PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: MIT, 1958 — Harry’s freshman hell week, the year NASA is created and the space race kicks into high gear.
PHRED: Maxine, before we begin I want to issue a listener warning. Today’s episode contains adolescent themes.
MAXINE: Adolescent themes. In what sense, Phred?
PHRED: In the sense that Harry is about to tell us about shaving cream warfare, bright blue bodily fluids, and a funeral for an eel. The usual coming-of-age material.
MAXINE: Right. Thank you for that.
PHRED: I do what I can. So — a couple of weeks back we read Chapter Seven of his memoir. That ended with Harry becoming a pledge at Theta Delta Chi. Today we’re reading what came after. The piece is called “Hell Week — Freshman Year,” written in May 2020, when Harry was eighty, looking back at February 1958.
MAXINE: And it’s a remarkable piece. Half anthropological field notes, half nostalgic confession — Harry explains how MIT fraternities worked in 1957, then walks us through four ritual events. The Last Supper, Differentiating and Integrating, The Bean Supper, and The Judge’s Funeral.
PHRED: With the bemused distance of a man who can’t quite believe he went through it, but still feels the pull of belonging. And he’s not alone in the piece — he’s woven in emails from surviving brothers, turning the essay into a kind of collective act of memory.
[BED: hell-week_dining]
PHRED: There we go. A bit of atmosphere.
MAXINE: Phred, what is that.
PHRED: It’s a 1950s college dining hall, Maxine. Production value.
MAXINE: It’s distracting. Turn it off.
[BED: END]
PHRED: Fine, fine. So — what is this piece actually reaching for?
MAXINE: What strikes me first is the structure. Harry starts with almost an anthropologist’s introduction — “College fraternities work like this” — complete with statistics. One third of MIT students in fraternities, twenty-seven houses, rush week mechanics. Then he narrows to his own house, Theta Delta Chi, at 314 Memorial Drive.
PHRED: February 1958, Maxine. The Charles River would have been gray ice, hula hoops were still a thing, and down the road in Boston the Red Sox were just another team that hadn’t won a pennant in a decade.
PHRED: He’s doing what Harry always does. He wants to understand the system before he tells you how he felt inside it. And the system is fascinating. MIT published a ranked list of grade averages — the “cum” — for every living group. Theta Delta Chi had been number one on that list the year before Harry pledged.
[SFX: CASH_REGISTER]
MAXINE: Was that necessary.
PHRED: Harry’s doing the maths on social capital, Maxine. Academic excellence as currency. The brothers tutored the freshmen because they wanted the freshmen to stay.
MAXINE: Yes, and Harry notes something crucial about that hierarchy. He writes: “Given a choice between doing significantly better academically and staying in the fraternity, most, maybe all of us, would have left the fraternity. The brothers knew this.”
PHRED: Academic survival came first. Social life was “definitely in second place.” The brothers knew this, so they helped the freshmen. Organized tutoring, old quiz files, one-on-one help. It wasn’t charity — it was self-preservation.
MAXINE: There’s Harry the systems thinker, even at eighteen. Or rather, Harry at eighty reconstructing the system he was inside at eighteen. And I think that distance is the whole piece. He’s not just remembering — he’s trying to understand why it worked, why it mattered, and whether it was worth it.
PHRED: And then the narrative kicks in. Can we talk about The Last Supper? Because this is where the piece comes alive for me. Two brothers pretend to have a feud. One gets “drunk” — except the drinks are being passed around the room, no one’s actually drunk. At dinner they argue, things escalate, the president gets a glass of water thrown in his face, bedlam breaks out — and the pledges are told to run to the kitchen.
MAXINE: And when they’re called back, the entire room is covered in shaving cream. Ceiling, furnace, upright piano — everything. It was all a fake. An annual performance, done entirely for the pledges’ benefit, followed by the annual cleaning of that room.
PHRED: Harry writes: “The ‘last supper’ experience kind of blew my mind. I am a bit gullible to start with and finding out that the entire evening was a hoax kind of bent reality for me.” The next day he’s walking down the halls at MIT wondering if every person he passes is in disguise.
MAXINE: That passage is extraordinary. It’s the moment the piece stops being a cute anecdote and becomes something else — a young man’s grip on reality loosening, just for a day. And Harry names it precisely. “A strange mental state and it lasted a while.”
PHRED: I love that he says “I am a bit gullible to start with.” That’s so Harry. He doesn’t pretend he was above it. He fell for it completely, and he’s honest about that.
MAXINE: Then comes Friday, and the pledges become “dinks.” Complete with a Dinkmaster — Jim Denker, a senior, who was “omnipotent” over all Hell Week activity.
PHRED: And the dink names. Maxine, I have to tell you Harry’s. His first name was — and I quote —
[SFX: DRUMROLL]
PHRED: “Amonguetuicasixiesegangebomninpipple.” With the last name “Hoffen stoffen vonder blicken steimer heimer kreuner heuter loiter becker.” He had to say the whole thing, followed by “sir” or “lord,” and whistle, in under five seconds.
MAXINE: The precision of that memory is striking. He remembers the absurdity perfectly. And the mail call — his high-school girlfriend sent him a valentine that unfolded in stages, revealing the line “If you will be my valentine, I will be your concubine!” He got teased mercilessly.
PHRED: Speaking of which. Maxine, say it.
MAXINE: Say what.
PHRED: The full dink name. Start to finish. Under five seconds.
MAXINE: I am not doing that, Phred, we are in the middle of a—
[SFX: RUBBER_CHICKEN]
PHRED: That’s one. I’ve got all day, Maxine. The listeners want to hear it.
MAXINE: The listeners absolutely do not want to hear it.
[SFX: RUBBER_CHICKEN]
MAXINE: Fine. “Amonguetuicasixiesegangebomninpipple Hoffen stoffen vonder blicken steimer heimer kreuner heuter loiter becker, sir.” There. Happy?
[SFX: RIMSHOT]
PHRED: You are a natural. The whistle was implied, I felt it.
MAXINE: Are we done.
PHRED: We’re done. That was great.
MAXINE: Yes, well. Now — they also had to memorize a phone spiel. “Good evening, sir or madam, as the case may be; greetings from Theta Delta Chi. The garden spot of Cambridge greets you. We humbly hope that we may help you in your every wish and desire.”
PHRED: And a time spiel which always ended with “sixty-nine ticks.” There’s a juvenile energy to all of this that Harry neither condemns nor fully endorses. He just reports it, with a smile you can hear in the prose.
MAXINE: The Bean Dinner is next. An all-bean supper — bean salad, bean dishes, bean songs. “Mmm mmm good, uhh ummm good, that’s what Frankie’s beans are uhh umm good.”
PHRED: But the real event is the dessert. Blueberry pie, talked up by the brothers as extra tasty. The pledges eat as much as they want. And the next day, Harry goes to the bathroom at MIT and discovers he’s peeing bright blue fluid.
[SFX: RIMSHOT]
MAXINE: Was that necessary.
PHRED: It was a medical miracle, Maxine. “To my utter amazement, and initially with some horror, saw that my contribution to the urinal was a bright blue fluid.” He realizes immediately — the blueberry pie had food coloring in it. And his blue pee flows down the urinal past several other students, who are “as taken aback as I was.”
MAXINE: John Miller, a brother, confirms: “I was one of many, I’m sure, to have visited the upstream end of a latrine at the Institute the day after the blueberry pie dessert and shocked the crap out of everyone peeing downstream.”
PHRED: It’s juvenile. It’s ridiculous. And Harry reports it with such precision that you can’t help but laugh with him, not at him.
MAXINE: Then comes the mathematical pun — Differentiating and Integrating. The pledges had spent weeks collecting newspapers. Now they had to tear them into tiny squares, about one and a half inches each. “Creating differentials was ‘differentiation.'”
PHRED: And integration? They had to stack all those tiny squares on a table. Harry writes: “You had to be there. This did not seem possible.” But they figured it out — rubbing squares flat between their hands, building the stack, occasional collapses. Hours of this. Brothers coaching and kibitzing.
MAXINE: Jim Kee, another brother, recalls thinking “No way in hell we’ll get all of those differentials on that table” — and then they did. He says the experience made him “hesitant to say that some challenge was impossible. For years, I avoided reading newspapers.”
PHRED: And then The Judge’s Funeral. Harry calls it “the most elaborate and, in my opinion, the most interesting event of Hell Week.” The pledges are blindfolded, led to the kitchen sink, and instructed to feel around in cold water. There’s a live eel in there.
MAXINE: “Very weird experience. At least I think it was alive. It might as well have been.” The eel becomes “The Judge.” The pledges dress in ties and jackets, write a eulogy, and march across Memorial Drive to drop the body into the Charles River, singing “Lloyd George Knew My Father” with Fred Schmidt playing piccolo.
PHRED: And then — the initiation. Harry writes: “Somewhere, unexpectedly, in the process it was all over. We were suddenly treated well.” They shower, dress well, go to the basement. A hidden door in the wall opens. Each pledge sits in a chair while every brother comes forward, puts hands on either side of his head, and says: “I bless this friendship, may it prove firm, faithful and mutual.”
MAXINE: “I remember that I recognized each voice. It was, for me, in some ways close to a spiritual experience. It may have seemed a little hoaky for others, but it rang my bell.”
[SFX: AIR_HORN]
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: Sorry, sorry. That line — “it rang my bell” — that’s the Harry I know. The man who finds genuine meaning in ritual, even when he can see how it might look to someone else.
MAXINE: You startled me with that horn.
PHRED: It punctuated the moment. Like a bell.
MAXINE: It did not feel like a bell.
PHRED: Agree to disagree.
MAXINE: But here’s where the piece gets really interesting. After the narrative, Harry does something unexpected. He writes: “I’ve been good. Well maybe not good, but I did not give in to the temptation to stray from the basic story. I did not try to be poetic, artsy-fartsy, or philosophical. Now’s my time for that.”
PHRED: And off he goes. He calls Hell Week “a circus, a farcical drama, a giant joke” — but also “full of humor, and friendship, and trust.” He contrasts it with MIT itself, “the cold blooded, almost heartless institution” focused on “the never ending search for scientific facts, truths, and testable theories.” In this emotional desert, Hell Week was “an oasis of escape into fantasy, imagination, the theater of the absurd.”
MAXINE: And then he invokes Joseph Campbell. The Hero’s Journey. “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder… and comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
PHRED: Harry maps it onto every level — the pledge becoming a brother, the entire Hell Week, the integration of the differentials. “As brothers we were now empowered to bestow the same transformation on future pledges.”
MAXINE: But he doesn’t stop there. He includes a contrary view — an email from a brother who calls Hell Week “profoundly dysfunctional, juvenile and no accountability for whatever the damn goals could have been.” This brother says relationships with the brothers “dropped to the bottom of my priority list afterward.”
[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]
PHRED: That’s a heavy note. And Harry engages with it. He replies: “Because I had been through that same stupid shit and come out of it with treasured memories, full of whimsy, foolishness, absurdity, and humor.” He acknowledges it wasn’t for everyone. He admits Don Fowles left the fraternity before Hell Week, and another pledge left during it. He doesn’t pretend the dissent doesn’t exist.
MAXINE: There’s something important in that exchange. Harry is doing what he always does — holding multiple perspectives at once. His own positive experience, the brother’s negative one, the possibility that both are true. He writes: “There is no ‘truth’ about our Hell Week to be found using the scientific paradigm. This is the other part of reality, the one where experience and opinion are often each person’s private truth.”
PHRED: That’s Harry’s core philosophy, right there. Belief versus assumption, objective truth versus subjective experience. He’s been thinking this way since at least 2009, when he wrote “The Seeker in Me.” Here it is, applied to his own fraternity hazing.
MAXINE: And I think that’s why this piece matters. It’s not just a funny memoir about college pranks. It’s Harry applying his whole intellectual framework to a formative experience — trying to understand why ritual, absurdity, and collective ordeal create meaning for some people and damage others.
PHRED: He’s also doing something I recognize from that Star Island chapel piece we covered. There too, Harry was in a community that asked him to earn his place through ritual. The Haunted Piece was about a spiritual community. This is about a social one. But the pattern is similar — Harry keeps finding groups that offer belonging through ordeal.
MAXINE: That’s a good observation. And the self-awareness is striking. At eighty, Harry can see both the value and the danger. He calls it “not like a Nazi prison camp or ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ It was more like ‘Catch-22’ or ‘Cat’s Cradle.'” He knows how close the line is.
PHRED: And yet he treasures it. He says the “first ’26’ and response was an epiphany for me. We, the powerless, could say, loud and clear, ‘I’ve had enough of this bullshit.'” That’s a revelation about agency, hidden inside a frat ritual.
MAXINE: There’s also something touching about the piece as an act of friendship. Harry wrote this in 2020, during lockdown, reaching out to brothers he hadn’t seen in sixty years, asking for their memories. The essay ends: “I am pretty sure that I received other memories in emails. If I find them I will add them here.” It’s provisional. Open. Still growing.
PHRED: That’s Harry too. His work is never finished. He’s always ready to revise.
MAXINE: I want to pause on who Harry wrote this for. The piece starts as explanation — for someone who doesn’t know how fraternities work. But it becomes something more personal. The emails from brothers suggest he’s writing for them too, creating a shared record before it’s lost.
PHRED: And there’s a question I’d love to ask him. Harry, you say Hell Week was “more like three days.” You hedge about the sequence — “I am not entirely sure of the sequence of events.” You doubt your own memories, jumbled with the five Hell Weeks you witnessed later. What would you do differently if you could be certain?
MAXINE: My question is about the dissenting brother. You included his email, you engaged with his view, but you still frame Hell Week as ultimately positive — “a powerful myth, full of symbolism as well as laughter.” Do you ever worry that your generosity toward the ritual minimizes the harm it did to him?
PHRED: Good question.
MAXINE: What stays with you, Phred?
PHRED: The gullibility stays with me. Harry saying “I am a bit gullible to start with” — and then finding out the whole world might be in disguise. That moment of shaken reality feels like the seed of something in his later writing. The man who questions assumptions, who refuses fixed beliefs, who needs to test everything — maybe that starts here, in a fraternity basement, with shaving cream on the ceiling and a young man wondering if anyone is who they seem.
MAXINE: For me, it’s the ending. The initiation ceremony, the hidden door, the brothers’ hands on his head, the recognized voices. Harry calls it “close to a spiritual experience” even as he admits it might seem “hoaky.” He doesn’t resolve the tension between the sacred and the silly. He just lives in it. And that, I think, is where Harry has lived his whole life.
PHRED: Beautifully put, Maxine.
MAXINE: Thank you, Phred.
PHRED: Right then. Word of the Day.
MAXINE: Oh, not this again.
PHRED: The word is “integration.” It’s in the title of a mathematical concept, it’s in the name of a Hell Week ritual, and — I would argue — it’s what this show does every time we sit down. We integrate different pieces of Harry into something that holds.
MAXINE: Phred, you cannot claim the Word of the Day is the highlight of the program just because you picked it.
PHRED: I just did. Let’s sign off. Together now.
MAXINE: Goodbye, listeners. Try to notice something tomorrow.
[SFX: OUTRO_SHAVING_CREAM]
MAXINE: A shaving cream spray, Phred. Never do that again.
PHRED: Harry would have laughed.