The Kansas City Trophy was first presented in 1929 as the Cleveland Trophy and was originally sponsored by the Cleveland Alumni Club. In 1958, sponsorship was taken over by the Kansas City Alumni Club. The trophy is awarded to the most outstanding Phi Delta Theta chapter at a small institution.

Following the success of the introduction of the Harvard Trophy, the Fraternity realized that there were a variety and difference of conditions that exist in the colleges and universities in which there are Phi Delt chapters. It was thought best to change the method of award or to create new trophies for schools with similar conditions. The second method was chosen and the Cleveland Alumni Club awarded a third trophy to be known as ” The Cleveland Trophy.” The point system for the Founders Trophy trophies was exactly the same as that for the Harvard Trophy.

At the time of introduction, the Cleveland Trophy was open for competition among chapters located at institutions with male enrollments fewer than 850.

As expressed by Executive Secretary Priest, “It is the hope of the General Fraternity that through the medium of this trophy, greater excellence may be developed in chapters and a feeling of greater unity grow in the Fraternity.”

View the historical list of Kansas City Trophy winners.

The Fraternity Executives Association is the professional association of men’s and women’s fraternity executives. It is dedicated to the common interests of its members and promotes, supports, and encourages the free discussion and exchange of ideas relating to college fraternal organizations.

Its members are chief staff officers of the administrative offices of general college social fraternal organizations who promote and uphold the code of ethics of the Fraternity Executives Association. Their titles may be executive director, executive vice president, or chief executive officer. Other paid employees of the member’s fraternal organization or its educational foundation comprise FEA’s section membership.

The Fraternity Executives Association provides for the professional development of its members while promoting the values and success of the fraternal movement.

Arther R. Priest was elected as the initial president of the association. Past Executive Vice Presidents Paul C. Beam, Robert Miller, and Bob Biggs all served as presidents of the Fraternity Executives Association at one point throughout their tenure. Robert Miller and Bob Biggs are recipients of the FEA Distinguished Service Award. The award did not exist during the tenures of Arthur R. Priest and Paul C. Beam.

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William F. Harrah, UCLA ’34, stands as one of the most influential figures in gaming history. The company named for him is currently the world’s largest gaming operator, and his focus on efficient management and effective marketing has become the industry standard.

Harrah’s gaming career began in Venice, California, when in 1933, he bought out his father’s interest in a bingo-style game on the Venice boardwalk. Biographer Leon Mandel attributes his immediate “classing up” of the gambling operation to an innate sense of “The right way of doing things” that would guide him throughout his career. Harrah indeed fired the shills [employees hired to simulate play] and added padded stools and drapes to the gambling facility.

But Harrah’s new business occupied a precarious legal perch. In 1937, Harrah wearied of his struggles with the law and moved to Reno, where he opened a bingo club. The club promptly failed due to its poor location, two blocks away from the cluster of gambling halls in downtown Reno.

Harrah owned a series of small bingo parlors for the next decade in downtown Reno. Then, in 1946, he opened a larger gambling hall called Harrah’s Club. There, Harrah focused on providing outstanding customer service and attention to detail: later, employees would rush to replace burned-out lightbulbs almost instantaneously for fear that Harrah’s wrath would come down upon them.

In 1956, Harrah opened a Harrah’s Club at Lake Tahoe. To stay open during the slow winter, Harrah inaugurated a bus program that delivered patrons from across Northern California to his casino. The Reno and Tahoe casinos became highly successful and subsequently added hotels.

Harrah brought principles of standardization to the fore: all employees were thoroughly ‘Harrahrized’ before being allowed to serve the public. Thus, all customers could expect the same high service level regardless of the property they visited.

Harrah was generally content to let his top executives run daily operations and devoted much of his time and money to an extensive collection of automobiles that was, at the time of his death, assessed at over $40 million.

In 1971, Harrah’s offered its first stock to the public, and in 1973 it became the first gaming company traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Harrah died on June 30, 1978, during heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. On his death, his attorney Mead Dixon became executor of his estate and chairman of Harrah’s board. In 1980, Dixon orchestrated the sale of Harrah’s to Holiday Inn, a purchase that created the company Harrah’s Entertainment.

In 1989, Harrah’s family endowed the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus with a generous gift to support hotel management education. Today, the William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration is one of the world’s top hotel programs—a legacy worthy of this gaming pioneer.

In 1934, motivated by civic pride and a love of baseball, entrepreneur and industrialist Powel Crosley Jr., Cincinnati 1901, purchased a financially strapped Cincinnati Reds franchise. Crosley brought stability and innovation to the Reds.

During his nearly three decades of stewardship, the Reds organization introduced night baseball to the Major Leagues, expanded its home ballpark, solidified the grand Cincinnati Opening Day tradition, hosted two All-Star games, fielded some of the most memorable teams in club history, and strengthened its position as an integral part of the civic and cultural fabric of Greater Cincinnati.

At General Headquarters in 1937, a new executive took charge. After a careful search, the General Council chose Paul C. Beam, Indiana 1922 (Illinois 1925), as Phi Delta Theta’s administrator.

An upstanding young man who combined a natural warmth and friendliness with efficient practicality, he had been a fraternity leader at the University of Illinois. After graduation, he became an adviser to the chapter while serving forty other fraternities in a system of cooperative purchasing and business management. As a result, he knew about chapter accounting and fellowship.

A talented musician with an ever-ready sense of humor, he was as easy with undergraduates as with alumni members. From the central office, he conducted extensive correspondence; in visits to chapters, conferences, and conventions, he carried the spirit of helpfulness and hopefulness that Arthur Priest had extolled.

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There was virtually no new building on American campuses until the Public Works Administration, headed by Harold L. Ickes, Chicago 1897, began constructing roads, buildings, and other facilities. One of its 34,000 public projects came to Miami University. In 1936, Miami University rebuilt the century-old North Hall under a federal grant with matching funds from the university. The original brick walls remained, but the interior was hollowed. Down came the old chimneys and fireplaces, and the battered old halls and stairways went out. The new building, still redolent of the past, was ready for use in 1937. Renamed Elliott Hall, it combined tradition with comfort. Pillared porticos graced the entrances, and steel and concrete replaced the old wood construction. An invitingly furnished paneled lounge room occupied the first floor’s south end.

By an act of the university trustees, the Founders’ Room, a front room on the second floor, was restored to its original dimensions and assigned to Phi Delta Theta. The Fraternity furnished it in appropriate character, with portraits of the founders on the walls. Under the custody of Ohio Alpha, it was decided that a chapter leader should live there.

The first Phi so honored was Robert Louis Heald, Miami ’39, when he moved in. Phi Delta Theta had returned to the room where it began. Wrote Ralph McGinnis, Miami ’19: “The tablet in the outer wall marking the birthplace of Phi Delta Theta has not been disturbed. The aroma of historic events fills the bright hallways and cheerful rooms of the renewed building.” But, for all Phis, the most memorable event was the meeting there of six young men on the night after Christmas 1848.

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In November 1908, at the 29th Pittsburgh Convention, Scroll Editor and Manager Frank J. R. Mitchell suggested the Scroll Endowment Fund, a plan for life subscriptions that would, in time, provide adequate support for the magazine. In 1910, he placed before the Niagara Falls Convention a proposal, without precedent in the fraternity world, which called for a plan providing for a life payment of ten dollars for each initiate. By 1917, the fee of ten dollars upon initiation was obligatory. By 1936 the fund amounted to approximately a quarter of a million dollars, invested in mortgages and high-grade securities. The principal of this fund now amounts to more than $4.9 million. Almost every fraternity and sorority has since adopted the plan of life subscription which Phi Delta Theta gave to the fraternity world.

The 43rd Convention held August 30–September 3, 1938, in Old Point Comfort, Virginia, provided that, in Brother Mitchell’s memory, the endowment should be named the Frank J. R. Mitchell Scroll Endowment Fund.

Unfortunately, the contributions to the Mitchell Fund stopped in 1981 due to a change in the tax code. As a result, this fund was insufficient to continually support the publishing and mailing of printed The Scroll in perpetuity. Therefore, the decision was made to change the delivery method of the lifetime subscription to electronic. A digital version also reduced the Fraternity’s overall use of paper and helped address the ever-rising production, printing, and postage costs. Now funds from the Mitchell Fund and the True Blue Society support The Scroll, The Scroll Archive, The Scroll Extra, and expenses related to communications and alumni relations.

Lou Gehrig, Columbia ’25, the Iron Horse of baseball famed for his 2,130 consecutive games-played streaks, made one of the most memorable speeches in the annals of sports. Heartfelt and poignant, this man with less than two years to live shared his feelings to an enraptured audience that left tears rolling down the cheeks of all but a few.

On July 4, 1939, Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day, the longtime Yankee first baseman gave his famous luckiest man speech. The next day’s New York Times wrote, “the vast gathering, sitting in absolute silence for a longer period than perhaps any baseball crowd in history, heard Gehrig himself deliver as amazing a valedictory as ever came from a ball player.

‘For the past two weeks, you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.
 
When you look around, wouldn’t you consider it a privilege to associate yourself with such fine-looking men as they’re standing in uniform in this ballpark today? Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I’m lucky.
 
When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift— that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies—that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter— that’s something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body—it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed—that’s the finest I know.
 
So, I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.’”

Tom Harmon was a football star at Michigan from 1938 to 1940. An electrifying running back, quarterback, and kick returner, Harmon led the country in scoring in both 1939 and 1940. He won the 1940 Heisman Trophy as a senior. In his final college game at Ohio State, Harmon completed eleven of twelve passes for 151 yards with two touchdowns, ran for 139 yards and two scores, kicked four extra points, and intercepted three passes in a 40–0 rout of the Buckeyes. He received a standing ovation from the Ohio State crowd at the game’s end—an honor no Michigan player has received since. Harmon’s accomplishments after college were even more extraordinary. He was a decorated fighter pilot during World War II, played for the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, and became a legendary sportscaster.

On June 2, 1941, Lou Gehrig, the most eminent athlete of his time, died in New York after a two-year battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). In fifteen years with the New York Yankees, Lou Gehrig, Columbia ’25, had made an unparalleled record as a baseball player and a man.

Signing with the Yankees direct from Columbia University, he went to first base on June 2, 1925, and left on May 2, 1939, after playing 2,130 consecutive games. He played with broken fingers and toes and on days when he could hardly stand erect. Nevertheless, he held the record in grand slam home runs at twenty-three and the highest batting average in seven World Series. With his teammate Babe Ruth he shared the record for runs-batted-in.

Off the field, he was a leader in youth movements and a member of the New York Parole Commission. Modest, versatile, courageous, and chivalrous, he retired from baseball in June 1939 after a diagnosis at the Mayo Clinic. On July 4, sixty-one thousand people jammed Yankee Stadium to honor this incomparable man. His death, two years later, wrote Grantland Rice, Vanderbilt 1901, “brought on more national sorrow than almost anyone I can recall.”