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white Jews he knew from the neighborhood, such as Mr. Schoen, the hat store owner. Those positive relationships set a pattern for his life.
    His summer of work at Gibson Island left Thurgood free from any fear of not being able to pay his tuition. He went back to school with confidence that he was there to stay and jumped into every activity on campus. He was never on the football team, but during his sophomore year he displayed a talent for talking about the glories of football at the Lincoln team’s bonfire rallies. His wild speeches, elegizing the great Lincolnteams of the past as well as commenting on the mothers of the opposing team’s players, became legend.
    Meanwhile, Aubrey had to take an extra semester to get ready for medical school. Never one for campus life, he spent most of his free time off campus romancing a pretty Baltimore girl, Sadie Prince. And he already had his acceptance to Howard Medical School in hand. In the winter of 1926 he graduated with honors and soon married Sadie.
    Thurgood, meanwhile, was at the heart of campus life. He took part in two rituals of young male college society. First, he joined Alpha Phi Alpha, an elite fraternity of mostly light-skinned boys. Although the fraternity was at the top of campus society, its hazing was rough. “We’d get hit in the morning, hit in the middle of the night … dousing in cold water and all that kind of crap,” recalled Monroe Dowling, who pledged a rival fraternity, Omega Psi Phi. “People came from all over the country to haze you.… You’d be beaten, branded, mistreated, and everything. That was Lincoln. The most uncouth place in the world.” 8
    The second male ritual Thurgood joined at the start of his sophomore year was to grow a mustache, a small, bushy one right below his nose—the same style his father wore. Marshall would keep a mustache for the rest of his life.
    Once he became an Alpha, Thurgood delighted in the nasty tricks fraternity brothers would play on each other and on rival frats. “I can throw water around a curve,” he later claimed with pride. “You put the water in a pitcher, and you hold the pitcher straight up … then about the third time swirling the water—
whrrrroooo
, throw the water and it will go around the corner.”
    After one of his friends was doused with water by a competing fraternity while wearing good clothes, Thurgood and his frat brothers decided revenge was in order. “We knew in the Lincoln Hall dormitory for some reason they had little trapdoors on every floor. So if you opened the trapdoors you could go from the fourth floor all the way down. So we decided we’d open them all at one time. We got a big bucket, and everybody on that floor peed in that bucket, and they spit, and some of us were chewing tobacco. And we got a real good bucket of real good stuff in about a week or so. So when the guy is coming in the front door, we dropped the bucket of slop on his head through the trapdoor. Bet it broke him of that habit of throwing water.”
    Thurgood took to researching the best pranks. In his favorite, fraternitybrothers would take the pants off the freshmen pledges and stick pickles between the cheeks of their buttocks before having them hop around the room in a race. After all the pickles had fallen on the floor, the older boys would put them in a punch bowl. While the boys were pulling up their pants, the old bowl would be switched with a bowl of fresh pickles. Then the pledges would be told to take a pickle out of the bowl and eat it. “Everyone would say, ‘Can’t I get my own pickle?’ ” Marshall remembered with glee.
    Thurgood personally took part in frat pranks such as shaving the heads of other students—against their will. And he used paddles to hit other students, often with too much enthusiasm. The overly aggressive hazing of a younger student got him kicked out of school. “When the blow [the expulsion] descended, Marshall and friends headed for New York to seek jobs