“Unbroken Chain”

I am a person who has always looked for connections, points of historical geometry between ideas or events, personal or academic, in my study of history, theology, art, or English, primarily, because I thoroughly enjoy the cross-pollinating interplay when I do discover interesting points of connection, and that has occurred quite often in my years as a teacher. As it happens, the newspaper article below on Q.T.V. becoming installed as the Omega Mu chapter of Phi Gamma Delta at the University of Maine in 1899, led to several personal and historical connections of interest for me. It was interesting to read that the National President of Phi Gamma Delta, at the time of Q.T.V’s induction, was General Lew Wallace, and I wondered if he was the same General Lew Wallace who commanded the Union army at the Battle of Monocacy Junction in Frederick, Maryland, 1864, and I found out that it was he. By coincidence, I live very close to that battlefield in Frederick, and I walk my dogs across the various battlefield sites on a weekly basis, and I consider how this short battle between General Wallace’s Union troops against Jubal Early’s Confederate division on July 8th - 9th, 1864 saved Washington D.C. from being captured. Although a Union loss on paper, in reality it was unqualified victory for the country.

General Lee ordered General Early to march up the Shenandoah Valley into Maryland and march south and capture Washington, D.C. The Union forces were caught off-guard, but after receiving some verifiable information that Early was closing in from the west and was going to cross the Potomac River at Shepherdstown into Maryland, General Lew Wallace headed west from Baltimore with his troops and arrived in Frederick in time to meet Early’s 15,000 troops. Although outnumbered 3 to 1, Wallace’s troops fought resiliently until they were forced to retreat eastward.  However, the battle slowed Early’s advance toward the capital just enough for Grant to send troops back to Washington from Petersburg to defend it from being captured by the Confederate forces. Although Wallace was defeated at the Battle of Monocacy Junction, the short battle has been called the “Battle that Saved Washington”. After the war, Lew Wallace became the National President of Phi Gamma Delta, and he also wrote the book, Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. He was a proud Fiji.

“Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and to find.”
​ Walt Whitman

When the first group of Omega Mu brothers entered the new house on fraternity row in 1899, they entered it with a highly distinctive historical inheritance, and they knew it. It was a source of great pleasure to join Phi Gamma Delta, and though it was a new fraternal endeavor they knew it would be very similar, in fraternal tone and substance, to the life that that had sustained Q.T.V. for twenty-five years. As one Q.T.V. brother positively asserted: “The change is only in name.”

With a conscious and sustained effort, a firm knowledge of the facts and truth of their fraternal history, our Omega Mu brothers entered the twentieth century with the same ambitious goals and objectives of success as in 1874, and with fraternal determination we are now approaching our 120th anniversary in full confidence of continued success for another 120 years. We know who we are and from whence we have come. We remember our past, and we have repeated it quite well, and we intend to continue to remember our successful past as we push successfully forward into the future.

Our first Omega Mu brothers entered the first PGD house ready for new achievements, experiences, and to continue to create a genuine human bond that continues throughout one’s life. The new house had ample space with a dining room, kitchen, a living room and parlor room for brothers simply to hang around, an ample front porch to continue the tradition of just gathering together on any given day the fall or spring, and there an adequate number of rooms for brothers like A. C. Lyon. The new house, like our Castle, was warm and welcoming to all men coming to the University of Maine. The new fraternal identity and the new fraternal home would become the source of life-long stories and smiling memories. “In memory, we find the most complete release from the narrowness of presented time and place…”

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When I look at the photo of the brothers sitting on the front steps of the house, I like to imagine what they are talking about, and no doubt it was simple day-to-day stuff: girls, school, tests, the upcoming dance or party, the upcoming athletic games, or talking about Omega Mu things. Maybe they are discussing brother Malcolm C. Hart’s letter that he sent Phi Gam National enquiring as to when he would be receiving his latest copies of the Phi Gamma Delta magazine; second, maybe they are discussing the engineering feat of the completion of the Panama Canal and how brother Oliver Crosby’s company supplied much of the heavy equipment to build the fifty mile canal, and how which President T.R. Roosevelt sat in the chair of one of these machines that made it possible to build the canal; third, maybe the thought of brother Francis Bacon came to mind in 1924 when the case that he designed was used to house the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States in the National Archives Building in Washington D.C., reading and talking about the game summary of Ralph “Froggy” Pond playing for the Boston Red Sox soon after leading Maine State College to a championship only days before, or reading the reviews about Malcolm E. Fassett’s leading role in “The Scandal”, the hit of the theater season, being performed at The 39th Street Theater in New York City. Nice thought.

The looming, world - consuming crisis of World War I was years away, and the brief Spanish-American War was over. However, for the brothers in house, they were deeply sad at the death of Charles C. Scott, who would have been with them in the new house in 1899. To honor him and three other men, the University of Maine administration placed a plaque in Coburn Hall, and, no doubt, our brothers went there often to read it often, to reflect upon and remember and embrace their brother again because our brotherhood is always time-transcending, in our undergraduate and graduate years, in life and in death. The gift and burden of life and those you love and care for through life, and that is our deep fraternal conviction. His death would be the first of many of our brothers who would die in future wars; may their sacrifice never be in vain.

The two and a half decades that the brothers would live in the house were not dry and tedious years of inactivity. Young men continued to seek membership in our brotherhood, and once pledged were duly nicknamed with impishly humors names like Hardpan, Froggy, Doc, Midget, Fish, Wisey, Ding-Dong, Sphinx, Bangor Browser, Brick, Scrapper, Deak, Sister, Humpy, and, yes, Hog and Spike. With fraternal purpose,  motivation, and creative imagination they responsibly carried out their day-to-day mundane responsibilities in caring for the house and performing their ceremonial responsibilities, showing character in each and all with our collective heart, hands, and heads. With eagerness, they met all obligations and responsibilities with a mature eye of success, wholeheartedly.

Superlatives filled the campus newspapers and the Prism about the successes of our brothers as scholars and athletes, and their extensive involvement in every club and organization at the University of Maine. They had Sophomore Hops that lasted until the early morning hours. Brothers Pond, ’11; Scales, ’10; Waite, ’11; Robie Mitchell, ’07;  were quite successful on their respective University of Maine athletic teams. Other brothers participated in a variety of clubs, committees, and organizations on campus: Ivy Day Committee, Musical Club, Mandolin Club, Glee Club, Banjo Club, Maine Masque, the Military Ball Committee, the Junior Prom, Military Hop Committee, Commencement Ball Committee, the Prism yearbook, and the Campus newspaper. And, not to be overlooked, brother Ballard Keith, ’08, was given a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University. The list of our successes goes on and on.

To fittingly use Thoreau’s description, these brothers consistently, with lightness and seriousness, intensity and depth, increased the “broad margin” of our Omega Mu fraternal life, in a civically responsible manner, at the University of Maine. By their own words, these brothers always wanted Omega Mu to be “on top.” They never compromised in wanting to be the best. The collective actions of these Omega Mu brothers created a coherent, committed, and vigorous Omega Mu brotherhood. These brothers laid a resilient foundation during an extraordinary phase of our fraternal history, and they consistently used the phrase “nearer to you” in asking the Q.T.V. graduate brothers to stay connected, and they did stay connected to the new, yet the same, brotherhood. Our unswerving focus as graduate brothers remains the same: connection, commitment and compassion. Our spirit refuses to quit, and we continue to strive to do our best in all ways for Omega Mu. Taken altogether, our brothers were doing quite well, and then the tenor of the world changed dramatically in 1914.

But, again, the will-to-power politics led to the start of the human folly of World War I, and it would soon impact many of our Omega Mu brothers. Guided by a sense of patriotic commitment and responsibility, eighteen of our brothers would serve our country and play a significant role in winning the war, and four of them died doing so. They went to war with pure motives, and they each knew the ultimate risk; they each were willing to take the risk. Our Omega Mu brothers embraced it just as they embraced every aspect of fraternity and university life, with passion and commitment, resilience and grit, and we embrace them in our fraternal memory. We are proud of our brothers who served or died in World War I.

By way of closing, the brothers must have been deeply dispirited that four of their own would not be returning from the war to rejoin them in the house. The brothers must have been consoled by the memorializing letter that they received from Willett C. Barrett’s mother after he was killed in action 1918 in stopping the heaviest German attack at Chateau Thierry, near Sergy, on July 27th, 1918, and saving Paris from being captured by German army. She writes:
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“He was girdled about by his fraternal friends. There lay before him the promise of a glorious future. Yet from all these friends he turned away and went. And he made the supreme sacrifice. His was an irreproachable character. His conversations, his gestures, his very look was persuasive and irresistible. He was possessed of a splendid voice, which often filled the house with songs of Phi Gamma Delta. He went to war cheerfully , and his letters, written in the trenches, though showing plainly between the lines that he did not expect to return, were cheerful.”

Filled the house with songs of Phi Gamma Delta. Mrs. Barrett’s word were a beautiful and touching tribute to her son and his love of Phi Gamma Delta. The brothers must have thought about her words as they considered all of their brothers who had served in World War I as they sat on the front steps of the house or in the living room. For those brothers that they lost they mourned and for those that returned they celebrated, and so it goes. Most importantly, they must have embraced the great grace that it was to call each of them brother. By conscious effort, the Omega Mu brothers moved into the postwar years with the same steadiness of vision, commitment and effort to do well; finding ways to serve and care for the larger university community, but they continued to value what was most important: the brothers within the house.

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The brothers simply got back to living a full fraternal-college life with our classic Omega Mu vigor, zest, and stamina, and their actions and behavior seemed to be commensurate with the energizing ethos of the 1920’s with the decisively formative technological, sociological, musical, and economic changes that were occurring. These changes were strongly felt and fervently embraced nation-wide, and with hope, trust and faith they were embraced by our Omega Mu brothers as they approached their twenty-fifth anniversary of existence at the University of Maine in 1924. The growing vision and dream of Omega Mu and the United States loomed large, confident, even triumphant, and on a not so ordinary day in April 1924 that would change for Omega Mu, with consequences that were seemingly dire after the house was destroyed by fire during an early spring blizzard. Fortune, or Fortuna, smiled upon the brothers that snowy day. All that was lost was the house, and no brother were injured or killed, even after many brothers made repeated dashes into the scorching heat and whipping flames to recover cherished Q.T.V. and PGD memorabilia. It was a terrible moment in our fraternal history. Thus again, the undergraduate and graduate brothers faced an interesting challenge. Would there be a new life for Omega Mu? Would good men, wise men, and strong men step forward? Spurred by necessity, those pressing questions were quickly answered, as they had always been answered in the past because we are past oriented and future directed as a brotherhood.

Historically, the Q.T.V.-Omega Mu brotherhood had always confronted exigent challenges with resilient pride from the beginning. First, would our young fraternal brotherhood survive after the founding Q.T.V. seven brothers graduated and moved on into their respective careers? They did. Would their vision of brotherhood, grounded in its key existential object: “Enjoyment, sociability, and the best interest of its member through life” remain? We know what happened, our fraternal story did not end. With calm intention, the next generation of brothers kept the vision and mission of our fraternity alive and well. In the 1880’s, when the Q.T.V. brotherhood was asked if they wished to merge with A.T.O., they had a simple declarative answer for them: No. Would the transition for the Q.T.V. brothers who became Omega Mu Fijis during the 1899-1900 academic year be a smooth transition or filled with unexpected hardship? It was not. Similarly, when a fire destroyed our first chapter house, would we be forced to shut our fraternal doors forever? Would we rebuild and be bigger and better than ever? With historically grounded orneriness, the fire goaded the fierce independence, fraternal pride, and fight in the entire Omega Mu brotherhood to bring new life out of ashes so that there would be no death rattle, no final breath, or no dying-choking gurgle of our Omega Mu brotherhood. There has never been a paralysis in our Omega Mu sense of responsibility and obligation. We never leaving anything to chance with our future; we assume control so that we have future. ​

“It is said that the flames of adversity will melt the weak, but that it tempers the strong, and that is certainly true for Omega Mu. Eyebrows were raised over this loss, but after a critical evaluation of the how and why questions for the fire, in our muscular Omega Mu manner, we moved beyond the mind-numbing loss of the house and started anew. Within months after the fire that destroyed our first house, after all options and alternatives were thoughtfully considered, it was decided that Omega Mu would embark, once  again, and continue our fraternal Odyssean journey down College Avenue toward Orono, daring to dream, envision and innovatively create the elegant architectural grace of The Castle that we all love. Due to connected and committed leadership of Charles W. Mullen, Hosea Buck, George Hamlin, and Joseph Gould, land was purchased and building funds were quickly raised from graduate and undergraduate brothers, and we are forever grateful for their dedicated leadership, ongoing commitment, and outstanding generosity. The legacy of their collaborative vision and generational commitment to give is a legacy we continue to adhere to now: a fraternal embrace for Omega Mu’s future. Within months there was a groundbreaking at 79 College Avenue. Every chapter-passage in our fraternal journey has been one of not standing still and lamenting what has changed or been lost but embracing the new: land, house, fraternal identity. We are adept at creating and recreating with resilient determination to succeed.

Charles W. Mullen, 1883

George H. Hamlin, 1873

Hosea B. Buck

Joseph F. Gould, 1882

The collective determination and vitality of Omega Mu to rise to any occasion to succeed and win is a historically proven certainty, and within a years time the brothers crossed the threshold of The Castle, and orderly fraternal domesticity was re-established, and it continues to this day. Beethoven was correct, a willing endurance to persevere is the most important virtue. Consequently: “By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with…beautiful treasures.”

Ultimately, the important trajectory of our historic fraternal life and history is whether we, the unbroken chain of undergraduate and graduate brothers, will give back in order for the conservancy effort to restore The Castle to its original state when is was built in 1924-1925.

Fraternally,

Chip Chapman, ‘82

Perge!

“Phi Gamma Delta still to thee our hearts will turn eternally.”