In Memory of Burk “Buck” Delventhal

David Fitzharris

Fall, 1965 Pledge Class

Top Row:  John Osborn (197), Jim Hunt (207), Ron Pomares (196)

Middle Row:  Doug (John) Campbell (199), John Linder (202), Tom Hart (200), John Harris (208)

Bottom Row:  Lee Foerster (206), Jim Roark (198), Buck Delventhal (201), Dave Fitzharris (205), Bob Nykodym (203)

Photographer:  Rich Cirami (204)

In honor of Buck's memory, I will be adding "Buck stories" sprinkled within this website.  But first, I am including parts of a letter Buck wrote to Jim Hunt's son after Jim's death in 1989.  Jim is the little guy at the top of the pyramid.  It's a good insight into both men.

Buck Delventhal – BE 201

In 1999, Buck wrote a long letter to Jim Hunt’s son, Joshua, after Jim’s death.  Joshua wanted to know what Jim was like in his college days.  Buck’s letter was 9 pages long and talked of many things about Jim, his relationship with Buck, Theta Xi and Buck’s own journey.  Buck sent me his letter after I asked him to post a tribute to Jim in the “In Memory” section.  Below are some of his recollections that I felt should stand alone in the “Interviews” section.  More on Jim will be posted on the “In Memory” page.  – Dave

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I first met Jim in September of 1961 when I was beginning my second year at UC Davis. That Fall semester we became pledges at Theta Xi Fraternity.  That year Theta Xi, participated in a freshman “rush”. I do not know if fraternity rush still exists. During fraternity “rush week” new students try to get themselves admitted to fraternities. I assume that the rush refers to the mad scramble by the applicants to get around to all the fraternities to see how many will offer them “bids” to join. A student can only accept one bid.

A pledge was a new member who pledged his loyalty to the fraternity. If the pledge completed the pledge semester and got passing grades, then he would go through “hell week” followed by a ritual initiation admitting him to full membership in the fraternity. Though in some fraternities there was physical abuse, “hazing”, of pledges, there was none in ours. In Theta Xi all abuse of the new members was psychological usually taking the form of relentless questioning about the trivia of fraternity’s history. The abuse typically was not personal and never sadistic, nor did it pick on an individual’s weaknesses.

While this process surely seems silly and inconsequential, I think it did serve an important function for people like me who had lived very sheltered lives. We were forced to stand up before “hostile” interrogators and keep our cool. During hell week we had to work with no more than an hour of sleep a day for several days in a row painting and cleaning up the fraternity all the while facing constant questioning. Being a pledge was as much of a rite of passage as those of my generation who did not serve in the military, like me, would ever experience.

Beyond the absence of physical hazing, there was something else unusual about Theta Xi. Most fraternities in those days extolled anti-intellectualism and perverse elitism. The film Animal House, starring Jim Belluschi, portrays a caricature of that ethos. Handsome bigoted, usually blond jocks pursued by bevies of usually blonde bimbos while grossly cynical slobs demolish the fraternity house and play vicious pranks on defenseless nerds. These attitudes as well as the exclusivity and Spartan isolation of fraternities contributed to their decline in the late‘60’s‘ when college students found meaning, inspiration, and sometimes escape in the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, communes, Woodstock, the Summer of Love and even sexually integrated dorms. No fraternity, not even Theta Xi, was any match for the dynamism and optimism of the movements of the late 60’s.

Nevertheless Theta Xi was different. Its founding members were returning Korean War veterans who were more mature and motivated than most college students. Jim and I came along not more than eight or nine years after the chapter of Theta Xi had been established at Davis. It sought good students and enforced quiet study hours in the evenings for the pledges. Theta Xi was so concerned about getting good students that it would even go so far as to use connections in the University to get unauthorized access to confidential campus scholastic records to help decide whether to give a prospective applicant a bid. Alcohol was not allowed in the fraternity’s houses. During each of the eight semesters that I lived in Theta Xi, it had the highest grade point average of any living group on or off campus. Indeed, some of our members would be considered nerds today. Theta Xi offered its members a unique environment.

As a result of their inferior status pledges were forced to band together in an “us against them” mentality, them being the “active” members of the fraternity. There were 13 members in our Fall 1961 pledge class. Most of the pledges, like me, had been chosen from the previous year’s freshmen during the spring rush. However four members of our pledge class were chosen from the Fall rush.

Among the members of my pledge class, I was closest to Jim, John Harris, and John Osborne. Our fraternity consisted of three houses in a row at 515 First Street in Davis. In the Fall of 1961 Jim roomed up the hall from me in the main house. We immediately struck it off together. I was above average in size and very strong. Jim was much smaller, and I think that he liked having a big friend.

I also enjoyed his sense of humor. He and I used to play pranks on other members of the fraternity. One of our favorites was arm wrestling. I was one of the stronger people in the fraternity. I could easily beat most members in arm wrestling. Jim loved to put people up to arm wrestle with me. I would quickly pin their arm; then Jim would walk up according to our prearranged ruse and challenge me. I would feign fatigue and decline. Jim was so brazen about his challenge that everyone would coax me on. Finally I would relent.

Jim and I would face off sitting across the table from one another. Jim would get this very intent, menacing look in his eyes as if, driven by hidden daemons, he were undertaking a great and difficult feat. After a prolonged period of deep breathing and preparations we would cautiously and tentatively clasp one another’s hands. Finally the sign to start would be given, and a titan struggle would ensue. We would both be grunting and groaning. I would take control of the see-saw battle, first pulling Jim’s arms down on mine. To the spectators it looked as if he were winning. When it appeared that I was about to be pinned, I would redouble my efforts and push his arm back up and start to pin his arm. Back and forth our struggle would play itself out. Finally Jim would pin me. The onlookers were amazed as one of my arms was almost as big as both of his. Jim told me that sometimes after I had taken over both sides of the battle he could barely even hold up his arm.

It was worth a lot to see the amazement in the eyes of the other members in the Fraternity who were dumbfounded that Jim could beat me. We suggested that it was all a matter of leverage. His arm was much shorter than mine; therefore he could get a better angle. Our suggestion was gibberish, but the befuddled fraternity brothers would nod in dazed wonder. I just love seeing intelligent people wondering in mindless amazement at something that is the entirely unbelievable.

During a later semester Jim lived in Bryson, the middle house where he kept a weight set. Jim bet several guys that I could do a military press of all the weights in the set, which amounted to 212 pounds. At the time I weighed 190 pounds. I had never done any weight lifting but was very strong. I had no idea whether I would succeed, but my vanity would not let me back out. I succeeded. Jim made a bundle on his bets, and I got a hernia.

Your father was never one to decline a challenge. In one of his most legendary exploits he called my bluff and drove stark naked from UC Davis to Placerville at night in November, 1963, in my 1957 Triumph TR3 convertible car with the top down. He went with a guy named Jim Palleschi. Your father got slight frost-bite on his ears but otherwise survived the challenge. He raised money for a charitable cause in the process.

Then there was the case of the purloined brownies. Cookie, our Fraternity’s cook, used to make brownies and keep them on hand for special occasions. She noticed that her supply of brownies was disappearing during the evening hours when the kitchen was closed. She made several unsuccessful attempts to catch the predators. Except for Cookie, the kitchen steward, Tim Fitzharris and the members involved in taking the brownies, no one else knew what was going on. Cookie and Tim hatched a plot to catch or at the very least foil if not punish the culprits. Cookie started making batches of chocolate chip cookies, using the laxative EXLAX rather than chocolate. She left them in the hiding place from which they had previously been disappearing.

Well, it turned out that a couple of guys in our fraternity began making repeated trips to the campus infirmary where they complained of persistent diarrhea. Your dad was one of those guys. The campus health officials were about to do an inspection of our kitchen to see if there was anything wrong with the way we were preparing and storing food. At that time Tim told your dad what was going on. He stopped pilfering the cookies, but he was never very fond of Cookie or her cookies after that event.

In the spring of 1965, our country was beginning the long national debate that became a nightmare and eventually a tragedy, over Vietnam. The movement against the Vietnam War has been inextricably tied to Kent State University where members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed student protesters. Well before Kent State, however, the movement had gained its initial inspiration at UC Berkeley when the students sought to protest the presence of military recruiters on the Berkley Campus.

When the students disobeyed a police order that they disband, the Free Speech Movement was born. The leader of that movement was Mario Savio a political science major at Berkeley. At that time Pat Brown, Jerry Brown’s father, was the Governor, and Clark Kerr was the President of the University of California. Ronald Reagan was an over-the-hill movie star who hosted the General Electric Hour. No one could have ever imagined that the state that prided itself as a leader of liberal democracy would ever retread an old movie star into a governor much less a president.

At Davis, I had been involved in many student activities. By the 1964/65 year I had become one of the “student leaders” on the campus. A couple of days after the outbreak of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, a group of us leaders were summoned to an evening meeting with the Davis Chancellor who often worked closely with us. We were asked to exercise “responsible leadership” and not allow an outbreak of protest at Davis like the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley

.It must be difficult to imagine the 60’s now. Today students are more concerned about getting their grades so that they can get into law school, medical school or the right MBA program. They do not have time for futile protests that will not change anything. They know how hard it is to gain a foothold in the economy, and with housing prices so high, they wonder if they will ever be able to afford to purchase a home. They also hear that Social Security will not be available to them in their old age. They want to make their material way and not get bogged down in dealing with problems they are not responsible for. I know that this assessment is simplistic and certainly does not accurately describe all of today’s students. Nevertheless, it seems that today the student who is concerned first about making his or her own way is not unusual.

In those days, Watergate, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the truth about John F. Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iran Contra, Monica Lewinsky and the other scandals that have undermined confidence in our public institutions lay far in the future. Young people then were very idealistic. They thought they could change the world. In fact, they did. Many values and institutions that molded and nurtured our policies and attitudes on race, the roles of the sexes, the environment, crime and punishment, national liberation movements, the respect to be accorded to authority figures and the role of public institutions like universities in our society were jettisoned. We are still trying to put the pieces back together.

The point here is that we had no perspective then from which to understand what was going on.

I bought the campus administration message hook, line and sinker. Jim was a fraternity leader but unknown on campus. When I told him about the need to prevent a protest on the campus, he questioned my judgment. First he pointed out that I was being used by the campus administration and needed to think for myself. He suggested, prophetically, that the Free Speech Movement was performing an important function in questioning our country’s involvement in Vietnam. He had thought so far ahead of me that I was not immediately able to understand what he was telling me. In a few years, I understood and appreciated having a friend with the judgment and the courage to question and even challenge “conventional wisdom”.

In 1965 most people of my generation subscribed to the Cold War tenet that Communism had to be stopped at all costs. Regarding South East Asia, we were inundated with the “Domino Theory”. After Vietnam, Cambodia would fall and Laos, Thailand, Burma (now Myanmar) and so on. Jim realized before the rest of us that we had to be suspicious of what the politicians in Washington were telling us. He was deeply influenced by a book, The Arrogance of Power, by then Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In that book Senator Fulbright suggested that our antipathy to communism blinded us to the force of indigenous liberation movements. Ho Chi Minh was, in the final analysis, leading just such a movement to liberate Vietnam from French and subsequently American colonial domination.

Jim never pretended to have all of the answers, but he was better equipped to think for himself than most of the rest of us, especially me. He also had a way of challenging someone else’s point of view without being didactic, hostile or patronizing. He had the patience to think things out for himself and to spend time with others like me who were not so acute as he. He certainly figured out Vietnam way before I did.

As with my views on Vietnam, I had rather simplistic views of “private enterprise”. I felt that governmental regulations were oppressive. He patiently forced me to trudge through the bogs of clichés in which my thinking was mired. It was not easy for me because I was forced to realize time and again that I did not know what I was talking about.

David Fitzharris

Other "Buck stories:

Of course, there was the famous incident concocted by Buck Delventhal against Carl Lind.  He had the bright idea of stringing Carl’s bunk up between the Jackson sleeping porch and Bryson, one story up!  Brother Lind came back from a late date, searching for his bed.  When he finally found it suspended in the air (it had taken several brothers working in coordination to get it up), he failed to see the hilarity.  He yanked and pulled – or maybe just cut – the supporting ropes from one side and the bed came crashing against the side of the house.  No wonder we needed a rebuilding fund.

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From Torsten Jacobsen (known for his demented sense of humor):

At a Friday evening special dinner with dates I am sitting between Tony status post beer and Buck Deventhal with his first time date. Buck decides to take out his prosthetic eye, put it in his mouth and turn to his first time date. She is totally shocked. He starts to laugh, almost swallow it. If he had to undergo a proctoscopic exam, the G.I. guy would probably think that he had gone too far when he encountered an eye looking back at him.

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Speaking of Buck's false eye, there was the ROTC story.  In those days, all freshman and sophmore male students were required to take ROTC.  Obviously, Buck would be exempt, but he when through the physical anyway.  He memorized the eye chart and passed with flying colors.  After a few weeks of parading around with the rest of us, he went into the Commandant's office and told him he didn't want to be in ROTC anymore.  The Commandant huffed and puffed and told him he had no choice ... upon which Buck leaned forward, showed him the false eye and said "Tap, tap".  Needless to say, he left the program.

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Buck had a gift for languages.  He was especially fluent in Spanish and frequently tested my 4-year high school Spanish.  He'd come up to me and issue forth a long monologue in Espanol, followed by a grin, a nod and a wink, saying "Eh, Cabron?", like we were sharing a good joke.  Except "cabron" in Spanish means "bastard".

But he also took German, French and Russian.  I remember nights in the sleeping porch, where most guys were snoring, but Buck was talking in his sleep.  In Russian.

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Buck was always concerned about his fitness.  He would eat well, hike often, ride his bike to work and swim regularly in a sheltered part of the San Francisco Harbor.  Some time ago (maybe 30 years), he was swimming alone in the early morning hours.  Something happened -- hypothermia, perhaps -- and he was in trouble.  Fortunately, some rowers were nearby and saw his situation.  They brought him on board and he was evacuated to the hospital, unconscious.  When he awoke, guess who was sitting at his bedside?  Dianne Feinstein!