By Lady Gray, February 28, 2017 — The second semester of my freshman year, I learned about fraternities and sororities. While I had not yet made up my mind about pledging (joining) a sorority, I was learning about what they stood for and the community work each one did as an organization.
I attended an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges & Universities) in Atlanta, Georgia and discovered that these fraternities and sororities did things a little different from what I’d seen on the news. I loved the positive aspects of these Greek organizations. They did some projects and fundraising as individual groups and other times they all came together.
I learned all their colors. For example: Alpha-Phi-Alpha wore black and gold; Alpha-Kappa-Alpha wore pink and green. My favorite was Phi-Beta-Sigma fraternity and their sorority sisters Zeta-Phi-Beta. I was quite in-tuned to the fact that their colors were the same, royal blue & white and that their Greek letters linked together (Zeta Phi Beta Sigma). That made a lot of sense to me.
Attending college and living on campus, you never seem to have enough money. My roommate and I knew how to sew and I knew how to embroider so we embarked on a profitable endeavor. We started making pillows for the guys who became the newest members of the fraternities. Traditionally, someone who loved you gave you a pillow, specially designed to mark the occasion. It would have their on-line name (the name they were called while they were pledging the fraternity), the date they crossed over, the Greek letters and anything else their loved one requested to make it memorable. Their girlfriends ordered them from us. We made sure they were ready on cross-over night; the night they became full-fledged fraternity members and were no longer “little brothers.”
Not too many girls on campus sewed so we had the opportunity to make quite a bit of money to help pay for our books and other necessities. We found creative ways to save on fabric, thread, and other accessories for the pillows. Even some of the girls who were dating athletes asked us to make pillows for their boyfriends. Sometimes I went outside the box; like the time I embroidered a large towel for a young man who became a member of Omega-Psi-Phi fraternity. Their colors are purple and gold and he took his curtain down to proudly display his towel in his dormitory window.
1969 was truly a busy time for us. My roommate and I found life on campus educational and interesting. We were able to meet most of the challenges of our thriving business especially when we were asked to make a crimson pillow for a Kappa brother. His fiancé wanted the pillow as wide as his shoulders and as tall as he was. You should have seen his eyes when he got that 6-foot pillow.
