Foundation
The first meeting of the Gamma Phi Society was in the Spring of 1903. This meeting was not though of as a fraternity or secret organization, but just a group of five men quickly assembled together. The five men joined together upon hearing of a wrecked Sante Fe Freight train in Norman, Oklahoma who had a freight full of bananas. The railroad officials sent word to the University that bunches of bananas could be had at a very low rate. The five men: Roy Kingkade, Tom B. Matthew, Bob Severin, A. Maxwell Alden, and Jay T. Conway, accepted the proposition and tried to eat the bunch of bananas at one sitting. The five men met in a one story house across the street from the McFarlin Memorial Church.
The five men had such a good time in their fellowship that Tom B. Matthews suggest that the group organize and make something permanent and constructive. It was then suggested that the group be made into a secret organization, or a fraternity. At that time, there were no local or national fraternities on the University of Oklahoma campus. The five men decided on the name "Good Fellowship." Founder Tom B. Matthews had been studying Greek and the name "Gamma Phi" was chosen due to the phonetic sounds of the "G" and "F."
Read more about this topic: Gamma Phi
Famous quotes containing the word foundation:
“The foundation of empire is art & science. Remove them or degrade them, & the empire is no more. Empire follows art & not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)
“Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation.... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)