Herbert L. Tindall, Jr. Interviewed 6/18/2008 by Robert C. Tindall Herbert L. Tindall, Jr. (H) attended the University of Rochester from 1932-36. He was a member of Beta Delta Gamma, and currently is believed to be the oldest living member of the fraternity. He was interviewed by his son, Robert C. Tindall (R), who attended the U of R 1961-65. R: Were you in the fraternity the whole time you were in school? H: Yes. I joined in my freshman year. R: Was this a “high status” thing to do? H: Well, I don’t know whether it was “high status” or not. Lots of people didn’t belong. But it was a sort of status thing to be invited to join a fraternity. R: How did that come about? H: We got invitations from ones that wanted to interview us. R: Where did they get their information? H: I don’t know. There were plenty of chances for contact with the freshmen. I was a “nerdy” sort of guy, and didn’t expect that anybody would send me an invitation. But I had two invitations, Beta Delt & Theta Chi. I actually never interviewed with Theta Chi, because Beta Delt was first. They put high pressure on you to join. Theta Chi had a house on the campus. Ours was off the campus. R: You had a house? H: We had a house. It was the only one that was off the campus. R: Where was it? H: It was on Elmwood Avenue. Just across the bridge, at Genesee & Elmwood. About a block & a half from the University. It was pretty good. It was a pretty good place to live and study. R: Did everybody live there, or just upperclassmen? H: Well, we didn’t have that many places. It was a regular house, 2-story house, and it had three bedrooms upstairs, I think. But what we did was make the attic into a dormitory, and put beds up there. A varying number of people lived there. We didn’t have that many members. Not like some of them did.
R: So yours was a smaller fraternity? H: It was smaller, yeah. And there was only one that didn’t have a house, and that was Kappa Nu, which was a Jewish fraternity. R: How many were in the fraternity? H: There were probably three or four in each class. Some of the people (alumni) lived in Rochester, so they came around a lot. They were like hangers-on. It may have been a little bigger than that – I forget how many we had in our class. R: In terms of the life at Rochester, what role did the fraternity play? Was that where you spent a lot of time, most of your time? Were social activities centered around the fraternity? Or was it just a living base. H: I didn’t have a lot of time for social activities. Chem engineering was a tough course for consuming your time. And being over where we were, when you were over there, you didn’t just hop out of the house and go to Todd Union or something because it was too far to walk. Once you got there, you usually stayed there. I didn’t eat there; I ate over at the University. R: Just because of the logistics? H: Yeah. We didn’t have any demand for food. Most of the time, I was maybe the only one that was living there. A lot of the guys were from Rochester. R: So you were the only guy living there? H: Yeah, some of the time. R: That would seem kind of weird to me. H: Yeah, the House Mother and I were the only ones there. Mrs. Edwards. R: Did she cook? H: Yeah, she could cook; did cook. Nice old lady. She had an impossible daughter that lived in Canada who was always giving her trouble. I think she was divorced. R: One of the things that’s happened when these guys decided to organize the reunion, it stirred up a lot of commentary about relationships over the years. I was wondering, in terms of your own of the fraternity, whether you kept up relationships. H: We kept up relationships with some people over the years. We had a good bunch of kids. The class after mine was bigger; the class of 1937 had more people. We were the
first people that went all the way through on the new campus. The class before us only had three years on the campus. We had all four years on River Campus. R: Where was it before? H: Over on Prince Street. Where the Women’s College was. I remember some of the people, before and after me. Some of them were real characters. Some people had some weird experiences. R: Such as… H: A guy by the name of Ogilvey – he was a few years ahead of me – he was a storied character. He was 6’4”. A big guy. He was always doing outrageous things. Like in the winter time it would get 20 below zero, he’d walk downtown, take his coat off, undo his tie, wiping the sweat off his face. Anything that would attract attention. So he DID attract a lot of attention. Somebody said one time that we needed a new floor lamp for the house, so he went to the Rochester Theater, into the lobby. It was wintertime, and he had a heavy coat on. So he stuck it under his coat, with it sticking out over his head, and he took it home on the trolley car. Dumb things like that. He was famous for doing weird things to attract attention. And, you know, I can’t remember what occupation he had. H: At the time, the Beta Delts, not having a house on campus, were looked upon as the “poor sisters” fraternity. Not that we didn’t have good relationships with people. Some things we did very well. We won the singing contest, the barbershop type. H: Since we had a lot of alumni living in Rochester at the time, we had a lot of tutoring available. If these guys needed help, they came and helped. R: So even after they graduated, they came around and hung around the house? H: A lot of them hung around anyhow. When the next class after mine came along, they were a very cohesive group. There were more of them – there must have been six or seven, or something like that. H: Bill Bayley was an optometrist. I kept in touch with him for many years. I haven’t heard from him in 4 or 5 years. He was older than I was. I think he might have died. H: Ev Gardner, from the class after mine. He was always good about keeping in touch. But I haven’t heard from him in quite a few years. I haven’t heard from anybody recently. I imagine most of the ones around my time are dead. They’d be in their nineties. Aren’t many of us that make it that far. H: I never regretted joining the fraternity. It was a cohesive group of people, and they always wanted to help each other. And we had a good time.
R: You were there during Prohibition, right? H: The college speakeasy was not right near campus. It was downtown. A place called Jack Ferran’s. And Jack Ferran sort of catered to the college group. R: So you had to locate the speakeasies? H: Yeah. There were no legal drinking establishments until ’36. I remember the day that Prohibition went out. It was in my senior year. I went over to East Avenue, to the Manhattan Restaurant, so I had a manhattan…just because that was the name of the restaurant. R: When you had social functions, did you have them at the house? H: Yeah. We had dances and things. R: Was there alcohol there? H. Yeah. Beer & wine, mostly. R: And how did you get that, since it was illegal? H: Bootleggers. R: It’s hard for us to imagine that you’d have to work that hard to get a drink. When I went to the U of R, the drinking age was 18. It wasn’t a challenge for anybody. It was no big deal. H: The place we went to was a typical bar. You’d expect to see sawdust on the floor; that type of place. There wasn’t much of a “drinking problem”, not like what you see in the universities now. And I don’t remember any illegal drug use. We always associated marijuana with jazz musicians. We had a lot of fun at Jack Farran’s. Mostly, we sat around and drank beer. R: And the police never bothered you? H: I never saw any there? It was a respectable place. H: I remember some of the dumb little things that happened. A couple of guys decided to buy a park bench. We were right across from the Elmwood Park. They bought a park bench, took it to the park. One time we were over there, and a cop came along. One of the guys said, “Let’s take a trick on this cop.” So they carried the bench out of the park. The cop arrested them, and they went before the judge. The guys then pulled out a bill of sale for the bench. R: How did you wind up going to the U of R?
H: We lived there. I got accepted, and my father got a transfer. I was originally planning on living at home. R: Did a good many people live at home/ H: Yeah. When I was there, at least half the people were local; maybe more. H: The fraternity bought this house from a dentist. The dentist held the second mortgage on the house. Of course, they were always broke. Never had any money. R: Do you know how long they kept the house? H: No. I don’t know what happened to it. We couldn’t afford the place anyhow. We had good neighbors as a rule, but sometimes we had an all-night party and they complained. I remember one time, about two o’clock in the morning, these two cops showed up. The party was rip-roaring by that time. We invited them in, and they came in. They got so drunk. They were still there when everybody was going home, about 5 o’clock in the morning. They were having a good time. But I don’t think the neighbors appreciated it. H: We had some nice events while I was there. There was an inter-fraternity dance. I think they had it once a year, near the end of the year. You went around to all the houses till about midnight, and then you went back to your own house. I remember at our house one year we got Cab Calloway. We couldn’t afford anybody big – other groups got big names, like Ozzie Nelson. I remember they paid $1100 for his band, and that was a lot of money then. I remembered that Cab was born in Rochester, so I got the bright idea to call him up and ask him if he would play at our dance. He said, “Yeah. It’s about time that I came up there anyway.” So he came up, and they played. They charged $100 – I’m sure it didn’t cover anybody’s expenses. But it was really wonderful. Anyway, you went back to your own house till about 6AM. And some of the locals lived along the lake, and we went there for breakfast. We had some good times.