We’ve all been shaped by our experiences as Brothers in AXP. We bonded as Postulants, then made other lasting friendships as new men came in to embrace the ideas and ideals behind those three Greek letters.
Brother Jim Dickson had something of a head start in learning about and retaining those values, not only as members of the Fraternity, but as examples to everyone. Now, at 92, he’s writing about the values and principles he was given by his dad and Alpha Chi Rho.
“My father Gerald Dickson was a charter member (of Phi Kappa) in 1916,” he says.” His dad became a pledge just before chartering, and became a Brother a week later when the charter was approved. “He owed a lot to AXP. He found it to be a home away from home.”
Jim Dickson (Phi Kappa, Class of ‘52), grew up on the family farm ten miles west of Elgin, Illinois, and “never had any thoughts of going (to school) anywhere else, or being in anything other than AXP.”
But first he spent 18 months in an Army airborne unit between high school and college. He can laugh about it now.
“Again, I didn’t have much choice. My father was ROTC from 1914-18, and became a 2nd Lieutenant in time to go to France during World War I. He always felt that was good training...so his three sons all had to go into the service after high school.
“There were lots of veterans at school,” he recalls, “and they were serious about education.”
Dickson says his eight or ten pledge brothers were “kind of slave labor in terms of cleaning, etc., but it was fine. You do that...then you move on.” Light duty for someone who’d been a paratrooper.
“We had a really good cook,” he remembers. “You’d dress for dinner most nights, with a necktie. Manners were important. Today I don’t think people know what manners are, particularly.
“Meals were very enjoyable; everyone would eat together, at least at dinner. You wouldn’t start eating until the last person came. There was a prayer of thanksgiving for the meal, and you didn't leave until everybody was done.
“There were study rules, too, but there was nothing burdensome about them,” he said, adding that there were “quiet hours” after dinner. “I think the whole atmosphere of the House helped; you were (at college) to study and get an education.”
Dickson believes the no-liquor-in-the-House rule was a good one; it had existed since Phi Kappa’s founding. But the lowering of the legal drinking age in the mid-1970’s meant liquor could be used in the House. “I could never understand why that changed,” Dickson said. “There were nothing but disasters because of it.”
He remembers that, as House vice-president, he went up to the third floor, saw someone with a bottle of liquor, and quickly confiscated it. “I went to the window, opened it, and dropped the bottle. No one ever said anything more about it.”
No booze did not mean no parties. Dickson remembers -- as many of us do -- the Cave Man Drag and two formals a year. “With no House Mother, well-liked university faculty members were the chaperones. We also had four or five exchanges a year with good sororities, but never the biggest ones because we had 45 people...and some of those sororities had 60 or 70 girls.”
A very different occasion led to the girl of his dreams. It started in an unlikely way -- his involvement with the YMCA. In summer 1951, he saw a notice at the “Y” about a Students in Government event in Washington, DC, featuring 90 kids from 30 colleges. “That’s where I met Peggy. Then, in the spring of 1952, I went to visit her at Wellesley and left my pin there,” Dickson laughed. Her father had been a missionary doctor in China for 20 years, and Peggy had lived there for ten years.
Another AXP tradition was fielding intramural teams --football, basketball and swimming. Phi Kappa’s main rivals then were the nearby DKEs and Psi Upsilon next door. “We were never the best, but we held our ground,” Dickson said.
He was involved with the Illio, the university yearbook, from freshman year. By his senior year, he was Illio’s business manager, which led to his inclusion in a senior men’s honor society, Ma-Wan-Da, with about 25 others. He credits AXP for encouraging his involvement in both YMCA and Illio work.
Up next was pre-law and eventually graduation from Law School. Then came another twist.
“The thing I learned in law school was that I didn’t want to be a lawyer,” Dickson remembers. “I decided I wanted to be in labor relations.” A professor he knew through the YMCA was an expert on the subject. His advice: try to hook up with one of the paper companies in Wisconsin.
“There was a lot of labor strife after World War II,” Dickson recalls, but the paper industry was noted for good labor relations, including the Marathon Paper Co., which hired him. He moved to Wisconsin and has been there ever since.
Dickson admired his dad for hosting groups of 15 or more Crows on his farm for years. For Jim Dickson, living in Wisconsin made it tougher to have such gatherings.
“But I can get down to Champaign-Urbana for something pretty big,” he adds.
Dickson is discouraged by changes he sees in both the Fraternity and the country. He believes it started as far back as the 1950s, with a “a kind of turning point for the country...around the time of Woodstock.”
For him, it boils down to a nationwide “addiction to materialism rather than spirituality.” Dickson believes the AXP he experienced in college could be restored by going “back to the basics of Brotherhood.
“Each class of, say, ten thousand, comes in in the fall, and you only need maybe 25 each year, who would say, ‘Yeah, I want that.’
“AXP gave my father a lot of structure. It worked for him and it should work for any kid, and I’m very grateful for it.”
Dickson, a born-again Christian, has found new fulfillment in writing commentaries, posted on Amazon. His plan for renewed spirituality is based on the creation of classes of roughly a dozen participants, similar to techniques used by Methodist Church founder John Wesley, and the Twelve Steps meetings that are the hallmark of Alcoholics Anonymous.
“If we can bring back basic values such as AXP had, most of our problems would disappear,” Dickson believes.
He has written several books including, “On Fire for God,” his call for a return to spiritual values that guided the nation’s founders. (The book is available online at barnesandnoble.com.).
Despite his discouragement over the drift away from spirituality, Dickson says he finds happiness with his wife, five children and 14 grandchildren.
“We’ve been married 67 years, and in the same house for 60 years,” he says. “I do hunger for people to drop in once in a while, but life is good.”