Cross & Crescent

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article written by Executive Director Emeritus George Spasyk in the Fall 2004 Cross & Crescent following the death of Tozier Brown.

Lambda Chi Alpha and the interfraternity world lost one of their most active and prominent leaders with the death of Tozier Brown (Denver 1936) on June 23, 2004, in Sarasota, Florida, at the age of 89.

A man who had good sense and a warm heart; humor and high seriousness; philosophical balance and an ability to get things done. That’s a quick way to sum up our friend and brother Tozier Brown. It hardly seems possible that my association with him goes back 54 years to July 1950, when Tozier was Grand High Pi of Lambda Chi Alpha and visiting headquarters in Indianapolis preparing for that year’s General Assembly, and I was starting my first day on the professional staff as a Traveling Secretary, fresh out of the University of Michigan. It was a job Tozier held as his first job right out of the University of Denver in 1936.

He had plans to go to law school, but the country was in the midst of the Great Depression and even with a scholarship to Cornell Law, he was unable to make ends meet. He traveled for three years and again planned for law school. But the merger with Theta Kappa Nu Fraternity took place that year, 1939, and with 28 new chapters to integrate into Lambda Chi Alpha, Tozier was persuaded by Administrative Secretary Bruce McIntosh to stay on another year to visit all of the former Theta Kappa Nu chapters.

Finally, in 1940, he took that scholarship to Cornell Law where he was the editor-in-chief of the Cornell Law Quarterly and graduated with honors in 1943. Tozier’s professional career is chronicled elsewhere, but his fraternal and interfraternal knowledge is unmatched in the Greek world.

50 Years of Service

For 50 uninterrupted years, from 1946 until 1996, Tozier Brown served Lambda Chi Alpha and the Greek system in one official capacity or another. He was elected to the Grand High Zeta at the Toronto General Assembly in 1946, served three 4-year terms and was elected Grand High Alpha at the Montreal Assembly in 1958 for another four years. In 1951 he became a founding director of the John E. Mason Memorial Foundation, whose name was changed in 1968 to the Lambda Chi Alpha Educational Foundation; he served as president from 1977 to 1985 and finally retired from the Board in 1996.

Of more than 200,000 members of our fraternity, represented on more than 200 college and university campuses in North America, I would put Tozier up there among the top five people who had the greatest influence in our organization.

In 1962, the year he stepped down as Grand High Alpha, Tozier was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Interfraternity Conference, and was elected president in 1969. Ten years later, while still serving the Lambda Chi Alpha Educational Foundation, he turned his attention to the National Interfraternity Foundation, became a director and served as president for four years.

When he retired from that Foundation in 1991, he persuaded me to join its Board upon my retirement as Lambda Chi Alpha’s Executive Vice President, which ultimately led to my being president of that Foundation. It seems there was always a Lambda Chi Alpha seat on every Interfraternity board, commission or committee in existence, and this was due to Tozier’s commitment to Interfraternity service, a legacy I was very proud to share and continue.

Defining Qualities

There are so many words I could use to describe Tozier’s qualities.

Perfectionist -— he had an uncanny ability to make people perform, seemingly beyond their capabilities. Of the many Grand High Alphas I served with during my fraternity career, Tozier was by far the most exacting taskmaster. I would rather floss my teeth with barbed wire than mess up an assignment he had given me. Not because he would get angry, but because he expressed disappointment, which made it even worse.

This may come as a surprise, but I found Tozier to be an extremely intolerant person. That word normally has a negative connotation, but not with Tozier. He was intolerant of mediocrity. He was intolerant of laziness. He was intolerant of stupidity. He was intolerant of bigotry. He was intolerant of hypocrisy. He was intolerant of crude and rude behavior. He was openly intolerant of anything that represented the worst in our society.

One of my favorite quotations of Tozier’s had to do with hazing, in which he said, “Unless you are a hypocrite, you cannot be unbrotherly toward a candidate on one day and administer the initiation degrees to him the next day.” Truly, he was a gentleman in the finest sense of the word.

What’s in a Name?

So, whether it was Fozier, Topaz, or Tozier, his high standards, his keen sense of professionalism, his gentle manner at times, yet his explosive dynamism at other times, his unselfishness in giving of himself freely, his sensitivity to the needs and aspirations of others -— these are all rare qualities of a man, and Tozier Brown had them in abundance. This endeared him to the tens of thousands of fraternity and interfraternity friends and brothers.

Tozier’s years on the National Interfraternity Conference Board in the late 1960s and the year he served as president, 1970-1971, are particularly significant and poignant. The fraternity system was going through one of the toughest times in its then nearly 200 years of existence. More than a dozen fraternities had left the Conference, largely for the economic reasons, as hundreds of undergraduate chapters were unable to survive the anti-establishment firestorm that raged on college campuses. The NIC was on the verge of collapse.

As NIC president, Tozier instituted the most comprehensive public relations program the fraternity system had ever seen, and as he and I traveled around the country together, we secured endorsements favorable to the fraternity movement from hundreds of corporate and business leaders, college and university presidents, and prominent leaders of government, the professions and the arts. He asked me to serve as chairman of a committee to relocate NIC headquarters from New York to Indianapolis and, not surprisingly, we decided to put them in College Park, just around the corner from our headquarters. And he hired its first full-time Executive Director, Jack Anson, Phi Kappa Tau, a position now held by a Lambda Chi, Jon Williamson. With all this activity, within the next year, one fraternity after another rejoined the Conference until the “family of fraternities” was again complete.

Tozier’s strong emphasis on public relations and philanthropy was also evident in Lambda Chi Alpha programming, as he developed the “Lambda Chi Alpha Lends a Hand” logo. In 1986 the Grand High Zeta established the Tozier Brown Public Affairs Award, given annually to chapters best exemplifying the ideals of community service, and the Educational Foundation created the Tozier Brown Graduate Fellowship. Tozier also developed the Order of Achievement, Order of Interfraternity Service, and Distinguished Service awards, he also developed the criteria for them, and even designed the medallions and certificates. The first were awarded in 1960 at the Cincinnati General Assembly.

Rest in Peace

I shall be eternally grateful for the 54 years Tozier has been part of my life. But we are also enormously grateful to him for bringing into our lives a truly wonderful woman, his wife Beatrice, whose tender, loving care these last several years of Tozier’s struggles with Alzheimer’s disease have been a genuine profile in courage.

Tozier now rests in peaceful eternity with our blessed Lord. And Bea may now find that peace that comes with a life fulfilled. So we may say goodbye to a dear friend and brother. We shall miss him more than these poor words can say.