Unknown Skirmishes of World War II

September, 2011--Air Force Lt. Bill S., a P-38 pilot, had one more mission: He and his crew were stealing an engineless P-38 from in front of the University of Arizona engineering building so they could park it on the lawn of the university president’s home.

With grandchildren going back to college for the fall semester, I was reminded of such little-known consequences of World War II. Bill and others like him came back from the war to school and fraternity life feeling they had been deprived of their college fun years. They set out to make up for it.

As we Sigma Chis reconstituted our chapter in the fall of 1945, we were a mixture of the usual 18-year-olds just out of high school and young men in their twenties who in ordinary times would have finished college and begun their careers. That first year our chapter president, Russ D., had been an Air Force major. The next year, when we had reclaimed the Sigma Chi house, which had been closed during the war, our chapter president, Chan F., was a veteran of Army Intelligence who had won a medal for infiltrating a Nazi underground unit.

When the veterans set out to play a college prank they were so competent they succeeded spectacularly. The night Bill stole the P-38 he simply climbed into the cockpit and steered while his accomplices hooked a stout rope to the rear bumper of someone’s prewar car and drove away. The next day the university building and grounds department was challenged to put the plane back where it belonged. They needed two tractors and a mob of workers.

John S., who I believe was the oldest of the veterans, in his late twenties, specialized in rustling cattle. He absconded with a calf from the university experimental farm, hid it in his room till late evening, then released it through french doors into the living room of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house across the street.

This entertained him so much that a couple of months later he repeated his widely admired prank. Unfortunately, in the meantime the calf had grown considerably. Although John was a powerfully built man, it was all he could do to stuff it into a car, keep it contained in his room for an evening, then coax it across the street. We heard later that the Kappas had called the police and the indignant calf had butted one of the officers who responded. This didn’t do much for town and gown relations.

(I am not using last names to avoid embarrassing fellow Sigs. John, for example, in later years became headmaster of an East Coast prep school.)

We were all getting our degrees thanks to the GI Bill. It’s a good thing Congress didn’t know what some of us were up to, although Chan, as president, and I, as house manager, were a steadying influence on some of the more exuberant brothers. One week in midwinter, when it’s cold at night even in Tucson, two of our guys started coming home from the bars to "serenade" the house after midnight. Although one of them was a huge lineman on the football team, Chan and I took a big pot from the kitchen and filled it with cold water. It took both of us to lift it. From the second floor balcony we doused the serenaders with the contents. Despite having served in the Navy, that was the nearest I personally came to combat.

Richard Frisbie

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