DEKE NEWS

Oklahoma Deke Leads the Tin Can Sailors

Garcia Menocal, one of seven Dekes who have served as national presidents.

Loving the Monthly Grind in New Media

Another Deke has reached the top. Early last year, Tin Can Sailors, a non-profit association of 10,000 veteran U.S. Navy destroyer sailors, elected Terry Miller, Rho Lambda ’69, as the group’s president. During his first months at the helm, Brother Miller worked to orchestrate a merger with the 1,500-member Cruiser Sailors Association, but those plans were scuttled in November.

From its headquarters in Somerset, Mass., Tin Can Sailors has helped secure $2.5 million in project grants to help preserve ten navy ships and their history. The group also maintains a library there of over 8,000 books on U.S. Naval history.

It sits across the Taunton River from Battleship Cove Museum, which contains the largest collection of World War II ships including destroyers, a submarine, two PT boats, and a soviet missile corvette.

Brother Miller sailed aboard the USS George K. Mackenzie (DD-836) out of Yokosuka, Japan from 1968 to 1970, with many of Miller’s missions occurring off the coast of North Vietnam. During WW II and the Korean War, the destroyer provided antisubmarine screening and battleship and carrier support duties. It was retired in 1976.

Brother Miller is a historian, researcher and long-time newspaper man who wrote for a small-town Texas weekly before it succumbed to the realities of print media today. He has contributed to every issue of Tin Can Sailors’ magazine since 2002 and recently began contributing to the Deke Quarterly. In last summer’s issue, he wrote about two Dekes vying for the Republican presidential nomination of 1886. In this issue, check out his story about Delta Chi Deke and Cuban president Mario

Since departing Bloomsburg University with a degree in English and a masters in instructional technologies, Shawn Rosler, Chi Rho ’00, has pursued a meandering career with many stops, all at the intersection of teaching and digital media. He’s been an adjunct professor at Bloomsburg since 2017, but his favorite gig to date? Host of the nation’s first culinary podcast, Coarse Grind, which he launched in 2014.

More than eight years on, Brother Rosler approaches his 200th episode. In shows of gives a view of Rosler’s penchant for subjective, almost fan boy exaggeration or just plain crazy content. “I only want to have fun and share interviews that tell the backstory of the best chefs in the country. I’m looking for real life, to hear the ideas that got the chefs to where they are, and the unpredictable nature of the biz.”

Notable guests have been Christopher Kimball of America’s Test Kitchen; Steven Raichlen, of Barbecue University; and Art Smith, Oprah Winfrey’s longtime personal chef. Others have been Bravo TV’s Top Chef alums Ilan Hall, Dakota Weiss and Laura Cole. Cole, former chef at Denali National Park, told of having to pull a sled through temps of -50F to get ingredients into the kitchen at Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole.

Ilan Hall won the second season of Top Chef, and Weiss is executive chef for Los Angeles’ luxury hotel W.

30 to 60 minutes, Rosler airs opinions – his own and those of expert chefs, cutting a wide swath of topics from music to bartending, along with tales spun by chefs about their culinary art.

Coarse Grind’s subtitle, “gonzo culinary podcast,”

Drop in to see current or past podcasts on his YouTube Channel, here, or on Facebook @CoarseGrindPodcast.

Five years ago, after completing his 50th podcast, Rosler said he wasn’t quitting his day job anytime soon. Here we are in 2023, and he still hangs on to his better paying pursuits. Meantime, he’s loving every bit of the monthly grind and sharing crazy times with this wife, Greta, and three sons. a semester off for various reasons.

With several chapter expansions underway and spring recruitment just ahead, DKE appears poised to pass the 3,000-member mark for the first time by the end of the academic year. For historical comparison, DKE had 1,161 members in fall 2012 and 1,993 members in pre-Covid fall 2019.

DKE Membership Is On the Rise

DKE is enjoying some solid post-pandemic growth, according to Turner Spears, Director of Administrative Services. The current active membership role, at the close of fall 2022 recruitments, was near 2,700 undergraduates. That total reflects a low inactive rate—when members take

The growth is significant as operations are improved when chapters are competitively sized for their campuses, Spears notes. Strength in numbers provides greater purchasing power in housing, for hosting successful events, or simply to avoid the fear of extinction with each pledge class.

“From a strategic level, a beefed up DKE could be beneficial in weathering the predicted college enrollment

Expansion Notes: DKE Returns to West Point, Works With Other Interest Groups

slump that is projected to span five or six years,” says Turner. “From HQs perspective, stronger membership allows us to roll out more and improved services to chapters – like a stronger chapter consultant program, better online tools for chapter management, larger conventions, and networking initiatives.”

A Weekend to Remember at Lambda-Kenyon

The alumni reunion at Kenyon College on a spectacular fall weekend in late October drew an exceptionally good crowd – a couple dozen alums returning to the beautiful campus in Gambier, Ohio, barely outnumbering a passionate group of 22 active brothers. DKE Executive Director Doug Lanpher presented the Delta Award to the full chapter. Lambda had been named most improved chapter at the DKE Convention in Charlotte last summer -- but it is always special to bring it home and deliver it to the full complement of brothers who earned the award.

Delta Kappa Epsilon’s expansion of the past couple of years continues in a positive direction. The latest growth comes from a return to West Point. The DKE Board of Directors approved an interest group of 30 men as an Associate Chapter in November.

DKE had a chapter, Alpha Gamma, operating at the U.S. Military Academy in the early 2000s and a colony that faded out in 2018. The Academy does not recognize fraternities, but it doesn’t seem to keep them from forming. Students are grouped into different corps at West Point, and our interest group hopes that the fraternity will enable them to more easily socialize with men from different corps.

Cadets of the new Associate Chapter, Timothy Clements, ’24, and Ryan Santoro, ’23, are pictured in a visit to the West Point cemetery on December 4. They paid respects to DKE founder Edward Van Schoonhoven Kinsley, who’s buried there, as is another Deke, John Biddle, Omicron chapter, who served as the Academy’s Superintendent during WWI.

Morgan McElroy, assistant director of chapter services, notes that DKE is teeming with expansion opportunities this spring – with interest groups at Villanova and Central Michigan, as well as getting the green light for chapter slots at Oklahoma State and Penn State.

Exciting opportunities are also in the works for possible expansion beginning next fall at University of Delaware and Indiana University and, following that, exploring potential for chapters next year at Cal-Irvine, Maryland, San Diego State, Tulane, and Union College.

The hit of alumni weekend was “The Lambda Express,” a school bus that A.J. House, ’80, had converted into an RV. Brother House and co-pilot Jeff Spear ‘78 drove the Express to Gambier from west central Illinois for the festivities.

As is always the case, this alumni weekend witnessed guys who were great friends in college reuniting, in some cases for the first time in decades, but quick to rekindle the friendship formed years before.

The Lodge, on the site of the first structure in North America ever built in North America exclusively for fraternity use, is in the best shape it has been in decades. Members built the lodge in 1854, after the college removed its ban against fraternities and even supplied the land and lumber.

DKE Chapters Raise $22K for Movember

Each year, Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity participates in a month of philanthropy fundraising that benefits the Movember Foundation, a leader in men’s health awareness, especially mental health, prostate cancer, and testicular cancer. From November through early December, 16 DKE chapters collectively raised just shy of $22,000 for the 2022 “Challenge.” That total meant DKE’s fundraising over two years reached more than $58,000 for men’s health.

This year’s top earning chapters were Nu Alpha-Northeastern ($4,200), Tau Alpha-McGill ($3,000), Phi Epsilon-Minnesota ($2,400), and Alpha Phi-Toronto ($1,900).

Imagine this handsome Deke with facial hair! One of Nu Alpha-Northeastern’s newest members, Christopher Wilk, was the true Movember Man; he was the top individual fundraiser this past fall among all DKE chapters.

Grave of Psi Founder and Gold Rush ’49er Refurbished

Psi-Alabama chapter alums recently located the grave of Cyprian George Webster, Phi-Yale, class of 1848. Brother Webster, buried in Mobile, Ala., graduated from Yale a few years after our fifteen Delta Kappa Epsilon founding fathers. He was considered “the most influential of active Dekes” at the time, per a history in the 1910 Catalog, especially

Chris Rice Inducted into Beta Chapter’s 1851 Society

DKE’s Beta alums have inducted Chris Rice, ’94, into the chapter’s top honorary society for alumni, The 1851 Society. The society is named for the year Beta was established on the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill.

Brother Rice joins 13 others who have been inducted since the society’s inception in 2009. Members have provided valuable and dedicated service to Beta for an extended period of time.

“Chris Rice is the kind of Deke alumnus who has sustained us over all these long years,” says Jim Gray, ’70, who administers the society for the chapter. “We were the first fraternity at Chapel Hill, and we remain the best.”

There were no 1851 Society awards given in Covid year 2021. However, the society

Members did vote in 2021 to name longtime house manager Meg Miller an honorary member; she was recognized in the 2022 ceremony, on Saturday, Oct. 29.

Rice and Miler were made members at a ceremony on the iconic red stairs at the DKE House. Family members and pledge brothers spoke about Brother Rice’s long service to the chapter. Rice and Miller received pins and certificates, and their names will be added to the permanent brass plaque in the Beta bar.