In a recent Knox College article, featured Alumnus Andrew Isaacson (ΔΘ 1098) shared not only his story of attending Knox College but of what being a Brother of Sigma Nu meant to him.
While at Knox College during the late nineties, Andrew majored in elementary education with a minor in technical theater. He also played on the Knox College golf team all four years. Andrew worked in the AV department and participated in Knox College’s infamous Repertory Theatre Term.
Isaacson rushed Sigma Nu his freshman year. There, he met Karl Rogers (ΔΘ 1088), a sophomore at the time. Andrew pledged Delta Theta and became Roger’s pledge son. Andrew recalls being nervous about fraternities because of their exclusivity and the stereotypes they carried with him. But after attending Tequila Sunrise, one of Isaacson’s first parties at Knox, he noticed a “synergy there between the brothers there.” So, he joined. For the next three years until graduating in 1999, Andrew was able to balance his position on the golf team, his academics, and his leadership roles at Sigma Nu.
“Leadership is super important. And it’s such a balancing act with all the other things you have to do in life,” Isaacson said. At Sigma Nu Fraternity, Andrew’s first leadership position was being elected to the position of House Manager his sophomore year. Andrew described the job of Delta Theta house manager with a wistful smile, explaining that his job — much like the house manager’s job today — included construction, living upgrades, and delegation of cleaning tasks to the active members of the chapter.
At the time, Isaacson was in charge of work parties to clean the house and perform basic maintenance tasks. These happened on Sundays mornings which is in stark contrast to the two-a-weeks the House has them now on Wednesdays and Sunday afternoons. One of Andrew’s greatest fetes as house manager, with some controversy, was getting the house’s leaky roof fixed.
Andrew did it from the bottom up. He obtained quotes for a new roof, contracted to get the work done, and oversaw the installation himself. He humorously recalls when the college learned the House had the roof replaced:
“The administration realized what was happening on the day the new roof was being installed at the house and was like, ‘Wait a minute . . . what’s going on . . . stop! Why are you putting a new roof on this house?!’ Well, I was like ‘Cause it leaks? Cause it’s old? Cause it’s twenty-five years old?’ And the school responded, ‘But you can’t. . . . Oh, it’s paid for already?’ ”
The college administration was dumbfounded Delta Theta managed the entirety of the roof replacement and paid for it. “It was quite a day,” Isaacson said. “We figured it out, and it was awesome, and I think the college was just surprised.” During Andrew’s junior and senior years, he would serve as Lieutenant Commander and Commander, respectively.
But his favorite memory of his time in Sigma Nu comes from a time all of Delta Theta took a trip down to a theater in Peoria to watch the re-release of Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope. Andrew recalls:
“There’s a scene in [the movie] where Luke Skywalker whiningly says, ‘Oh, but I was going to go into Tosche station to pick up some power converters!’ ” “And it’s not just whiny, but really whiny!” And when Luke said it really whiny like that, the entire Sigma Nu house let out a whine at the same time in the theater like, ‘nooooooo!’”
Isaacson recalls that afterward, the brothers of Delta Theta would constantly quote the line of the movie at each other.
After Knox College, Isaacson reached out to Matt Wunderlin (ΔΘ 1106), a brother who graduated a year ahead of him. Wunderlin was working in Los Angeles and helped connect Isaacson with people in the entertainment industry out there, eventually introducing him to Jon Slusser who was in digital entertainment and sports programming. Slusser is now Isaacson’s partner at The Famous Group, the company Isaacson has been working for the past 25 years and which you can learn more about in the article on Andrew published by Knox.
When asked how Delta Theta contributed to his life, Andrew said, “There’s seeds of Sigma Nu in everything you do, and I really think that the relationships you build at the fraternity can be pretty powerful. It’s a tribute to not only the environment Knox College made exist so one could be in a situation like the one I was in, but to really make an impact after I graduated.”