Dickens on Maloy

Got this e-mail today from Mike Dickens ’69. It’s posted here with his permission:

We pledged Mike in the fall of his freshman year (1966) in the pledge class with among 20 others Fox Demoisey and Jerry Kroll. If memory serves in our region the Sigma Chis at Wake Forest and Duke supported us and the chapters at UNC, NC State and especially the University of South Carolina were not pleased. I believe the intemperate words by one Sigma Chi at USC was that they were going to come up to Davidson and burn down our fraternity house.

We never faced the issue of presenting Mike for membership in the National Fraternity because he never made his grades. I am not sure if that rule was a school rule or a fraternity rule. In any case in 1970 when the chapter voted to leave the National Fraternity and become the Macchis (our school nickname) it was largely because of the feeling that the national fraternity was racist generally as well as specifically in some of their dealings with our chapter. Jerry Kroll was our president (I think the Greek title was Consul) and he would know the story better than I.

Mike faced a racism both overt and subtle that we can only imagine. Remember he came to Davidson just two years after the Freedom Riders in Greensboro and one year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It’s is impossible to know what the pressures were like that forged the man he became. It is awfully sad however that someone who was such a good friend to a number of us could have disappeared so completely from our lives over the last almost 40 years.

The last time I saw Mike was in the fall of 1971. I was coming back from playing pro basketball in Belgium and he was playing with the Virginia Squires. I went by Norfolk and met him at his apartment. After getting into horrible shape the previous year playing for the Pittsburgh Condors he had completely turned himself around. He was 220 lbs and in the best shape of his life. He told me he was playing the best basketball he had ever played and he was the starter at small forward going into the season. But he said there is a rookie on the team that does things every day in practice that nobody has ever seen on the basketball court and I should remember his name. Well his name was Julius Erving and when the season started Mike was on the bench. He was making too much money to not start so the Squires traded him to Dallas after 7 games. With Charlie Scott averaging 34.6 ppg and Erving averaging 27.3 ppg and 15.7 rebounds a game the Squires finished 2nd in the ABA Eastern Division.

Mike played in 9 games at Dallas in the 1972-73 season but I think was in Austria well before the season ended. I talked to him in Dallas a couple of times but never saw him or talked to him after he went to Austria.