SIGMA PI RUSH BROCHURE

By Mark Reed

For those of you who were fraternity men in the 60’s at UGA, the height of the Greek system on campus, you will remember rush brochures. Most every fraternity would publish one and distribute to potential pledge members who came through formal rush or pledged later.

In 1967-1968, I was Vice President of Sigma Pi Fraternity at UGA. As VP, one of my roles was as Rush Chairman. The lifeblood of a fraternity is rush. You have to rush and gain new members to pledge in order to sustain your membership. We had about 100 men, which meant we needed at least 25-30 pledges initiated each year for that to happen.

As the new Rush Chairman, I put together the new rush brochure and got it to our printer. Below is the final result.

The cover

The Creed

One of the great fraternity houses at UGA

The photo at the bottom left is of me having just presented the Outstanding Pledge Award to Buddy Murrow.

My sister, Cynthia, was Pledge Sweetheart along with Sweetheart Ann Delong

Letter from the President/Sage

Officers

Collage centerfold left side

Collage centerfold right side

Assorted Brotherhood photos

Letter from the Rush Chairman

Alumni

Our Jocks

Our Composit

Why Sigma Pi

The back cover with our crest

THE DAWG WALK

By Mark Reed

Most of us Dawg fans have witnessed a Dawg Walk at one of our home games at UGA. How many of you have actually participated in one? I’m not talking about any of you players, coaches or team assistants – I’m talking about a standard issue run of the mill fan.

For the uninitiated among you, let me define what a Dawg Walk is: The team is delivered by buses down Lumpkin Street to where access to Sanford Stadium starts. The team will exit the buses and walk the gauntlet, a hundred yards or so, between screaming fans on both sides, into the stadium to get ready for the game. This usually occurs a couple of hours before the game. This is about as close to one of the players most of us will get.

In 2004, I think it was, I took my Bible study buddy and his son, Basil and Dean Marais, immigrants from Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, to their first American football game. I wanted them to capture the entire experience, so naturally I took them to the Dawg Walk.

As we entered the crush of fans along the Dawg Walk, I told them to stay close to me as I weaved through the crowd to get us as close to the ropes that divided the throng from the players. I could see the players threading down the opening between the fans and I pushed closer. I have no idea how it happened, certainly not on purpose, but I somehow found myself walking beside David Green, the starting QB for the Dawgs. I looked up at him and he looked down at me with a big smile. I instantly realized that somehow I had gotten through the security barrier rope. I looked behind me and there were Basil and Dean scurrying along trying to keep up with me. The three of us were the only “civilians” walking with the team.

There was nothing I could do but continue on with the team, fully expecting to be grabbed by a police officer at any moment, along with my south African friends, and arrested. Basil and Dean had no idea that we were doing something not allowed. They were thinking that Mark sure does know how to show us a good time, going so far as to actually walk into the stadium with the team. All the while, David Green, David Pollack and all the other Dawg player we were marching in with just gave us big smiles.

As soon as we entered the stadium, I extricated myself and my friends from the team and made our way to our seats. Basil and Dean were ebullient and exhilarated from the experience. I decided not to tell them right then how close we came to spending the weekend in jail.

By the way, the Dawgs won…WOOF!

BLIND SHOT

By Mark Reed

I have done a lot of duck hunting over the years, with dad taking me on my first duck hunt in 1957 as an 11 year-old boy – over sixty years ago. Our family was visiting my grandparents, Ma and Pa Pepper, mom’s parents in Bloomfield Missouri over Thanksgiving. We hunted a place called Duck Creek WMA, next to the Mingo National Wildlife Refuge near Puxico, Missouri. Got my first two green head Mallards on that long ago hunt – the first of many. I have a big green head from another hunt mounted and hung on my office wall.

My last duck hunt was in Stuttgart, Arkansas with lifelong friends. It was January of 2018, almost exactly sixty years since my first hunt with dad. That leads me to the real purpose of this story – specifically about one particular shot during that hunt. Anyone who has hunted a great deal will have their “one particular shot” story. This is mine.

It was freezing, as is often the case, in fact the water in much of the pond in front of our blind was frozen, except for a perimeter around our decoys. Our guide had installed a “water crusher” in the center of the decoys, which was run by a generator in the woods. Basically, the crusher circulated the water to keep it from freezing, so the ducks would have somewhere to land among the decoys. Our blind was in a great spot and it turned out to be a great hunt, with us six guys knocking down seventeen or so that morning.

Anyway, as we sat in our blind, this overhead formation of ducks turned and came flying in to our decoys, having been called in by our guide. As they flared to land, we jumped up and opened fire. Several went down, but this one particular duck flew directly toward me and over my head to escape into the woods behind our blind.

Now you have to remember that this all happened in a matter of seconds and those little boogers are fast. As the one passed over me, heading out of sight, I couldn’t really sight in on him. I leaned forward and twisted my body while swinging my shotgun (dad’s trusty Remington Sportsman 48) backwards over my shoulder. As the duck flew out of vision, I shot.

The odds of hitting a blind shot like that are very small, and since you could not even see the bird, you might not even know if you hit it, or just scared it to death. In this case, I knew I hit  – there appeared a burst of feathers in my peripheral vision, which softly drifted down as a snow of feathers in the air. A one in a thousand shot. Our dog retrieved the bird.

I don’t claim to be a marksman, and obviously there was a lot of luck in a shot like that, but I like to think that sixty years of practice prepared me in some small way for that “Blind Shot.”

As an aside, I have shot many Wood Ducks over the years. I think they are the prettiest of the ducks. I never had one mounted until one from this trip. He joined my Green Head Mallard on my office wall.