The actual place which inspired the fictional Gamma Alpha Beta Sorority
The Sigma Kappa sorority house at the University of Washington is an enchanted place. The grandeur begins outside the front of the house with its classy brick façade and a stunning mix of Victorian and Tudor architecture. Truly notable is the three-story high round turret.
Once inside, the turret does not disappoint with its centerpiece being a wide and sweeping circular staircase which invites all eyes upward towards a magnificent crystal chandelier.
For a starry-eyed child, that staircase invited you into a place of fantasy and daydreams; up the stairs one would climb and promenade down them as if a princess, creating stories in one’s head.
My first visit to this magical place was likely in the early summer of 1963. My grandmother, Alma DeVore, had taken a job as the housemother and, with the students gone for the summer, invited my family to come visit her at her new job.
I have no idea how many days we stayed, or if we even slept at the house. My older by two years sister says we stayed nearby at our uncle’s house. I was five at the time and I remember little about the visit to Seattle and the Woodland Park Zoo and more about the Sigma Kappa house.
There was a skybridge which connected the formal living areas to the dining hall and kitchen. In the basement were all sorts of mysterious rooms including one painted bright purple which we were told was the chapter room. Around every nook there was another cranny.
Hallways were lined with closed doors to, undoubtedly, the private rooms of the members. At the very top level was a long sleeping porch with parallel rows of bunk beds where all the members slept. There was a back staircase leading to new and interesting spaces. It was the ultimate place to play hide and seek as you could scurry up one set of stairs and down another and through different corridors.
Through photos and documents which she had kept – and are now in my genealogy collection – I’ve determined that my grandmother must have arrived as the housemother beginning in January of 1963.
In 1946, the opportunities for women to earn a living were limited. On September 17th of that year she found herself a widow. Here she was, 46 years old, and with – at most – a high school education; she had no marketable skills beyond having raised three children: my uncle Lyle, my dad, Vince, and their younger sister, Arlene; and managing her own household.
Fortunately for her, she lived in Walla Walla, Washington at the time and was hired as the housemother for the Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE) fraternity.
The TKE years were good ones for her from what I’ve been told. She enjoyed the young men who were members and there was a camaraderie with the other housemothers. I can’t say for sure why, exactly, she left Whitman and took the job at the Sigma Kappa house except that it brought her closer to my Uncle Lyle and his family who moved to the Ravenna neighborhood in Seattle in the mid-1950’s. Although my parents lived in Walla Walla after both graduating from Whitman and by oldest brother having been born there, my family had left the community shortly after his birth as my dad had been transferred to Moscow, Idaho with his job at National Cash Register.
The only other time I know for sure we visited her there is in March 1965. That winter, in Yakima, Washington, where I grew up, the entire town is abuzz. Competing in the State AA Basketball playoffs were our crosstown rivals: D.D. Eisenhower (Ike) and A.C. Davis high schools.
The University of Washington was, I suspect, the best possible choice to be closer to one of her children and family and be able to support herself.
My dad, who had left National Cash Register 1961, returned to college to get a degree in Education, now taught Washington State History to ninth graders. He loved teaching and was invested, particularly, in the local sports community. At the end of the Region 4 semi-final round on March 13th, Ike lost to Davis who was now poised to play at the Seattle Center Coliseum the next Friday.
Although neither of my brothers went with us – my oldest brother attended Ike and would not have anything to do with Davis – my Dad was undeterred and my sister and me – now ages 9 and 7 – were loaded in the 1960 pink Dodge station wagon, and drove with our parents to Seattle on Friday, March 19th.
While I don’t recall a lot of the details, I do know that it was the UW’s Spring break, so the house was empty of sorority girls. And I got to live out every fantasy I had about that house. I was in heaven.
That evening, while our parents went to the basketball games, my sister and I stayed with our grandmother and even got to sleep on the sleeping porch!
Davis won and would be in the championship game the next evening! Once again, we hung out with grandma while my parents went to the game, my dad thrilled when Davis beat Roosevelt 66-49 for the 1965 AA state basketball championship.
Sometime late that evening, our parents arrived back at the Sigma Kappa House, and put my sister and me to ‘bed’ in the back of the Dodge station wagon. We traveled home that way, snuggled in sleeping bags with our heads on pillows that let us look up at the sky while we drove through the dark mid-March night.
My last memory of that trip is of looking up at the snow falling that night on Snoqualmie Pass, swirling in mesmerizing chaos, with the thick flakes illuminated by car headlights shining through the window behind our heads.
My grandmother, born March 15, 1900, seems to have retired at the end of the 1966 academic year. Some 15 years earlier she had bought a house in Spokane. She had it converted to a duplex which she rented out for all those years when she was a housemother! In going through her papers, it was apparent that, despite not having a college degree, she was a determined woman who did not wallow in her grief, but pulled on her work boots to insure her own future. She retired to Spokane and lived in the left half of the duplex, renting the right half out until her much too early death in January 1970.
I have never gone back to the Sigma Kappa house. I think if I did it would seem smaller and less grand than my memories. Instead, it has morphed into the Gamma Alpha Beta sorority, as much a ‘character’ in ‘The Darling of Delta Rho Chi’ as Elise, Riley, Jack, and Virginia.
A few links:
Designation as a National Historic Site:
Have to have one from the Infallible Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Kappa
A link to the official chapter page: http://washington.sigmakappa.org/
Program from the 1965 State AA basketball championship: https://issuu.com/tacomasportsmuseum/docs/2018.29.02
Article from the Yakima Herald Republic:
barbaradevore.com 