Pi Kappa Phi

“We built it from the ground up.”

In the early years, Kappa Phi Local was a revolving door of pledge classes: some pledges stayed, others left, and every week brought new faces. But through the turnover, a culture formed. The brothers looked for quality over quantity when onboarding new members. A.B. Stallworth became the chapter’s advisor. The founders cite that Stallworth’s leadership was essential. 

Brotherhood emerged through doing. The Beta Phi Chapter began with only six initiating members — among them Robert M. Hood, who would later serve as Archon and accept the chapter’s official charter on February 16, 1963. Hood described the early years as filled with leadership challenges and personal growth, as the young chapter recruited students, furnished a house, and ran operations with impressive initiative. The early pledge trips became legendary. 

Wiley Lewis’ red Dodge Dart Phoenix convertible, a machine with such astounding horsepower that it could catapult a freshman into near‑hysterical laughter, ferried pledges through a surreal itinerary: shaving in a restaurant (until the outraged owner threw them out), stealing a military cadet’s hat at Hargrave Academy, asking an unamused housemother for permission to visit her girls’ dorm, and collecting the required women’s undergarments for reasons explained only as “tradition.” 

The First Chapter Room (1961) 

Few spaces in Beta Phi history contain as much lore per square foot as the second floor above Beddingfield Pharmacy. 

When the brothers acquired this space, it was abandoned and badly in need of repair. Lighting was minimal, which was an advantage for concealing the room’s rough edges. The brothers transformed it into a bona fide social hub of the early 1960s. When occupants did the Twist or the Continental, the entire floor swayed so dramatically that moviegoers standing outside the State Theater could watch the windows rising and falling. 

After collecting black, creosote‑soaked fishing nets from Swansboro to create “atmosphere,” the brothers inadvertently set the perfect stage for disaster. One night, the netting caught fire, releasing thick, oily smoke that blinded the room. Everyone escaped down the narrow staircase. The fire department saved the building, but the pharmacy owner’s patience had burned out. The brothers were evicted. 

"The Niche"

The Niche, above Diener’s Bakery and Ken’s Furniture on Dickinson Avenue, was twice the size of the Beddingfield room, complete with a hand‑painted sign created by Phil Lomax. In one corner sat a functioning stoplight “borrowed” from Sanford.  

The Niche was not perfect. Leaks from the bathrooms dripped into the bakery downstairs. One notorious night, a beer keg leaked into the bakery below. Ralph Finch remembers the brothers joking that the baked goods “must have been great the next day." The fire marshal demanded the installation of an exterior fire escape. 

Finch vividly reimagined The Niche in a painting created decades after its heyday. In his mind’s eye, the names of the fourteen Beta Phi founders listed as “Greek Gods” are carved into the chapter house facade, unerasable. 

In 2019, brother Ralph Finch #22 revisited Greenville and penned a letter to the Founders after seeing that 903 Dickinson Avenue — home of the old chapter room — still stood virtually unchanged.

“On my recent trip to Greenville, I was feeling nostalgic and decided to drive down Dickinson Avenue to see all the new businesses I had been hearing about, as well as the changes in Uptown Greenville. My main reason was to see if the old building was still standing where we had our chapter room. 903 Dickinson Avenue is indeed still standing with very little change to the building, although the neighborhood is different mainly due to the old tobacco warehouses being gone. The Carolina Grill restaurant space is still there on the corner with the interior now stripped of all items. I offered a small fortune for the original Pepsi Cola signs that used to be on the building when I saw them in an antique shop close by, but the owner said they were not for sale......ever. There is a faded sign on the end of the building advertising Ken’s Furniture, but the furniture store is gone along with the famous Diener’s Bakery where Alan Fearing and Everett Cameron used to bargain for day old pastries.” 

The First Fraternity House — 1301 E. 5th St (1963)

The house at 1301 E. 5th Street was purchased in 1963, and nineteen brothers packed into its rooms that spring. The beds themselves were surplus U.S. military barracks frames. Downstairs, the humidity lingered year‑round, tempered only by “Hector,” a monstrous industrial fan. Ralph Finch remembers that up to 8 brothers shared the back bedroom. One bathroom upstairs and one downstairs meant inevitable cold showers. The downstairs bath was shared with the house mother, Mrs. Barnhill, adored despite being occasionally pranked by Ray Lewis. A strict rule: shoes stay on the porch, enforced by a 25‑cent fine. As Finch wrote, “Beta Phi became a big part of my being.”  

Across the street lived Mrs. Gertie B. Merritt, ‘Gertie B.’, the elderly widow whose scolding—“Woodrow! Keep that noise down!”—became a running joke. Her house served as overflow lodging for brothers too late to claim a bed in the main house.

One of the most remembered pranks involved John Thompson, a brother with a penchant for the unexpected. One day, he arrived at the 5th Street house carrying not one, not two, but three live chickens, one of which was a fully crowing rooster. It was clear he had never handled a chicken before, which made the scene all the more ludicrous. Once released into the living room, the birds panic‑fluttered across furniture, knocked over lamps, and created pandemonium. 

If the chickens were chaos in physical form, the alligator prank was psychological warfare at its finest. The upstairs bathroom at 1301 E. 5th Street began to mysteriously lock itself from the inside, leaving residents baffled and vaguely unnerved. People speculated about everything from faulty hinges to poltergeists, but brothers in the downstairs back room knew the truth: they were deliberately locking it from the outside using a long wooden ladder, then waiting to hear the confused speculation drifting down through the floorboards. The prank gained momentum when someone joked that perhaps an alligator had moved into the bathroom. 

Another recurring escapade involved bursting into a brother’s room, unannounced, grabbing him under the arms or around the waist, and hauling him outside, usually with very little clothing allowed. He’d be bundled into Wiley’s Dodge Dart, a Triumph TR‑4, or the rattling 1959 VW bus, and driven deep into rural Pitt County, then dropped beside a dark road with nothing but the instruction: “Find your way home.” One incident involved Dan Ray, abducted and left near Ayden; he hitched rides so efficiently that he ended up back on campus before the brothers who dropped him off, stunning them when they returned. 

Among the most absurd episodes in early Beta Phi history is the legendary thrift‑store dress incident. Brothers John Gaffney and Walt Jacob, who found themselves one afternoon outside a thrift shop, slipped into women’s dresses right there outside the store. Their timing could not have been worse. The shop owner, glancing out the window, saw two young men prancing around in borrowed dresses and immediately assumed the worst. Within minutes, local police arrived, catching Gaffney and Jacob still adorned. Appearing in court may have been the end of the humiliation if it were not for the judge's sense of humor. They were ordered to walk up and down Main Street in the dresses for an afternoon in broad daylight; much to the dismay of Gaffney's father who encountered the incident upon opening a back page of his morning newspaper over 400 miles away in Philadelphia.

The Local Scene

When they weren’t in class or at the fraternity house, Beta Phi brothers were a familiar presence throughout Greenville. They frequented local diners and hangouts like Sumrell’s Tastee Freeze, Cliff’s Oyster Bar, the Carolina Grill, and the Riggs House, places known for cheap meals, jukebox music, and late‑night crowds. Other regular stops included downtown favorites such as Old Towne Inn, Happy’s Pool Hall, and the Rathskeller, as well as roadside spots across the Tar River like Bud Venter’s, Darwin Waters Esso, and Dora’s Tower Grill.