Reunion Highlights Unlikely 77-Year History of a High School Fraternity
This is not to be another typical high school or college class reunion.
Instead, on September 9, 2006 well over 200 men, (total of 400 attendees) aged
26 (Jacob Lohser) to 90 (Paul Milner), will gather as brothers at the Beachwood
Marriott, not to celebrate the anniversary of their graduation but the founding
of their Cleveland Heights High School fraternity established 77 years earlier,
one month before the stock market crash of 1929.
Cleveland, OH (PRWEB) September 7, 2006 -- This is not to be another typical
high school or college class reunion. Instead, on September 9, 2006 well over
200 men, (total of 400 attendees) aged 26 (Jacob Lohser) to 90 (Paul Milner),
will gather as brothers at the Beachwood Marriott, not to celebrate the
anniversary of their graduation but the founding of their Cleveland Heights High
School fraternity established 77 years earlier www.batboys.org, one month
before the stock market crash of 1929.
Why don't we form a club?
Here’s how the fraternity’s founder, Bob Bachman (later a physician), described
that seminal moment: Dick Lustig and I were sitting on the front steps of our
apartment building, our bicycles propped against a terraced rock garden. "Why
don’t we form a club?" I asked Dick. So we called up Harvey Lederman and Bernie
Goldstein and talked it over."
The first meeting of Beta Alpha Tau was held September 19, 1929, the last in
1997.
Are we talking about a high school fraternity here? No mistaking it, B.A.T. was
a fraternity in every sense of the word, made up of everything bad (exclusion)
and everything good (brotherhood) that the word implies. Banned, as were all
Heights High Greeks in the mid-‘50s, it went underground to survive. When the
school board realized this aberration was indelible, it accepted B.A.T.’s
existence as an extracurricular club (as in bowling or chess club) provided an
adult adviser oversee its meetings and hold its members responsible for any
infraction of laws or school-dictated rules. The boys agreed, selecting me (then
a "passive" B.A.T. in my late 20s and not too responsible myself) as its
board-approved adviser. And the fraternity lived on.
But it wasn’t just the natural desire of young boys to form a brotherhood that
kept it alive. Nor was it the brotherhood’s at-best tenuous adherence to
dictates. It was the embracing of an idea unique in its time. Though its members
were of one religion (Jewish), as was the fraternal norm back then, B.A.T.
decided to banish its religious oneness. The mixing of religions became
commonplace in the higher Greek societies of the late 20th Century, but it was a
radical, unheard-of idea when initiated by these16-year-old high school boys in
the early ‘60s.
By 1970 the B.A.T. roster, no longer looking like a row of donor plaques at the
local synagogue, was studded with names like Scicolone, Kackloudis McCarthy and
Olmstead (and later with the likes of Ma and Ishikawa). This easing into
homogenization did not come from the school administration nor from the boys’
parents, themselves carefully self-segregated in those days, it came from
within.
It just happened.
What’s "unlikely" about B.A.T.? Its being alive today. It appeared to die a
natural death in 1997, an anachronism which had outlasted its rivals by a good
40 years. But brothers insisted upon remaining brothers, most of them friends
for life. One typical enclave, a dozen septuagenarian passives, still meets
every week as "The Monday Lunch Bunch." Dozens of brothers are related as
legacied sons, cousins, nephews or in-laws.
What’s become of all these brothers? Most, from their affluent suburb of
Cleveland Heights, went on to college, then into the professions: medicine, law,
education, business, the arts, the military. Many, troublemakers in their callow
youth as active members, gained local renown, some, national. Albert Ratner ’46
is CEO of Forest City Enterprises, builder of San Francisco’s new
Bloomingdale’s. Another, Allan Jacobs ‘47, was San Francisco’s city planner for
many years. One heads up a national medical foundation (Louis Levy). a
university (Jeffrey Lieberman), a bank (Robert Goldberg). Several are authors.
The Belkin Brothers, Jules and Mike are a Midwest household name as impresarios
of entertainment, the first to bring in the first names: Frank, Elvis, Madonna.
Doctor and Lawyers? Dime a dozen. Others have operated investment firms, ad,
auto and insurance agencies. Teachers, coaches, a fire fighter, a cop…you get
the idea.
While B.A.T. folded in 1997 as an active fraternity at Heights High, it’s never
been forgotten. A year ago a few passives, 60 and considerably older, decided
they’d press their brothers’ nostalgia buttons by floating a reunion. Could
there possibly be any interest out there? Over a dozen other brothers quickly
formed a steering committee and within months the reunion of a high school
fraternity that no longer existed was officially on. With an attendance of
nearly half the brothers alive today, it turned out to be the biggest and – all
agreed – the best in B.A.T.’s three-quarter-century history. Just to see the
brothers, separated by as much as four generations reminiscing, laughing, and
back-slapping, and to hear their off-key singing of our raunchy frat songs of
old, was worth the nearly 3000-mile journey many took to get there.
Founder Bachman wrote these prophetic words in 1934: Has the idea of a permanent
club carrying on among men out in the world and sprouting from this very
organization ever entered your heads? Our holding together is the key to the
success of this dream. Keep it in mind and it will broaden your outlook no end.
Let us stick together as long as we may.
Nine years after our "death" we’re still together and mean to stay that way.
After all, our hundredth anniversary is just 23 years away.
www.betaalphatau.com
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Page updated
12/21/2006
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