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DKE Fall 1962 Pledge Class. (23 pledges; missing Bill Tennille.) |
Picture it. It’s fall 1962 at the University of North Carolina. Amidst a decade of change, a new group of freshmen have landed on campus and are finding their way, finding where they fit.
It’s Rush Week, and the new students have woken up to find invitations slid under their dorm room doors from SAE, Phi Delt, Zeta Psi, Sigma Nu, Sigma Chi, KA… But one incoming freshman has another fraternity in mind.
Bill Schmidt ’66 has already heard good things about Delta Kappa Epsilon from a friend back home In Jacksonville, Florida. Bryan Simpson ’65 is a sophomore in the DKE House, and he tells Bill that he’d be a good fit there, too. It’s a place for men who are equal parts “gentleman, scholar, and jolly good fellow.” So even though he has eight rush invitations already slipped under his door, it’s the DKE House where Bill is headed.
It’s clear from the very first minute he steps inside the front door that DKE is the place for Bill.
“I had a wonderful, warm feeling,” he said about that first moment. “I know that here was where I wanted to be.” Surry Roberts ’62, who just graduated and is heading for UNC med school, spends time with Bill, telling him what it meant to be a Deke. Even though it’s only the second night of rush, he makes his final decision to “shake-up” right away. And then, he starts to help build a pledge class.
Quickly joining him are two friends who had gone to Robert E. Lee High School with him in Jacksonville—Mike Hoyt ’66 (who would receive the 1851 Award in 2008) and Hap Stewart ’66. Next came Joe Churchill ’66, Alex Shuford ’66, Tom Roberts ’66 (2016 1851 Award recipient), Bill Tennille ’66, John Edgerton ’66, Lyons Gray ’66, Norton Willis ’66, Cammie Harris ’66, George Butler ’66, and Max Chapman ’66. All told, 23 men would pledge to DKE in 1962. And although they all knew they were meant to be Dekes, it’s unlikely they had an inkling of how intertwined their lives would become, or that the DKE motto of “Friends from the Heart, Forever” would still be ringing true nearly 60 years later.
Early Leadership at the House
Bill showed his leadership early on at the house. Within a few weeks, he was already in charge of the fraternity freshman “Bust Dook” float parade for the UNC-Duke football game and turning the DKE basement into the best place to party after the games. “We toggled between gentlemen, scholars, and jolly good fellows as much as we could.”
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1965-66 House officers: Left to right: Jimmy Davis ’67, Rush Chairman; Tom Roberts, MD’66, Vice-President; Bill Schmidt ’66, President (Brother Beta); Alex Shuford ’66, Treasurer; and Tommy Crudup ’66, Secretary (Scribe). |
Weeknights are for studying, but on the weekends, memories are made. There are Thursday night sorority mixers with the Pi Phis, Chi Os, and Tri-Delts, Friday night jukebox parties in the DKE House basement, Saturday Night combo parties with the Zetes and SAEs.
Over the next several years, DKE National recognizes the Beta chapter with the Lion Trophy, the crown jewel of DKE awards, which is given to the chapter which best exemplifies the core values of being a gentleman, a scholar, and a jolly good fellow in Chapter Improvement, Alumni Relations, Scholarship, and Community Service. They win three times in quick succession: in 1962, 1964, and 1966 (the chapter goes on to win a total of six times.)
As a freshman Bill is elected to the DKE representative of the Germans Club, founded in 1890 as an interfraternity social club. The club, which spanned thirteen separate fraternities, held two concerts each year, Fall Germans and Spring Germans. He books entertainers in Memorial Hall: Louis Armstrong (a group of Germans Club officers and representatives had dinner with Louis and his band the night before the Saturday show and Bill sang “Hello Dolly” with him); a young Woody Allen for $1,750 for a 40-minute standup routine (“He was a weirdo,” Bill remembers), Mary Wells, The Four Preps.
He becomes the DKE Brother Beta his senior year, and president of the Germans Club. As the events got more popular, Bill becomes more creative about the venue. So, he and Geoff Parker ’66 (who was the Sigma Nu freshman representative with Bill, and now Germans Club vice-president) go to Durham and rent out Planter’s Tobacco Warehouse for their Spring Germans event. They are smart about it: procuring liability insurance, contacting the Durham fire marshal, and meeting and inviting the UNC Campus Police Chief Beaumont in advance of the event. The event is a big hit: Lou Christie brings down the house with his hit song “Lightnin’ Strikes,” The Toys sing their hit “Lover’s Concerto.”
“It was a wonderful education,” Bill says about his four years at UNC. In addition to the classroom education that would advance his career in advertising and public relations, DKE taught him leadership, how to work with people, and the mechanics of government.
“It’s No Exaggeration to Credit Bill for Rescuing this Place from Ruin”
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Bill, Jr. and John Schmidt with Eddie Caldwell. |
The years after graduation pass quickly. Bill had married Sandra, and they had two sons, Bill, Jr. and John. When Bill, Jr. got accepted to attend UNC in 1983, he decided to join Beta DKE as his father had done before him. But, unfortunately for him, the house was a vastly different place than it had been in the heady ’60s.
Mike Hoyt ’66 remembers what the house looked like in 1983: “Our fraternity, like most back then, was teetering on extinction. The house was in terrible physical shape and had become a campus party center, complete with a front yard mudslide and a basement swimming pool. Breaking windows was an amateur sport.”
Winburne King ’68 (2018 1851 Award recipient), who had been in the same pledge class as Tee Baur ’68 (2011 1851 Award recipient), was serving as the alumni president of the house in the early ’80s. He called Bill and asked if he would consider taking over as alumni president of the DKE House. “Bill, I know you love this place,” Winburne said. It looked like a thankless job, but Bill didn’t even think twice about the opportunity to bring the house back to the kind of place where he had spent formative years, a place of tradition and legacy. “It was a very easy ‘YES’ for me!” he says.
For the next two years, Bill undertook what Mike Hoyt ’66 calls “a one-man crusade to bring the Deke house back from the dark times of neglect and into a new era of pride and prosperity.” With grit, hard work, and his trademark charm, Bill brought back the house he knew and loved for a whole new generation of DKEs. In 2012, his brothers honored him with the 1851 Award, stating, “It is not an exaggeration to credit Bill for having rescued this place from ruin.”
“All Through the DKE Connection”
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Bill and Mary Dudley. First Blind Date in Mobile, Alabama. Mardi Gras, March 2, 1992. |
A few years after the DKE resurgence, Bill lost his wife Sandra. It was his DKE brothers who mourned with him, Bill Tennille ’66 driving to show up on his doorstep the morning of her death. It was also through his DKE connections that he later met Mary Dudley, his “original Renaissance woman” to whom he has been married for the past 25 years. “I fell for her the first time I saw her,” he says about their meeting on a blind date at Mobile Mardi Gras set up by Sigma Nu Geoff Parker ’66, who served with him in the Germans Club, and his wife Nancy McLean Parker ’67. “It’s all been through that DKE connection.”
While Bill invested so much in DKE, he also remained active with UNC-Chapel Hill, co-chairing the Class of 1966 reunion committee with Jackie Smith Cooke ’66, organizing 25th, 40th, 45th, and 50th reunions.
After Bill, Jr. ’88 joined the house, his brother John ’89 also became a Beta DKE. On the weekends, the pair would make their way to Eddie Caldwell Drive to spend time with Eddie Caldwell, who had long since retired but had no intention of stopping his influence over generations of Beta DKEs.
A New Generation of Dekes
It’s been decades since the days when Bill, Jr. and John were in college. Today, their own sons are undergrads, and, naturally, they are choosing to continue their grandfather’s legacy and join DKE. John’s son Turner ’20 graduated this year as a Beta DKE and Bill, Jr.’s son Magnus ’23 is a sophomore at the Phi Alpha Chapter at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. If their grandfather’s journey is any indication, this is just the beginning of a lifetime of “Friends from the Heart, Forever.”
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Three generations of Dekes: John ’89, Turner ’20, and Bill ’66. |
