True Gentlemen by John Hechinger

Author:John Hechinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

THE DAY AFTER I met with the students, I visited Counts’s father, Jack Counts Jr., whose loyalty to SAE has been a defining aspect of his life. Counts greeted me at his photography company, Candid Color Systems, in a nondescript office park in Oklahoma City. The idea for his company, whose bread and butter is photographing fraternity and sorority members, graduations, and sports, began when he was an Oklahoma SAE and made extra money photographing sorority women at pajama parties for 75 cents apiece. In preparation for our meeting, Counts had laid out generations of SAE memorabilia in velvet-covered scrapbooks adorned with gold crests. Counts, who is in his late sixties, flipped through a yearbook and found a picture of his grandfather, a student senate president who had been one of the first presidents of the Oklahoma chapter. His son would have been the fourth generation at the chapter.

“These traditions go back to the founding of the university,” Counts told me. “It tears you up inside that this happened. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This wasn’t what we were about.”

The former SAE social chairman has shown his devotion to the university in many ways. Five months after my visit, President Boren inducted Counts into the Seed Sower Society, meaning he had given at least $1 million to the University of Oklahoma. In his case, he was singled out for support of athletics, including the Headington Hall project and the Sooner Air Program. Counts ferries coaches around on his Cessna jet when they make scouting missions to high schools across the country.

Counts picked up a dog-eared purple volume, entitled the “Songs of Sigma Alpha Epsilon,” published in 1921. “I can tell you I took a look through it to try to find that song,” he told me. “It wasn’t anywhere.”

Some of the lyrics have a nostalgic Southern flavor, such as “The Beacon Song”: “In the happy, sunny South, SAE first saw the light / And arose to be a beacon in the land.” There is also the old standard, “Sing, Brothers, Sing,” a rousing work that evokes straw hats and barbershop quartets:

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