta Kappa Epsilon. DKE International , Travelling Secretary,William Henderson joined brothers from the Kappa Epsilon chapter of the University of Washington and brothers from other chapters in administering the induction ceremonies in the Mayfair Room at the Hotel Vancouver. It was on that day that the new UBC chapter received its Charter (the 61st in the history of DKE) as the Phi Alpha Chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity. Phi Alpha received its Charter on the 50th anniversary of the advent of the first Canadian chapter (Alpha Phi at the University of Toronto). Phi Alpha was the fifth Canadian chapter and the 50th active chapter in DKE at the time.

Although these efforts were staggering and formidable and many did contribute, one of the Brothers stood out amongst that valiant group. Norman P. Hager, Sigma Rho '36 (Stanford) was particularly instrumental in securing Phi Alpha's charter. Brother Hager passed away in 1981, but we continue to recognize his efforts by raising our glasses in his honor each fall at our Normie Hager Night. Some of the founding brothers include Levi Corbett, Tommy Griffiths, Ben Wyatt, Daniel Wyatt, Cyril White, Arthur Botham, Arthur Hinchliffe, Blake Lilly, Donald Moore, and Warren Ferguson. The fifties marked the publication of the Voice of the Lion which in later years became the Phi Alpha Reports. These newsletter publications have kept the chapter membership informed about active and alumni chapter events, and updates on where our chapter brothers are and what they're up to. The Chapter occupied a number of off-campus rental houses in the early years. After an extensive search, the active chapter acquired its first DKE Chapter House at 4435 West 12th Avenue. This eight bedroom home provided a place for the brothers to gather and hold chapter meetings until 1967. Our 2nd chapter house was located at 5765 Agronomy road and was designed by noted architect and DKE Alumnus C.B.K. Van Norman (Alpha Tau, University of Manitoba). Brother Van Norman was insightful enough to design it for the specific purpose of being a fraternity house by dividing the social and residential sides and by specifying materials that could withstand the rigors of being a DKE House! From 1995 through 1997 with money provided from the Phi Apha Renovation Fundraising Campaign, several dedicated brothers oversaw the renovation of the DKE Chapter House that prepared it to adequately house new Dekes into the next millennium.

 

MIDDLE YEARS AT PHI ALPHA

From our early years through to the middle 1970's the chapter initiated both a fall and spring class. The middle seventies through the late eighties was a heyday for DKE at U.B.C. Large classes provided Phi Alpha with the opportunity to initiate once a year. The largest pledge class being 45 men. The middle 1970's also marked an impressive string of years that the Phi Alpha Alumni Association was recognized as being the top alumni association in DKE. Over a 15 year period , Phi Alpha won 11 awards. Our most recent victory was in 1996. Phi Alpha won the Lion Trophy three times in ten years - '69, '70, '79. The Lion Trophy is given each year to honour the best Chapter in Delta Kappa Epsilon No other chapter has more victories, and only two other Deke chapters match our total!

Deke Day, an annual celebration of the fraternity's birthday, was celebrated up through the 1970's. In August of 1972 Phi Alpha hosted our first International DKE Convention. Phi Alpha welcomed over 120 Dekes from across North America to celebrate the 130th International DKE Convention.

During the seventies Dekes were an athletic powerhouse wining the Greek Intermurals Crown several times, this feat was repeated in the early 1990's. On these occasions Phi Alpha came runner up to the Engineers for the overall UBC Intermurals Crown - an accomplishment which is unmatched in the UBC Greek System. The Songfest Championship was owned by DKE. Under the guidance of Bob Halifax, Phi Alpha won in '78, '79, '81, and '83. Spring 1978 marked the hosting of the first DKE-ADPi Lasagna-Cheesecake Dinner. This annual exchange is the longest running exchange in the UBC Greek System.

The mid to late eighties saw the increase in the Deke-Beta rivalry, the advent of the Small Rooms, Jungle, and DKE Homecoming parties and back to back victories in the Greek Week Road Rally in '86, '87.

TOWARDS THE NEW MILLENIUM

In 1989, Phi Alpha celebrated its 40th Anniversary with a two day celebration. The Friday Pub Night held at the Deke House was celebrated by 225 Dekes, the Saturday Black Tie Gala at the BC Enterprise Centre saw over 450 party the night away. The two day event marked the largest gathering of Dekes ever!

In 1991, the Group of Seven (Brent Tynan, Keith McBain, Alvin Lee, Chris Lilly, Bill Enefer, Bruce Harris and Bruce Dawson KE '54) coordinated the reactivation of the Kappa Epsilon chapter at the University of Washington which had been dormant since 1965. Phi Alpha's assistance in the reactivation of Kappa Epsilon repayed a debt to our closest chapter which had been instrumental in Phi Alpha's birth. During the 1990's Phi Alpha Dekes created or reactivated three other Deke chapters. Tim Petit activated University of Western Ontario and Doug Sarti activated Bently University and reactivated Brown University.

Dekes into the 1990's continued to dominate as Greek Boatrace Champions and introduced the Millennium party. In 1994, Phi Alpha captured the intermurals Triple Crown winning the Day of the Longboat, Storm the Wall, and the Arts 20 Relay!

In 1996, Phi Alpha hosted the 152nd International DKE Convention. With events throughout the city from boat cruises to pub crawls, Phi Alpha displayed our warm hospitality to Dekes from near and a far.

In 1999, we celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Chapter with three events - a luncheon at the Terminal City Club where 100 brothers enjoyed the brotherhood, a pub night at the House where 250 brothers renewed friendships and toasted the Fraternjity and Phi Alpha Chapter and a black tie dinner at the B.C. Enterprize Center where 350 Dekes and dates toasted the future of the Chapter at U.B.C. We were privileged to have Brother Raymond J. Peterson (Kappa Epsilon - The University of Washington) in attendance to tell the brothers about the first days of the Chapter. Brother Raymond J. Peterson was the undergraduate President of the University of Washington Chapter who carried the Petition of Beta Chi to the 1948 Convention of the International and who was present at the initition of our Charter class.

The year 2001 sees the start of a rebuilding process for Phi Alpha Chapter. Starting with the 8 men who were initiated in March, 2001, the Chapter will rebuild to the strength that was enjoyed in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. The rebuilding will center around our efforts to again attract campus leaders who can live up to our motto that Dekes are " Gentlemen, Scholars and Jolly Good Fellows". We will pledge and inititiate young men who will show the leadership skills that will return the Chapter to its preeminent role on the campus

Phi Alpha's strengths have always been pride in our house, our singing tradition, strong alumni relations, and great parties. This along with successful academic pursuits and friendships that last a lifetime have endeared many a brother to our chapter and our fraternity. In the Fall of 2001, we will initiate the 1000th man into Phi Alpha Chapter of DKE.

 

Our Present Home

From our humble beginnings, continued fundraising enabled the alumni to erect our current house at #8-2880 Wesbrook Mall and was financed by alumni donations. Our new house was officially opened in February 2004.

 

Delta Kappa Epsilon History

A PANORAMA OF DKE
BY DUNCAN ANDREWS, RHO ‘57

“..the Union of stout hearts and kindred interests to secure to merit its due reward,” Saturday, June 22, 1844: 15 Yale sophomores, rejecting the staLus quo meet and form a new junior society which they call Delta Kappa Epsilon. More fraternal than its rival societies, DKE proceeds to recruit men who combine "in equal pro- portions the gentleman, the scholar, and the jolly good fellow”...the red hot spot to cast your lot is with old DKE, and although such was not the original objective, and the very moderate fee of $1.50 soon escalates, the Fraternity begins to take roof along the Eastern Seaboard and, thanks to the penchant of Southern planters to send their sons to Yale, throughout the South. Before the decade is out, 18 charters will have been granted by Mother Phi.

These are great days of fraternity expansion, for DKE and others, despite public antipathy toward secret organizations and the often active opposition of college facultics. In 1852, DKE moves West across the Alleghenies, to Ohio, and the campuses of Miami and Kenyori. Two years later, Lambda will build the first fraternity lodge in America There are setbacks, to be sure: Zeta, Princeton, falters, then dies in 1857; Psi, Alabama, a leader in building the Southern network, succumbs in ‘56, not to arise until 1884. But by and large things look good; colonization, not capitulation, is the order of the day.

“Slap. bang! here we are again. here we are again, here we are again...“ There are Conventions, now, oh boy are there Conventions: 1846, 1852, 1853, 1855. 1856... the first alumni directory appears in 1851, the first songbook, 1857. The obligations of the chapters are defined, the financial organization of the Fraternity is established. Even the proposal of a magazine is raised, although it will not be implemented until 1883. DKE is growing from adolescence under Mother Phi to independent manhood -- a manhood that will soon be tested in the cauldron of clvil war.

“In fair and stormy weather/Brothers ever friends at heart/Though bound by bonds of love must/From thine alter sadly part... “ It is 1861 . The Chapter Roll stands at 33, and Phi is putting the finishing touches on the first “tomb” to be erected by any college fraternity. The previous December the DKE Convention meeting in New York, unanimously voted to hold the 1862 Convention “with some Southern chapter of the Fraternity,” but such is not to be. War erupts, and the first Union officer killed (and, so far as records show, the first soldier on either side to give his life) is Theodore Winthrop of Phi. Four years of agony later; it will be a Princeton Deke, Philip Spence. who is the last Confederate commander to surrender, six weeks after Appomattox.

Except for Eta, Virginia, DKE’s Southern chapters close: many forever, their colleges destroyed. Of some 2,500 living Dekes, 1,542 will fight for their side—162 more than the next two fraternities combined. No chapter, North or South, is left un scarred; yet, amid the devastation of the battlefield, the Brotherhood lives on.

Except for the cartering of Theta Zeta, California, in 1876 evidence of the Fraternity’s desire to become truly national—Reconstruction brings a pause to the growth of DKE. Struggling to rebuild its surviving chapters, the Fraternity withdraws from the expansion of the antebellum years, and focuses on its internal operations and the construcion of a centralized governing body. By 1881, when Brother Rutherford B. Hayes enters the White House, the first fraternity man to become President, the machinery is in place, and DKE has further gained by the establishment of numerous alumni groups across the country. The Rampant Lion is beginning to roar.

In 1863, the first issue of The Deke Quarterly appears; in 1885 the DKE Club of New York is born. In 1884 the DKE Council is incorporated under the laws of the State of New York; centralized government is working, although DKE is not yet moving to expand. Between 1876 and 1890 only two chapters are added and in the latter year, while Sigma Tau, MIT, is installed, the Alpha, Harvard, chapter is dropped from the roll despile such alumni as Henry Cabot Lodge, J. P. Morgan and William Randolph Hearst. In 1898, however, things pick up: DKE becomes international with the chartering of Alpha Phi, Toronto, and by the turn of the century the chapter roll is up to 40.

“Shame on Spain, you went and sunk the Maine/There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonigh” The Spanish-American War— ”Mr. Hearst’s War” as it is sometimes called—brings Dekes again to the colors. The first American officer to lose his life during the war is a Rutgers Deke, Surgeon John B. Gibbs, and a DePauw Deke, J Frank Aldrich, newly appointed U.S. Consul General at Havana, perishes when the battleship Maine goes under. As the short war draws to an end, the assistant secretary of the Navy, now on active duty with a volunteer cavalry group, charges up Cuba’s San Juan Hill and shortly thereafter into the Governorship of New York, and the Vice Presidency. In 1901 McKinley’s assassination puts DKE’s second President, Theodore Roosevelt, Alpha. in the White House.

"Some kind of men make a no-kind-at-all/Not the kind for me/Takes a slick man, a damn fine man/To make jolly old DKE.“ It is about this time that a damn fine man who had made DKE at Bowdoin in 1877 achieves a cherished goal: on April 6, 1909, in cold so intense that a flask of brandy carried under his parka freezes solid, Admiral Robert E. Peary discovers the North Pole. AFterward, in New York, over 600 Dekes hail him at a tumultuous banquet (decorations by the American Museum of Natural History) at which he displays the DKE flag he took with him to the top of the world. (Sixty years later, a DKE flag goes even further: Astronaut Alan Bean, Omega Chi, Texas, ‘55 carries it with him to the surface of the moon!).

The Convention of 1910 establishes the first DKE General Secretary, and "Jimmy" Hawecs, Phi ‘94 is elected; the following year he begins the custom of chapter visitations A new DKE songbook and directory appear, as does a revised Ritual, and a Constitution embodying the concept that membership in, and an obligation to, the Fraternity does not end at graduation. but continues on through life!

The onset of World War I brings the involvement of the Canadian chapters Alpha Phi, Toronto, and Tau Alpha, McGill, as well as the participation of US Dekes, who drive ambulances on the Western Front or join the armies of France and England. When the United States enters the war, it is a Dartmouth Deke, Paul G. Osborn, ‘17, who is the first American to lose his life at the front.

"...The Dekes have gone to the colors, and vu r prayers go with them all!
Thank God for our band of brothers who have answered Duty’s call!
For our pin has a prouder meaning to you, my brothers, and me,
Since the stars it bears are shining in the trenches across the sea...”

General Peyton Conway March, Rho, Lafayette, ‘84 is appointed US Army Chief of Staff; his son, Peyton, Jr., Rho ‘19, will be one of the 155 Dekes who do not return from Over There.

“There is a name, a magic name/That makes our young hearts g1ow..." The twenties are roaring, the Lion is Waring; 1920 sees the first fraternity convention held off the American continent when DKE meets in Havana, courtesy of Cuban president Mario Gracia Menocal, a Cornell Deke; and 1923 brings the first Canadian Convention, in Montreal. The first DKE membership scrolls are authorized; the Initiation fee is set at $10.00; Prohibition appears and, as usual, is ignored; and although the fraternity movement flourishes across the land, DKE clings to an expansion policy of ‘extreme conservatism.” (This is hardly an overstatement, as only one chapter—Manitoba, in 1925—is chartered between 1912 and 1932.) Nevertheless, the Fraternity is produdng prominent men like mad: ambassadors, Cabinet members, Congressmen, governors, industrialists, bankers, university presidents, publishers, a startling number of bishops, and a host of other lumminaries, including a promising young composer from Phi chapter named Cole Porter, who somehow never manages to write a sweetheart song for DKE.

On go the years: Wall Street stubs its toe, and the DKE Convention of 1931, planned for London goes instead to Atlantic City, NJ. Emerging briefly from its conservative shell, the Fraternity charters both Alberta and U.C.L.A. in 1932, then withdraws from the field (the next chapter will be Northwestern. in 1948). ‘Dutch’ Elder replaces Jimmy Hawes, and subsequently takes on as his assistant a young music major from LSU named William Mercer Henderson.

The first DKE Pledge Manual appears in 1939; the last Convention until 1947 is held at New Orleans in 1941.

"Sing softly of the loved ones gone before.." More than 6,000 Dekes march off to World War II; over 300 of them will not return. The Fraterriity waits out the duration, barely a third of its chapters open at any one time. Peace returns and DKE rebuilds. Gone is the reluctant expansion of the past: new chapters emerge, new growth, new ideas. The Lion Trophy and DKE Achievement Awards are first presented in 1955. Ahead lies the campus unrest of the 1960s, another war, and continued expansion. The Rampant Lion Foundation was born in 1982. giving new hope and new opportunity the betterment of our Fratcrnity. President Ford, President Bush and Vice President Quayle lead our country through great tribulation to new glories.

As we celebrated the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of DKE in 1994, we reflected with pride on our past and those who have gone before and charge all brothers to keep DKE strong for those who follow. The Objects of Delta Kappa Epsilon are as relevant today as they were more than 150 years ago...

We are proud of our fraternity and the more than 70,000 men who have become our brothers since DKE was founded in 1844. Dekes come from every walk of life. Many have gone on to distinguish themselves in politics, the arts, sciences, sports, education, and the humanities. Five U.S. Presidents have been Dekes, the most of any fraternity. The first man to reach the North Pole was a Deke and a Deke has carried our flag to the moon. In every corner of the world you will meet fellow Dekes, but whatever their background or station in life, all are united by the shared experience of membership in DKE.