Second Family Values

This past Tuesday, February 13th, was my father's birthday.  He would've been 96 this year, had he not had such an aversion to doctors and their craft. He had a number of verbal terms which he would use that may not have been as accurate as he may have wanted, but we always knew what he meant when he spoke them. For example, a bush or flowery growth what you and I might call shrubbery, he might refer to as "scrubbery". Or in cases where he had enjoyed something a great deal, such as a particular meal or a song or movie which he'd just seen, he would say, "I likeded that". It was his own phrasing and we all just went with the flow when he dropped one on us.

Five years ago this week I had the great fortunate spend a few hours with some people who are near and dear to me, most of whom I had not seen in 30 years or more.  They are brothers and sisters from the Alpha Sigma chapter of my college fraternity. Now before you go off thinking about what kind of fraternity you may have been a member of, consider what fraternity yours truly may have been a member of. Got it in your head? Good. Now erase THAT fraternity's name and replace it with Kappa Kappa Psi. Kappa Kappa Psi is the National Honorary Band Fraternity. That's right. Some of you probably didn't know that I was a musician at one time. I played trumpet for over two decades and also played the french horn and mellophone as well. I don't play the horn any longer following a partially-severed nerve which occurred during a rather extensive wisdom tooth extraction on Valentine’s Day a number of years ago. 

I remember that my first knowledge of Kappa Kappa Psi came during Rush Week at the University of Tampa in the fall of 1979. I was so unknowing of so many things when I hit that campus. I had no idea about how fraternities worked, outside of seeing the movie "Animal House". That should tell you what I thought about fraternities. I remember walking through the rows of tables under the trees which lined the sidewalks that led to the student union building on campus. One of the gents at the table asked if I was enrolled in any music courses and I answered in the affirmative. He told me about KKPsi and how much they would like to have me as a member. I was intrigued and told him that I was interested. They told me that they would speak to me at band rehearsal in a few days and we'd go from there.  

It was my first real contact with anyone at the school other than administrators and the folks at the campus bookstore. What I didn't know at the time was how important these people would become to me over the next year or so.
I was such a "fish out of water" at the time. I had yet to reach my 18th birthday. I was not only new to the school, but I was new to the state of Florida, the city of Tampa and a bedroom other than the only one I'd known since I was born. Mind you, that bedroom was located in Stamford, Connecticut. I knew absolutely no one and even though my parents were only 50 miles away, they might as well have been 500 miles away. I ran into the guys from KKPsi at rehearsals and they told me about how the pledge process went.  I believed I was ready to make that happen.  The pledge process taught me a great many things about people in general. I'd never spent time around not only from other states but from other countries. The fraternity had all of those things. A fraternity of musicians differs from most frats in that the common link is already established--music. Whether it be instrumental or vocal, it was a common bond. When you are in a band fraternity partying isn't a top priority, as you are often the band which is playing at the event. If we get out on the dance floor who's gonna be left to play the tunes?

It was a group that taught me about trust. How to trust people who would always be there for you if you needed them. Not just at that moment, but into the future as well. I'd never encountered such a group before. I didn't know it at the time, but this was right were I needed to be at this time in my life. There were many events which took place during the pledge period, but none stands out like one in particular for me. 

It was the night of February 22, 1980 when the USA met the USSR in a semifinal game of the Lake Placid Olympic Games. We'd had a performance that night and as soon as we were done with it we rushed to find a television to watch whatever time remained in the game. I grew up as a New York Rangers fan and hockey was a big thing to me. But in Florida the game was an unknown thing for the most part. The Tampa Bay Lightning were still 12 years from playing their first games at the Florida State Fairgrounds.  But this game transcended the fact that most Sunshine State residents didn't know the difference between a hockey puck and a urinal puck.  This was about the country being represented by a group of college kids, like myself, playing against Russian professionals.

The game aired on WTSP-TV Channel 10, which was the local ABC affiliate at the time. I don't remember at what point we picked up the game but I do remember the cheer that we al let out when team captain Mike Eruzione took a wrist shot, on his off-leg, and the puck traveled past Vladimir Myshkin to put the USA in front at exactly the halfway point of period 3. The last 10 minutes seem to drag on for an hour. With a few seconds left we all started screaming and could barely hear play-by-play announcer Al Michaels exclaim, "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!!!!"  It still brings chills to me when I think about it. But that moment is something that we will all carry with us.  

After I survived the pledge process I was elected to the position of Parliamentarian for the chapter. It was merely a position in title only as most meetings were so filled with jokes and laughter that very few fines ever got handed out and even fewer were ever paid by the offenders. The following year I became the treasurer of the chapter. I'm not sure what I did given the fact that we had about $17.48 in our bank account most of the time anyway. One overdraft charge would've bankrupted the organization into oblivion at any moment. We were lucky in that while we didn't have a fraternity "house", our meeting room in H.B. Plant Hall sat directly below one of the iconic minarets which can be seen on campus and in many pictures of the Tampa skyline. We all took our lives into our hands in taking the dilapidated spiral staircases which led up to the top of the minaret which gave a spectacular view of "River City".

I went on to play in the UT concert band as well as the jazz band where I got to meet John Pizzarelli while he was at UT. I also got to play with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Band for six seasons. Many of my brothers played in that band along with me. It was a thrill to be a part of that band despite having some of the gaudiest uniforms ever devised.  We had bright orange long-sleeved polyester shirts which had Errol Flynn-style ruffled sleeves (think Jerry Seinfeld's pirate shirt only in the color of a fresh pumpkin), collars that came out to the shoulder, white pants, white shoes, a red sash on our hip with the Bucco Bruce logo on it and, for special occasions, a red hat a la Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch. (Millennials please see the google for obscure references of things you SHOULD already know about).

I left the Tampa Bay area in the fall of 1988, keeping in touch primarily with only one of my fraternity brothers, my great friend Rick Mayer. But the social media world opened doors which allowed me to make contact with the group which I had lost touch with over the previous two decades. I became Facebook friends with a few of the members, most prominently Kris Neldner, the wife of my "big brother" Tim Neldner. My blogs over the past few years have made many fans but Kris may be my one of my biggest fans. I'd heard about a gathering of the brothers and sisters of Tau Beta Sigma which took place in 2016 but I missed it by about a week.  My brother Eric Dobbie had a birthday in January and I commented to him that I would probably see him in a few weeks when in Tampa. Kris picked up on this immediately (3 minutes later) and asked about my planned visit.  And that's where it started.  About a month later we were all set to meet at Lee Roy Selmon's Steakhouse near the former site of Tampa Stadium. I had a great time seeing some people who were, for lack of a better term, my second family.  At a time when I knew absolutely no one in a city I barely knew anything about these people helped me get connections to jobs, friends and the one thing we all had in common- music.  For that I am, and always will be, eternally grateful.  

I believe that if 2020 and the time that has passed since then has taught us anything it’s that we need to be more appreciative of those long-term friendships and those new friendships just as well. There are people whom we’ve not seen in person in many, many months. Some of us have friends whom we will never see again. And that is tragic on so many levels. So when the time comes to be able to see each other again, make sure those people know how important they are to you. You never know when, or if, you’ll ever see them again. 

I had a great time with everyone that evening and I look forward to being at the next gathering, whenever that may be. In 2019 it was on February 13th. My late father's birthday. And as I walked to my rented Kia Optima in the parking lot after the event had ended I thought of my dad and the previous three hours, and said aloud, "I likeded that!"

I'm just sayin'