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The secret society 'tomb' hiding in plain sight in Berkeley
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
Posted: May 2nd, 2022
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/berkeley-skull-and-keys...
Walking up Prospect toward Memorial Stadium, your eyes will likely flit past it. But that unassuming gray building was once the “Tomb” of Berkeley’s most hated secret society, and it was so putrid the city eventually stepped in to shut it down. Skull and Keys was founded in the 1890s by a group of UC Berkeley fraternity members, most prominent among them writer Frank Norris. It was modeled after the famed Skull and Bones secret society at Yale, and like them, invited select members from other fraternities to join. Their primary activities were drinking and causing trouble. Each year during initiation, crowds gathered to watch the Skull and Keys lads parade through town in costumes. In 1920, Skull and Keys members impersonated specific female students, shaming them by name in what the Daily Californian memorably called “a smut carnival.” The university would ban Skull and Keys for a few years, relent and let them back, and then ban them again after another transgression. The death knell tolled for Skull and Keys in the late 1970s. On the night of April 20, 1977 — Adolph Hitler’s birthday — several members walked over to the campus’ Jewish community center and chanted “Hitler was right” and “kill the Jews” outside. In February 1979, tensions reached a boiling point. Neighbors could no longer tolerate the Tomb, site of weekly drinking-and-vomiting soirees. The property did not belong to the university. The campus had no control over the matter. So residents went to the city, which finally agreed to shut the place down.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on secret societies from reliable major media sources.
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