You Should Have Been There

Nearly sixty-seven years ago the first edition of the Oak Leaf was cranked out on a borrowed mimeograph machine, and distributed to the fraternity at large. At that time--Autumn of 1930--the total membership, including faculty advisors, administration sympathizers, the occasional parent, and perhaps an odd dog, numbered just around 100. The fraternity was still small enough that each member was at least familiar to all, but rapidly growing beyond the boundary of reliable communication within the group.

In the early years the alumni contingent had been a loose body of close friends who gathered regularly at each other's houses--at first those of their parents' and later their own--to meet, raise a glass (presumably of water, as this was during Prohibition), and indulge in poker games of marathon duration. As the 1920s played out, however, work, graduate studies and other responsibilities began to draw brothers away from the original band. Charter Member Walton Smith moved to San Francisco, for instance, where he effectively remained for the rest of his life. Others headed to the East for a stint at Harvard Business School. To reach the whole of the fraternity, at school and in the outside world, it no longer sufficed to put out the word, lay in a supply of steaks and cigars, and rustle up a few decks of cards. And from this necessity the Oak Leaf was devised.

The dignified Torch, (the Active-published forebear of the Oak Leaf) by virtue of its handsome--if slow--professional typesetting and printing, could only report on events several months past. It died a quiet death shortly after the arrival of its cruder, more vital cousin (for those who would say the present Oak Leaf is becoming disquietingly Torch-like, I, who have once again brought the wheels of production to a grinding halt while procrastinating over the few pieces appearing under my name, have no satisfactory answer).

The first edition of the Oak Leaf is not a particularly impressive thing, if judged by purely graphic standards. It is a one-sided, legal-size page of single-spaced typescript, hastily prepared and produced on cheap goldenrod paper by a commandeered mimeograph machine. Although I don't recall whether the first few installments were produced after hours in the administration offices of South Pasadena High School, I do know that quite a few later editions were printed there, as the father of one of the editorial crew was the Principal. One likes to imagine them cranking out the copies in the dead of night. However unremarkable it may have appeared, the effect it produced was profound.

Paul Dudley and Eddie Dew, editor and assistant editor, recounted the most recent monthly ``meeting'' (in this case a weekend event at the cabin) in the breezy style peculiar to that era. Twenty-two men attended, seven sent their regrets. And to the remaining 70-odd brothers not in attendance, the message was plain: You should have been there. All your friends were there. We had a great time. Beneath the raffish prose style the subtext is clearly: We missed you. Not a rebuke, but a reminder of wholeness of the group, and of one's place within it, however far removed. Reading it now, I regret having missed it, as though it had taken place just last month and not 30 years before my birth.

That simple, forward-looking Oak Leaf has been much on my mind lately as I contemplate recent Nu Alpha Phi events. Thinking about the newly-coined tradition of occasional Alumni Washes held in the Bay Area (and elsewhere in the Lower 48) brings to mind the original duties of the Oak Leaf editor as Bard of the Gatherings. It is with a sense of history that I find myself recording the place, the date, those in attendance and their comings and goings--filling in a sense of the event for the benefit of those who couldn't, wouldn't or didn't make it--and perhaps enticing them to turn up for another, later event. That's what the Oak Leaf was originally created to communicate, and as I devise some wry fillip or other to describe the gathering, the wise-acre voices of Dudley and Dew come to me, reverberating across the decades.

Another very different sense in which I have been reminded of the inaugural edition of the Oak Leaf is through the growing community of Nappies on the Internet. I sense in this the arrival of a new and a very different medium for expression of the principles of Nu Alpha Phi, and a new means by which our common experience can be shared. At last count we numbered around 100--the same milestone marked by the fraternity at the birth of the Oak Leaf nearly seven decades ago. [Currently we have 162 e-mail accessible Nappies. --Paul] At the moment our online fraternity serves mainly as a mailing list, but with growing numbers we will gradually increase the interaction. Oak Leaf co-editor Paul Nagai has been a remarkable force for connecting, cajoling and tracking wayward brothers and sisters across the vastness of Net and bringing them into the fold. With the advent of ever-improving technology, can the age of Internet poker games be far behind?

Our site on the World Wide Web is entering its second year now, and changes are in store. Longtime Webmaster Matt Kosokoff, who originally constructed the site using only his bare hands and a box of HTML, is taking a leave of absence to pursue some much-deserved R&R. Paul and I will be assuming the chores of converting the printed edition of the Oak Leaf to the Web, with the able assistance and server-management of Robert Falconer. The future is murky, as yet unclear, but I think I can make out the emergence of the Website version of the Oak Leaf as its own distinct entity, with its own voice, a unique personality, and an immediacy that can only be had through digital means--a mimeograph for the 90s.

In print or on the screen however, the message conveyed by the Oak Leaf will remain the same: that of Nu Alphs sharing their stories and their lives with one another, of friendships joined and carried out across miles and years, and of their meetings and gatherings, that will be best summed up to the absent with, ``You should have been there.''

How fortunate for all 900 or so of us, that through the medium of the Oak Leaf we can all be here, together, now and in the future, in this place we have built.

Editor Chris Hall '82 #870 and his son, Whitman

[Paul here. I'm afraid I've put Chris in quite a dither these last few issues. On several occasions, I have published pictures of Chris' son, Whitman. Chris is quite sure you are all convinced that he has had something to do with it. In fact, this is not true. I have done this on my own initiative. Of course, he does regularly send me rolls of undeveloped film, full of Whitman's latest tricks! Just kidding, Chris. Anyhow, this is to confirm that I published all of those pictures of Whitman without Chris' input or, for that matter, permission! He's really not one of those ``Let me show you some pictures...'' kind of guys. --Paul]