My William and Mary Tour: Stop 10, the Lambda Chi Alpha House

The Lambda Chi Fraternity House was just below the red square #10 on this map

When we entered William and Mary in 1965, the fraternities didn’t have houses – they had “lodges,” along a road that now runs past the Sadler Center.  One of the lodges survives as a coffee shop called “Common Ground,” but the rest have been torn down to accommodate the Sadler Center and expanded student health facilities.  These were certainly needed, but the lodges were something to experience.  A dining and events center in the Sadler Center is named Lodge 1 in memory of the lodges that were torn down to build this center.

Three of the lodges as they appeared in 1957

The lodges provided housing for only two members of a fraternity – usually the president and some other officer – and hosted the fraternity’s weekly meetings.  On Fridays and Saturdays, they hosted parties.  Lodge 3 housed Lambda Chi Alpha, the fraternity that Tim joined in the spring of 1966. 

This is “Common Ground.”  All the lodges looked like this.

We spent a lot of time at the Lambda Chi Lodge on the weekends.  It was a nice place to hang out with people you knew. We had good parties. It was routine (against the rules but routine) to sit on the roof of the lodges to cool off. I remember one Saturday night a guy fell off the Kapp Sig (or was it the Sig Ep?) roof and had to be carted away by ambulance. Everyone on the roofs of the other lodges clapped for him and cheered as he was taken away. One weekend Lambda Chi hired Bill Deal and the Rhondels (a Virginia Beach band) to play for a big party. This was before the band’s biggest hits in 1969 — May I, I’ve Been Hurt, and What Kind of Fool Do You Think I Am?

Lambda Chi had a song that referenced the lodge:

Out behind the Lambda Chi Lodge, crying like hell

Lies a newborn baby, listen to the little bastard yell like hell

Oh who could be its father? Maybe it’s I.

It’s just another bastard son of Lambda Chi.

Touching.

A quick funny (depending on who you ask) story about this song. Tim’s younger sister Michelle married a guy who was also a Lambda Chi at William and Mary. Michelle went to UVA. (This is an important part of this story.) So there were a lot of college friends at their 1976 wedding and reception. At some point, Michelle wanted all her UVA buddies to gather and sing “The Good Old Song” (the one that ends with “Wahoo-wah, Wahoo-wah"). After they were finished, it was the turn of the W&M contingent to sing the W&M fight song. We all looked blankly at one another because no one actually knew the words to the W&M fight song — we weren’t exactly sure we even had one. After a couple of minutes, since everyone there from W&M was associated with Lambda Chi, we sang “Out behind the Lambda Chi Lodge,” much to the dismay of Michelle and various parents and other wedding guests.

In 1967, the fraternities moved out of the lodges and into new fraternity houses.

The fraternities were given the opportunity to select the unit they wanted in the new complex, based on their campus ranking among the fraternities (grades, athletics, service, and so forth).  Lambda Chi was the #1 ranked fraternity at the time, so it chose the unit on the end in this photo, next to the intramural fields.

We also spent a lot of time at this building during our junior and senior years.  Tim lived here his junior year – the first year it was open.  This is the floor plan of the building:

Tim lived with his roommate Al Brown in Room 304, on the third floor.  The first-floor lounge area was nicely furnished, with upholstered living room furniture and a dining area beside the fully equipped kitchen.  Tim and the fraternity president, Ken Himmel, picked out “French Provincial” furniture for the space. It was lovely until it was trashed in later years.  The basement area was where the fraternity meetings – and parties – happened.  You’ll note that the first floor has rooms labeled “duty office” and “AD Office;” when Tim lived here (and for several more years), this space was occupied by the live-in housemother.  The housemother during our years was Mrs. Norton, the mother of one of the fraternity members who had graduated.

We spent a fair amount of time in this building after we graduated as well.  For decades, every homecoming weekend featured a post-game party at the fraternity house.  Hosted by current members of the fraternity, the party usually featured drinks and snacks.  Most fraternity members who had come back for the homecoming weekend showed up at the house after the game, and it provided a good opportunity to catch up with old friends.

We were sitting in the main lounge area of the house when the Saturday Night Massacre occurred on October 20, 1973 – a homecoming weekend.  You remember this – President Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox; Richardson refused and resigned.  Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox; he also refused and resigned.  Nixon then ordered the third-most-senior official in the department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, to fire Cox.  Bork carried out the order and said he then intended to resign but was persuaded by Richardson and Ruckelshaus to stay on for the good of the department. 

Some things you just remember.

Over the years, the house deteriorated.  When we first started to go back for homecoming weekends, the house was well maintained and the furniture still looked nice.  Over time, the main floor living and dining area started to look more like a dive bar.  The party deteriorated to a kegger with potato chips, and the people living in the house didn’t do much to prepare for what used to be a  big weekend.  There was little cleaning or decoration involved. After we moved to Williamsburg in 1998, we stopped going to the fraternity house after the game – not much was going on.  Then in 2013, Lambda Chi was suspended for five years because of reported hazing – including forced calisthenics and a 6-hour overnight marathon run – that violated William and Mary policies.

This meant that Lambda Chi was not eligible for a “new” fraternity house when these were built in 2013.  After five years off campus, Lambda Chi alums began to work toward reestablishing the chapter on campus in 2018.  It was slow going for a couple of years, but the small group of members and the alumni were making progress – until COVID hit.  Tim just heard a few weeks ago that the fledgling chapter, which was hoping to get a house on campus just a couple of years ago, has now suspended its efforts.  The members who had joined in the early years of the chapter’s rejuvenation had graduated, and without a house and associated support, they couldn’t recruit new pledges to keep things going.  The alumni group is hoping to try again, but it’s going to be hard.

After the fraternities moved out of the houses in 2013, the “old” fraternity houses were renamed Green and Gold Village but were always called “the  units.”  They were routinely acknowledged to be the worst dorms on campus, and are now slated for demolition over the next year or so.

I have mixed feelings about the “Greek” system in colleges.  It is by definition exclusionary and elitist.  I don’t think that my more enlightened version of myself would want to join a sorority if I were given the opportunity today. But at the time we were in college at William and Mary, the fraternity played an important role in our lives there, and created connections that continue to this day.  At Stop 13 on this tour (August 12) I’ll be writing about the Kappa House, where I lived with my sorority sisters during my senior year.