In a letter dated October 24, 1978, Bro. Bill Bamberger describes a number of new initiatives – as well as old ones rekindled – the undergraduate chapter was undertaking at the time. This is something I grabbed completely at random from amongst the unsorted material in the chapter archives and it turned out to describe the infancy or rebirth of probably a dozen different traditions still in place at the Hall: pledge tests, the Tattler, guest speakers, maintaining the general registry, inviting alumni to meet at the Hall around Homecoming, Parents Dinner, and on and on. I found the frankness of this letter – and its fond praise of Bro. Skip Awalt, so recently deceased – surprising and refreshing, a candid account of a time when the Hall’s long-term health and sense of self sounds especially tenuous. I was also struck by how many of the names he mentions are readily familiar to anyone involved in the last three decades of Hall life.
In the course of the first page of the letter, Bro. Bamberger used a term we do not allow to be recorded and I obscured it through application of a removable “sticky” tab and some magic marker applied in turn to that tab. The texts and materials of course remain whole in the document itself and I take special pleasure in the anonymous circle someone later penciled around that word to mark the taboo. The letter’s second page includes the full text excerpted above regarding thirty one bids. I was active the semester we handed out twenty one and had always assumed that was the record, but no, not even close. The third scan from this letter includes a carbon-copy list that reads like a Who’s Who of Xi: Hop Swift, Skip Awalt, Herb Bodman and many others.
There are a lot of documents like this waiting to be preserved. The work of the siblings has been magnificent when it comes to preserving this ourselves and I say that with absolute sincerity. There are decades of history inviting us to peruse them, sitting in the vault – much of it already sorted and organized! – and it’s my hope to be able to make all of that available to you as best I can. Many, many snaps to Bro. Peter Pendergrass, Sis. Courtney Rosenthal, Sis. Fiona Matthews, Sis. Kelly Garner and countless others who have sorted and organized and scanned and otherwise made the vault a significantly less scary place than it could be. We are truly lucky, as an organization, to have these materials available and it is incumbent upon us to figure out the best way to preserve them so that future generations of Xi can look back and realize abruptly that this or that innocuous document may be the only portrait of whatever features loom large in the chapter’s future life.
A new book from Sis. Melanie Sumner will be coming out in July 2010. You can read an excerpt from The Ghost of Milagro Creek at 
