It was the late winter of 1970, a month before the Beatles broke up and two months before Kent State....
Dale Bax had been elected Pledgemaster. (Dale, of float fame, bore a striking resemblance to Howdy Doody, thus generating a score of nicknames - almost as many as Jay Curran...)
Anyway, it was one of those nights when you are rudely awakened from a sound sleep.
Earlier that evening there had been a pledge drop-off, normally no big deal.
But not that night.
No, sir.
It was Dr. Kring!
The rest is taken from Dr. Kring's memiore:
Our Greeks on campus were exercising their freedom to raom the countryside during their spring sememster initiation. I received a strange phonecall from a chap near Boyers. He told me, "I am holding four of your boys hostage until you come over. They left my chickens out!" After receiving directions I picked up the pledgemaster who had lost the four hostages and drove to an underground chicken ranch in an abandoned mine.
I learned that the lost pledges had wondered into the mine to obtain directions. Being city boys the didn't know that open gates permitted chickens to escape. I also learned that the man holding the hostages was a guard who should have stopped the instruders but was preoccupied with the gal with whom he was shacked up in his trailer. This fact improved my bargaining position.
The underground farm raised chickens in pens which accomodated about 400 each. The floor of each pen was wire mesh about three feet above the mine floor. The chickens which the pledges had "left out" were wandering below the wire mesh in about 10 to 12 inches of moist chicken manure. I had agreed with the guard that our hostages would catch and return the chickens to their pen.
After completing the task of catching the chickens, the pledges were covered with chicken manure. They removed their clothing which we wrapped in a tarp and placed in the trunk of my red Cadillac. After completing their showers with cold water from a garden hose, the pledgemaster and I returned cour "bare-assed" Adelphikos pledges to Lincoln Dorm!
For Dr. Kring, the Adels would be forever known as the "Chicken Shit" Fraternity!
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