The first time I saw this building, I was 19 years old and I thought it was the coolest place in the world.

[caption id="attachment_263" align="alignright" width="211" caption="The old Delt house at GWU"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/3g252j3c.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-263" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/3g252j3c-211x300.jpg" alt="" width="211" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

It was September 1969 and I had just gone back to college for my second try, commuting from home to George Washington University in the Washington neighborhood known as Foggy Bottom.

I had had a miserable three semesters at the University of Virginia, where I had started when I was 17 going on 13. At least that was where my social maturity level was. I wasn't a good fit with what a lot of people called one of the top party schools in the country, so I tried an urban school that was heavily populated with Jewish kids from New York and the other mid-Atlantic states.

The building on the right, which looks old and run-down now, was almost brand-new that fall. It housed Delta Tau Delta fraternity, and the brothers of the fraternity noticed me -- and were impressed -- by my performance in a pickup football game on the quad. They invited me to pledge, which might have been the single greatest thing that had happened to me up to that point in my life.

<em>Things hadn't been all that exciting up till then.</em>

The next three months or so were a wonderful experience, although I sort of messed things up by enjoying fraternity life too much and not concentrating on my classes. I have so many amazing memories from that time -- late-night Diplomacy games, the eating contest (which no one ever won), some great parties and yes, even some hazing.

I met the lovely Betsy Custis at a Delt party and dated her for much of that fall. Just before Christmas, I met Shelley Marcus, and we wound up being each other's first love in the spring of 1970.

Alas, my grades were too bad and I never made it past pledging. Eight years later, at George Mason University, I was part of a group that founded a chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon on campus, and Sig Ep became my lifetime fraternity.

But I was older then, and I was married. It wasn't the same thrill as it had been walking into the Delt house on a Saturday night, or standing in the basement with the other members of my pledge class. The brothers were meeting one floor up, and we had been ordered to stand in a line and be completely silent.

That didn't last long.

I don't know who it was who started it, but for some great and wonderful reason, starting softly and getting louder, we started singing Donovan's "Mellow Yellow."

<em>"I'm just mad about saffron ..."</em>

Good times?

No, great times.