Dead Fred Goes to the Debate
He had to take his own chair, but Dead Fred made it to the vice presidential debate.
With 600 seats removed from the 1,500-seat Newlin Hall to make room for the TV cameras, tickets to the debate were the hottest commodity in town. Most of Centre’s 200 tickets went to students, with a few reserved for major debate donors and community members who helped bring the debate to Danville.
Yet as a regular at football and basketball games since 1953, it would have been a shame if Dead Fred had missed the biggest thing to happen to Centre since C6-H0.
Thus, the brothers of Phi Delta Theta escorted their portrait of Supreme Court justice Fred Vinson ’09 (law ’11), known affectionately as ‘Dead Fred,’ to the debate hall a couple of days before the debate and placed him out of the way on a ledge. (Little did they know then that the Supreme Court would end up ruling on the 2000 election.)
Fred Vinson, the man, was perhaps the most famous Phi Delt in 150 years of the fraternity at Centre. A brilliant student who could have had a career in professional baseball, Vinson went on to serve in all three branches of the Federal government. President Truman appointed him chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1946, a position he held until his death in 1953.
