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Paragon October 2024 |
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Rebuilding Our Family Trees is an Enormous Success! |
Upcoming Events November Friday, November 15 – Initiation July 2025 Saturday, July 19, 2025 – Summer 2025 Work Weekend
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| Thank You! |
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Since our last Paragon, David Sutula and Nathan Kossover joined the Ernie Schmidt Club. We also received a generous donation from David Cesaratto. Thank you David, Nathan and David! We also want to thank the 100+ brothers who responded to the Big Brother email in September. Read on for all the details of our updated family trees! |
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| RSVP Now for Homecoming |
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You are cordially invited to join the Ohio Alpha Beta Alumni Association for our 2024 Homecoming Event on Saturday, November 16. We will meet for dinner at Sasa in Shaker Square at 5:30pmwith a prix fixe menu including:
Alcohol is not included with your registration, but may be purchased separately. Please register and pre-pay for dinner on our website. The cost is $50 each per alumni members and their guests and $35 each for undergraduate brothers and their guests. After dinner, we will convene at 8:00pm at the Phi Kappa Theta house at 11016 Magnolia for the Phi Kap Night Cap. There will be desserts, light refreshments, some games, a 50/50 raffle (you need not be present to win) and a lot of reminiscing. Please RSVP by November 11, 2024 to make sure you don't miss you don't miss out on Homecoming 2024! If you have any questions about our Homecoming Dinner or the Phi Kap Night Cap, please contact Ken Nagano at nagano@ohioalphabeta.org. |
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| Join Us for Initiation |
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Coming into town for Homecoming? Just us for Initiation the night before! We will be initiating the newest members of the Ohio Alpha Beta chapter on Friday, November 15. We will be meeting at Eldred Hall at 10:30pm with Initiation to start at 11:00pm. No RSVP is needed for Initiation, but remember that by tradition the associate members believe Initiation will be at a later date, so please maintain the surprise if you see them beforehand. |
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| Rebuilding Our Family Trees is an Enormous Success! |
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“For as long as we can remember, new associate members (or pledges, back in the day) were assigned a Big Brother. For Homecoming, we'd like to see how far back in time we can connect the family trees from brother to brother.” That’s how the email began that we sent to every brother in our database in late September. We then asked you to either: I’m pleased to say that we succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. As of this Paragon, we have received 123 responses. 70 of you confirmed that we had your Big Brother listed correctly. 53 of you added your Big Brother information to the database. Several of you went far beyond that and added a number of names up and down your family tree. And then there was Aaron Gordner ‘11, who chatted with a bunch of his peers from from 2005 to 2015 and came back with 45 previously unknown Big Brother / Little Brother pairings. The upshot is that after all your efforts, we now have 378 Big Brother / Little Brother pairs in our database, 123 of whom were personally confirmed by the Little Brother in question. This is an enormous improvement to our historical data. Thank you to everyone who responded, with a special thanks to Aaron and those who helped him. Now that we have all this new information, how far back in time can we go? Allow us to introduce William Hehs ‘55 and Ross Hackel ‘57, here shown from the 1955 composite. As you may recall from our House-aversary newsletter, the brothers on the 1955 composite were the active chapter when we purchased 11016 Magnolia on December 30, 1954. Ross wrote in to let us know that William was his Big Brother. This makes William and Ross the earliest Big Brother / Little Brother listing in our database.
Alas, we cannot currently connect any of our undergraduate brothers all the way back to 1955, let alone 1941. How close to 1955 can we get?
Let’s start in the middle. This is David Zuckerman ‘98. After graduating from CWRU, Zuck completed his PhD at Johns Hopkins, and he is currently a professor at Iona University. Oh yes, and quite literally every single undergraduate brother we have today can trace his family tree up to Zuck. He is, if you will, the “Lowest Common Ancestor” in those family trees. Most of those actives go through Zuck’s Little Brother E. Phil Ajjarapu ‘99, but some go through Zuck’s other Little Brother, Neal Pence ‘01. There are at least 26 years between the most recent initiates and Zuck, but we aren’t finished yet!
This is Ted Purcell ‘80. We have no contact information for Ted in our database, but if what we have been told is correct, Ted currently is at the top of the longest unbroken chain of Big Brother / Little Brother pairs, bringing us from Ted’s initiation in 1977 to David Zuckerman’s graduation in 1998 and on to every undergraduate currently in the house in 2024. Or as one undergraduate framed the situation, Ted is the “Biggest Brother” of every current undergraduate. Although every undergraduate goes up through Zuck and on to Ted, the number of generations it takes to get there varies from 27 to 35. Currently, there are three undergraduates brothers who hold the record for most known “ancestors” at 35 total generations. From start to finish, here is the longest current family tree, not counting any new members we will initiate later this month. The first two generations of the longest tree are all currently undergraduates. |
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| October Work Weekend is a Success! |
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On October 26 and 27, alumni and undergraduates brothers joined together at 11016 Magnolia for our third and final work weekend of the year. Compared to our March and July work weekends, the October effort was a little lower key. A small but mighty number of alumni joined forces with the undergraduates to complete a number of smaller maintenance efforts throughout the house and grounds. A sampling of the projects completed includes:
- replacing the toilet in the first floor public bathroom
- replacing a light fixture in the third floor hallway and replacing burned out light bulbs throughout the house
- performing regular maintenance on the dehumidifier in the boiler room
We have had three successful work weekends in 2024, but there are always more projects that need to be completed. The Summer 2025 Work Weekend will be on Saturday, July 19 and Sunday, July 20. We hope to see you there!
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| Alumni Eat Wings, Assist with Fall Rush |
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On September 13, the Ohio Alpha Beta Alumni Association supported the undergraduate chapter by sponsoring a rush event at the Quaker Steak and Lube in Valley View, Ohio. Alumni Ken Nagano ‘01 and Max Alexy ‘24 joined members of the active chapter and many Potential New Members for dinner. We will be sponsoring another rush event during the spring semester; stay tuned for details.
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The Ohio Alpha Beta Alumni Association exists to connect the over 1000 alumni of the Phi Kappa Theta Ohio Alpha Beta chapter at Case Western Reserve University through events, newsletters, and other gatherings. Our subsidiary organization, the Ohio Alpha Beta Housing Corporation, exists to own, maintain, and improve the Ohio Alpha Beta Chapter House located at 11016 Magnolia Drive, Cleveland, OH, 44106. Please add @ohioalphabeta.org to your contact list to ensure delivery of the Paragon. https://www.ohioalphabeta.org/civicrm/mailing/optout/?reset=1&jid=&qid=&h=fakehash https://www.ohioalphabeta.org/civicrm/mailing/unsubscribe/?reset=1&jid=&qid=&h=fakehash 11016 Magnolia Dr
Cleveland, OH 44106 United States |
