Today is Pi Lambda Phi’s Founders’ Day. Pi Lambda Phi was founded in 1895 at Yale University by a group of men who were denied membership in the other Yale fraternities because of their religious and racial backgrounds. Frederick Manfred Werner, Louis Samter Levy and Henry Mark Fisher are Pi Lambda Phi’s Founding Fathers. They had a vision of a fraternity “where neither sect nor creed shall ever act as a bar to admission for any man.” According to the Pilam website, “the early history of Pi Lambda Phi can be divided into two periods. The first, known as the Founders’ Period, began with the inception of the fraternity at Yale University in 1895. In a few short years the fraternity grew to a position of enviable promise and achievement only to totter and collapse with equal suddenness.”
In 1908, the second, or Revitalization Period, began modern Pi Lambda Phi history. That is when the Alpha chapter was established at Columbia University. The songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were members of the Columbia University chapter. They were prolific and we can thank them for the scores of Oklahoma!, Carousel, The King and I, South Pacific, and the Sound of Music, to name a few. I wonder if the duo wrote any songs for Pilam. (Hammerstein was also mentor to musical genius Stephen Sondheim, Beta Theta Pi. See http://wp.me/p20I1i-be).
Richard Rodgers (l) and Oscar Hammerstein II (r) (courtesy of the Rodgers and Hammerstein website)
***
On March 21, 1988, Gamma Phi Delta Christian Fraternity was founded at the University of Texas in Austin. The idea for the fraternity was conceived by Kelvin C. James, Curtis Campbell, Rodney Walker, and Dwight Burns. Along with Luis Lopez, Eric Wilson, David Porter, Derek Riley, Jeffrey Holmes, James Lee, George Floyd, Michael Satterfield, Alex Bird, Bernard Jackson, Ikless Pettit and Melbourne McDonald, they founded the organization. These men are now known as the “Sixteen Visionaries.”
***
Condolences to the family and friends of Lisa Colagrossi, business reporter at ABC News. She was initiated into the Alpha Phi chapter at West Virginia University.
© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2015. All Rights Reserved. If you enjoyed this post, please sign up for updates. Also follow me on twitter @GLOHistory and Pinterest www.pinterest.com/glohistory/
