Emersonian Fraternity

The Emersonian Fraternity, also known as Phi Tau Nu, is a local fraternity at Hope College. It was founded in 1919 as a literary society and evolved in 1929 to a social organization. It has served the Hope College community and it's members for over 75 years.

I pledged Emersonian in 1989 and remained active until my graduation in 1991. I have continued to be involved as an alumnus since then.


Tradition


Tradition has always been a vital part of all fraternal organizations and Emersonian is no exception. Through the years the active membership has varied from a dozen to over 70 members. The men of Emersonian have always been of fine character. There are over 600 alumni of Phi Tau Nu scattered throughout the world involved in all types of professions. Many of whom return to Emersonian every year. During Homecoming 1995 hundreds of alumni came back to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of Emersonian.


Keep the Flame Alive.


People


Who are these guys? These are the men of Emersonian from the spring of 1991. Most of the active members are pictured here.

First row - Don Peterson, Brad Brown, Jim Adams, Joel Kooienga, Derek Triesenberg, Scott Bossard

Second row - Bart Shapley, Todd Travis, Darren Strickland, Scott Hice, Todd Adams, Dale Ermshler(tree), Jim Loats, Kevin Smallegan, Todd Shugars, Dave Kreydich, Gary Land, Carl VanFaasen, Dan Stevens


History


Activities

While I was an active member of the Emersonian Fraternity we were involved in many activities some of which include:

Formals
Fund raisers
Parties
Community service
Retreats, canoe trips, golf outings (Stroh's Open)
Road trips

Road Trips!!!!!

The road trip has been an exciting part of a college education for many decades. Thousands, maybe even millions, of college students each year spontaneously hop in the car and go someplace just for fun. During my time at Hope College I was involved in 2 road trips. Both of which were a lot of fun and a little crazy. I highly recommend a road trip as a simple way to get away from all the pressures of school, work and life. Here is a little about my 2 trips.

Breakfast in the UP

One Saturday night around midnight several of us were sitting in Denny's trying to decide what to do for the night. The brilliant idea came up that we should road trip, but to where? Several ideas came up including a trip to Cedar Point which considering it was February wasn't the most useful. It was finally decided that we should see the sunrise over the Mackinac bridge. For those of you who don't know, the Mackinac bridge is the bridge connecting the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. It also happens to be several hundred miles away from Holland, Michigan where we were. However, this did not daunt us.

Five of us piled into Carl's small Mazda and hit the road. We traveled up the beautiful Lake Michigan coastline of which we didn't see much because it was dark. We had some very merry adventures along the way. Most of these I will not recount here in order to protect the guilty, however there exists a photo log of the journey.

We timed it perfectly and drove across the bridge at 7am just as the sun was rising. It was beautiful. We eat breakfast in the UP and drove back across the bridge less than 2 hours after arriving. The trip back was much less eventful because it was daylight, we were tired and we took the much less scenic highway route home. We did manage to discover that while living it Holland it was possible to do breakfast in the UP in under 13 1/2 hours.

Pictured above are (clockwise from top) Tom Laswell, Dave Kreydich, Carl VanFaasen and Jim Adams.

Off to See the Skydome

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