DEKE NEWS

Psi Brothers gathered last June at Psi founder’s newly cleaned grave marker in Magnolia Cemetery in Mobile, Ala., left to right: Duggan Ellis ’82, John Nielsen ’83, Black Chaffe ’83, John Calhoun ’82, Semmes Favrot ’82, and and Rob “Catfish” Clark ’83.

for his work cultivating the fraternity’s early prestige and its continued development.

Brother Webster was the primary author of DKE’s first constitution, is honored as the founder of the Psi Chapter, and was instrumental in the push to develop the southern wing of DKE chapters.

Before settling into a law career after Yale, Webster and several of his Yale compatriots headed to California to take part in the great gold rush of 1849. Brother Webster thus became a genuine “49’er.” The experience extracted the ultimate toll. Webster returned home ‘a wreck’ – and died of consumption in 1850 at age 25, preventing him from seeing the birth of four Southern DKE chapters he had helped create.

At Yale, Webster was President of the Calliopean Society (a Yale literary and debating society), Class Orator, and Commencement Speaker.

Brother Webster was descended from John B. Webster, who was a colonial governor of Connecticut. The founder of Psi was also a cousin to a long list of famous Americans; they include Rutherford B. Hayes, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush – three Dekes who would serve as U.S. President – as well as Noah Webster, of dictionary fame, singer Janis Joplin, TV personality Johnny Carson, author William Faulkner, poet Emily

Dickinson and actress Katharine Hepburn.

The Deke Quarterly Turns 140

The Delta Quarterly was born 140 years ago this month. First edition of January 12, 1883, edited by Whitelaw Reid, who also worked for the New York Tribune, con- tained “a full page vignette in colors of the arms of our fraternity as revised by the last convention … the poem “Our Escutcheon”, contributed by an old graduate… a full account of the proceedings of the last Convention, so far as proper to be published … and Chapter Letters giving full account of condition and doings of each with notes of triumphs etc. for year past. [This latter inclusion was a first of any in the Fraternity world.]

Deke Trivia: Did You Know?

. . . that a Deke is credited with laying the foundation for the field of brain surgery. Harvey Cushing (Phi-Yale 1891) is considered the father of modern Neurosurgery, having developed or introduced to North America many techniques for brain and nervous system operations, including local anesthetics, the tourniquet, oxygen level monitoring, and a non-invasive way to measure blood pressure. His most famous discovery, “Cushing’s Disease” is caused by a malfunction of the pituitary gland. Brother Cushing was also an author who received the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for the biography of Sir William Osler. The U.S. Postal Service issued a 45-cent postage stamp in Cushing’s honor in June 1988, part of the Great American series.