Alpha Omicron Pi was founded on January 2, 1897 at the home of Helen St. Clair (Mullan). She and three of her Barnard College friends, Stella George Stern (Perry), Jessie Wallace Hughan, and Elizabeth Heywood Wyman had pledged themselves to the organization on December 23, 1896. That first pledging ceremony took place in a small rarely used upstairs room in the old Columbia College Library.
Celebrating a Founders’ Day on the second day of the new year proved to be a challenge for the organization, so Alpha Omicron Pi now celebrates Founders’ Day on December 8, Stella’s birthday through January 2 and beyond.
The auctions of eBay seller brettandjan are feature fraternity and sorority items. When last week’s crop of items highlighted this eclectic collection of AOPi items, I thought I’d feature it for Founders’ Day. Alas, I have been down a rabbit hole trying to solve the mysteries of these items.
The hand-completed rush invitation is likely from Syracuse University, where during the 1920s, the Alpha Omicron Pi chapter house was located at 602 University Avenue. In 1925, September 26 was on a Saturday. The name on the card is written “Beaulah Lincoln,” not the standard way of spelling “Beulah.” Was this an error on the part of the person who wrote out the card? I came across a few leads for Beulah Lincoln, but I could not connect any of them to Syracuse University. I do not have access to e-yearbooks, although I have several 1920s Syracuse yearbooks at home. But I am not there, and I thought better of asking my husband, my long-suffering husband, to go on a wild goose chase looking for her, when he has been saddled with the house and the dogs for months now.
The photo of Evelyn Purkaple from the Kansas University chapter proved a little easier once I enlarged the photo enough to see the spelling of the last name.
She left KU to marry W. W. “Bill” McConnell in the summer of 1922. A decade later, after the birth of two children, a girl and a boy, her husband, a superintendent of schools in Winfield, Kansas, was found dead of a gunshot wound in the school parking lot. Evelyn finished her degree at Southwestern College in 1938 and earned a master’s degree from Columbia Teacher’s College in 1967. She spent more than 33 years employed in the Winfield school system as teacher, principal and elementary school coordinator. She died in 1997.
The handmade, colored paper invitation is likely from the University of Maine chapter as Balentine Hall is on that campus.
