The Immortal Eleven
It is interesting to learn something about these earnest young men. Through the courtesy of Past Supreme Master and Founder David K. Schafer, the fraternity archives have been enriched with copies of the 1915 and 1916 Violet, the yearbook of the School of Commerce.
It has already been stated that Founder Charles C. Moskowitz was an outstanding basketball player, and he played on the Commerce team for three years and managed it for one of those years. Charles J. Pintel was a publication man. He was circulation manager of both the Commerce Record and the Washington Square Dealer, the downtown campus newspaper. The staff of the Commerce Record, a weekly paper devoted to the activities of that school and its students, listed Brothers Lustgarten, Shulman, and Kraus as staff members. Founder Herman L. Kraus was a debater and helped the N.Y.U. Commerce team achieve victory in a debate over the Wharton School team of the University of Pennsylvania. He served as secretary of the Commerce debating society, of which founders Lustgarten and Shulman were also members.
In voting for class personalities in the 1914 class, Brother Moskowitz ranked third for best athlete; Brother Shulman second for best nature. Founder Kraus was also a member of the staff of the Violet, a member of the Triad League, an advertising society, and editor for the Menorah Society, while Founder Shulman was the class historian.
Expansion
The young fraternity lost no time attracting new recruits. The first pledges were Aaron Rubin, Samuel Epstein, Morton Davis, Nathan Katz and Sidney Picker. Tradition has it that Aaron Rubin was the first pledge, although there is some reason to believe it may have been Samuel Epstein.
Of the five pledges, Samuel Epstein was a member of the debating society and of Delta Mu Delta, the honorary scholastic fraternity; Morton I. Davis was already working as an accountant, and was to become a very successful C.P.A. heading up a very prominent firm; Aaron Rubin was to become a very successful investor and real estate tycoon, and one of the great names in Alpha Epsilon Pi; and Sidney Picker was also destined to make his mark in the fraternity, as he did at Commerce, where he was on the Executive Committee of the Class of 1915 and vice-president of the Debating Society. Very little is known about Nathan Katz. Later that year Henry Rosenblum appears to have been added. He became a successful C.P.A. and attorney.
In 1914 the following men graduated, leaving the fraternity with a nucleus of eight men to carry on: Morton Davis, Samuel Epstein, Nathan Katz, Benjamin Meyer, Charles Moskowitz, Charles Pintel, Maurice Plager and Hyman Shulman. Weaker men might have faltered at this mass exodus which included many of the leaders and founders of the fraternity. This was not the case with the men of Alpha Epsilon Pi.
Although the treasury was quite small, Founder Schafer recalled later that dues were fifty cents a month, the men pressed ahead with what had been their goal from the outset, the founding of a new national fraternity. Plans toward this end had actually started when the fraternity was first organized, and the Violet carries the designation "alpha chapter" with the listing of members in the very first edition (1915) where Alpha Epsilon Pi is included. A young law student, unfortunately nameless, agreed to draft articles of incorporation for Alpha Epsilon Pi Fraternity, Inc., under the Act of the Legislature of the State of New York, Chapter 40, Laws 1909, entitled "An Act Relating to Membership Corporations." Evidently the founders were most impressed with the organization and growth of Alpha Kappa Psi and Delta Sigma Pi, which limited their membership to students in the Schools of Commerce of the universities where their chapters were placed, and decided to emulate them.
Contact was soon made with a group of men at Cornell University who had organized a local fraternity there called Phi Tau. They and the brothers at NYU had a meeting of the minds and formed the Beta Chapter - truly our fraternity could now be called a national fraternity.
A new national fraternity, probably the only major social fraternity in existence today for undergraduate men which was founded in an evening school, had come into being, less than one year after its official recognition by Dean Johnson of New York University.
