He's Burning To Be A Success

"He jumped out the window of my sorority house one night. He wasn't supposed to be there, of course, and he heard the security guards were coming. Ran right through the room where my sorority mother, Clemmie, was playing cards and dived head first out the window. The room was on the second floor. I don't think Clemmie even looked up. She knew him pretty well. He'd done $200 worth of damage to a brick wall out front driving in to see me one night."

"I missed the turn," said Rossovich.

"I came running into Clemmie's room looking for him. 'Where's Timmy?' I said. Clemmie pointed to the window and kept on playing cards."

"I landed in a tree," said Rossovich. "Put a hole in my leg. Here." He pointed to a purple mound on his left leg. There were other scars.

"It was a bad week for me," he added "I fell off two roofs and set fire to myself jumping over a car."

Jumping over a car?

"Well, we used to set fire to cars. We'd buy these old cars for $25, Mike Battle [who played for the Jets] and a few of us, and we'd set 'em on fire or we'd drive one to a big intersection and everybody would jump out and pound it with sledgehammers and saws and things. Sigma Chi was a crazy house. We used to collect bottles in a truck and go back to the house and have bottle fights in the halls. Always seemed to be about six inches of broken glass on the floor and two or three guys at the health center getting stitched up. We were like gunfighters. Every new guy comes to town has to make a challenge. We had a guy announce he was going to sleep for two weeks straight. He did it, too. He woke up just to eat and go to the bathroom."

What about falling off roofs?

"Somebody was always walking around somebody's roof. One guy used to dress up all in black with a clerical collar, and he'd take a bottle of Southern Comfort up on the roof and preach all night. I fell off the third story of the SAE house on my back on a concrete walk. I don't remember exactly why I was up there. My elbow dug into the ground next to the concrete and broke my fall. I was lucky."

Sigma Chi was eventually put on social probation for a number of reasons, Rossovich said, including filling the elevator of the Manix Hotel with water ("when the door opened, swoosh, into the lobby") and piling furniture in the living room of the Theta Chi house and for kissing a passing female motorist, a Mrs. LaFranch, against her wishes.