Brotherhood at Fresno State Since 1948
Every brotherhood has a beginning. Ours began on March 22, 1948, when six Fresno State men gathered for the first official meeting.
The Fresno State colony in the fall of 1950 — close to the seventeen men the colony counted at the end of its first semester. If you can name anyone pictured, we would like to hear from you.
Their first priority was not a social calendar. It was building a fraternity.
Every brotherhood has a beginning. Ours began on March 22, 1948, when a small group of Fresno State College students gathered for the first official meeting of what would become the Fresno State Colony of Lambda Chi Alpha.
The date was fitting—it was Lambda Chi Alpha Day.
The original group possessed qualities that would help define the young colony: character, scholarship and personality. Six men formed its nucleus—Tom Dunklin, Robert Kilpatrick, Blaine Stewart, Reinard Bergstrom, Dean Christy and Stanley Weitemier. Kilpatrick served as the colony's first president, Gilbert Bonner as vice-president, Dunklin as secretary and Weitemier as treasurer. Also present was faculty sponsor Dr. Ralph F. Evans, who became one of the chapter's foundational mentors.
They had support from Lambda Chi Alpha's international headquarters and from local alumni. Chief among them was Earl Hill, a Fresno man and a Lambda Chi Alpha alumnus from Oregon State, who sat in on that first meeting and had a hand in bringing the first members together.
Their first priority was not a social calendar. It was building a fraternity.
Two of them—Dean Christy and Stanley Weitemier—graduated that same spring. They would never live in the chapter house or see the charter granted. They built it anyway.
The Interfraternity Council had already accepted the colony—the president announced it at that first meeting—and the college followed on May 13, when the Dean of Men wrote to headquarters that Fresno State had granted Lambda Chi Alpha the opportunity to colonize. By the end of the first semester, six had become seventeen.
The brothers quickly became part of campus life. They competed for—and won—scholarship honors, organized rush events, and began traditions of their own. In the spring of 1949, the colony acquired a fraternity house at 1239 N. Van Ness Avenue.
And the next goal was already coming into focus: becoming a chartered chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha, which would happen in 1952.