How a fictitious USC honor society came to be — and the alumni who still gather to celebrate their fun.

Cana est paratum

By Howard Hellams, '63

Epsilon Epsilon Epsilon got its start at USC in 1962 when a handful of campus do-gooders grew tired of doing good.

        They aspired to have at least a couple of hours a week when they didn't have to edit the Garnet & Black and The Gamecock, or help lead the student body or run honorary organizations like Omicron Delta Kappa and Alpha Kappa Gamma. They yearned for a Friday afternoon beer at the Cotton Patch on Devine Street like "normal" college students. 

        Epsilon Epsilon Epsilon — Tri-Ep for short — was officially founded by Charles Behling, a senior journalism major from St. George, S.C., who elected himself czar, an office he continues to hold nearly 50 years later.

      "Charles was the perfect candidate," said Patty Whitlock Hamsher, who came to USC from Lake City, S.C., and now lives in McLean, Va., "since he possessed an extraordinary ability to do nothing, while appearing to be doing something worthwhile." 

        Behling immediately found a flag for Tri-Ep to rally around when I, a journalism and mass communications junior, wound up on the dean's list — and academic probation — at the same time. The loophole that allowed that sort of anomaly to occur was closed shortly thereafter, but it was all the incentive that a bunch of burned-out campus leaders needed to establish a totally exclusionary and politically incorrect society that did nothing but have lunch, laugh uproariously and make fun of each other and the rest of the world.

       Since the group included consecutive editors of the yearbook, Tri-Ep was able to insert a page honoring itself into the 1963 Garnet & Black, alongside Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi and other august campus organizations. The Tri-Ep page included an official-looking Tri-Ep coat-of-arms (which I had sketched on the back of a napkin at Cogburn's Restaurant on Sumter Street), and the motto, cana est paratum, which is really bad Latin for "dinner is served."

         In addition to the editors of the yearbook, the early Tri-Ep members were also editors and business managers of The Gamecock newspaper; president, secretary and treasurer of the student body; chairman of the Honor Court; May Queen; Homecoming Queen; chairman of the State Student Legislature; several class officers; and presidents of the Pan-Hellenic Council and Interfraternity Council. Moreover, during the first two years of its existence, Tri-Ep claimed all four recipients of the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award, the highest honor presented to students on Honors Day each year.

Honorary members included three professors in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications and executives with the R.L. Bryan Company and Price Coursey of Charlotte Engraving, both of which were instrumental in publishing the Garnet & Black each year. (The members of Tri-Ep might have been crazy, but they weren't stupid.)  

Tri-Ep survived for about five or six years after its founding, but it died in the late 1960s, when students became far too serious to embrace a frivolous organization that came along before drugs, free love, peace protests and Woodstock.

Of the original members, about 30 have remained exceptionally close friends, even though they are scattered all over the globe. Perhaps 15 to 20 get together somewhere in the world for a reunion each year, often at S.C. beaches or N.C. mountains but also in Italy, California and Washington, D.C.

Most of all, they have remained fiercely loyal to the one common denominator in each of their lives: the University of South Carolina. They still sing the alma mater, they still cheer for the Gamecocks and they still spend countless hours, weeks and days indoctrinating their grandchildren about the only university in the nation worth attending.