Paul Recer Breaks an Arm During a Kappa Sigma Initiation

Creator

Preview

Identifier

20124337

Description

Initiation Trick Backfires Paul Recer, 20-year-old North Texas State College sophomore from Fort Worth, went out on a limb Friday night and got a busted one for his trouble. Recer, his broken left arm in a cast, told the story from his Harris Hospital bed Saturday. He said he was participating in a fraternity initiation ritual high up in a time-worn oak tree on the NTSC campus in Denton. "Pledges have to stand in the tree and call out the time, temperature, and elevation," he explained. Recer said he and the other four guys had just yelled, "Time, 11:45 Temperature, 51 degrees Elevation, 638 feet," when the limb snapped. "One minute we were screaming at the top of our lungs, and the next minute we were moaning on the ground," Recer said. The other four Kappa Sigma pledges sharing the limb weren't injured. One of them didn't even fall since he was near enough to the tree's trunk to catch himself. "He just hung onto the tree and watched us tumble to the ground," Recer told. Recer was rushed to the new college dispensary after the accident but was later transferred to the Fort Worth hospital so his mother, Mrs. Lennie Recer of 3912 Menzer, could visit him. "They say I'll be back in school Monday," Recer said, "but I don't know how I'll make it." He explained that one of his Monday courses is a journalism reporting course that requires use of a typewriter. "How can I type like this?" he asked.

Archival Date

1958-12-06

Collection Name

Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection

Collection Number

AR406-6-178

Original Format

Negatives, Black & White

File Format

JPG

Rights

Rights held by The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, Special Collections. Any use of content downloaded or printed from this page is limited to non-commercial personal or educational use, including fair use as directed by U.S. copyright laws. For more information or for reproduction requests, please contact UTA Special Collections by emailing spcoref@uta.edu.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Subjects

Sophomore; Fraternities