My recollection is as follows:  Sometime around 1962 our entire class was herded into the large gymnasium and handed a mimeographed sheet of paper that we were told to read and sign.  It informed the reader that the Something Act of 1949 strictly prohibited the participation in or formation of any Greek letter or other secret society within the precincts of any Ohio high school.

The papers were collected and we were then dismissed without further comment.  Like most of my fellows, I had no idea what the whole thing was about and didn't think about it further until I was at Ohio State University in, say, 1966, at which point someone said to me, "Oh.  You went to Heights High School.  Were you in the Beta Sigma Plotski fraternity there?"  I think I replied that by law, there were no such organizations at HHS.  The response was hoots of laughter. 

Years of service at one college or another taught me that student organizations die hard, especially if they are prohibited, so it seems quite likely that (1) such a fraternity might have existed and (2) the likes of M Kinsler would never have been asked to join. 

Does anyone know, or is it still a secret?

Mark Kinsler

Lancaster, Ohio

I don't remember that; but that doesn't mean anything!  I read my diary recently and learned a WHOLE lot about what went on from 1961-1969!!!

On re-reading this post four years later it occurs to me that I never bothered to ask either my sainted mother, Vera G Kinsler, or my sister, Miriam Robins DDS, about the erstwhile fraternity  Both were vigorous and highly-involved HHS students, and I'm pretty sure both worked on the school newspaper and the yearbook. 

Mark Kinsler

BAT...beta alpha tau

Thank you, Mr Brown. A web search for "Cleveland Heights High School fraternities" yields a 2006 article from the Cleveland Jewish News, to wit: 

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Unlikely 77-year history of high-school fraternity

    BY: SAUL ISLER Special to the CJN Sep 22, 2006

On Sept. 9, over 200 men, ages 26 (Jacob Lohser) to 90 (Paul Milner), gathered as brothers at the Beachwood Marriott. They came not to celebrate the anniversary of their graduation, but the founding of their Cleveland Heights High School fraternity established 77 years earlier, one month before the stock-market crash of 1929.

The fraternity’s founder, Bob Bachman (later a physician), described that seminal moment: Dick Lustig and I were sitting on the front steps of our apartment building. “Why don’t we form a club?” I asked Dick. So we called up Harvey Lederman and Bernie Goldstein and talked it over.”

The first meeting of Beta Alpha Tau was held Sept. 19, 1929, the last in 1997.

B.A.T. was a fraternity in every sense of the word, made up of everything bad (exclusion) and everything good (brotherhood) that the word implies. Banned, as were all Heights High Greeks in the mid-1950s, it went underground to survive. Ultimately, the school board accepted B.A.T. as an extracurricular club (as in a bowling or chess club), provided an adult adviser to oversee its meetings, and held its members responsible for any infraction of laws or school-dictated rules. The boys agreed, selecting me (then a “passive” B.A.T. in my late 20s and not too responsible myself) as its board-approved adviser.

And the fraternity lived on, embracing an idea unique in its time. Although all its members were Jewish, B.A.T. decided to banish its religious oneness. The mixing of religions became commonplace in the higher Greek societies of the late 20th century, but it was a radical idea when initiated by these 16-year-old high-school boys in the early ’60s.

By 1970, the B.A.T. roster, no longer looking like a row of donor plaques at the local synagogue, was studded with names like Scicolone, Kackloudis, McCarthy and Olmstead (and later with the likes of Ma and Ishikawa). This easing into diversification did not come from the school administration or from the boys’ parents, themselves carefully self-segregated in those days; it came from within.

It appeared to die a natural death in 1997, an anachronism which had outlasted its rivals by a good 40 years. But brothers insisted upon remaining brothers, most of them friends for life. One typical enclave, a dozen septuagenarian passives, still meets every week as “The Monday Lunch Bunch.” Dozens of brothers are related as legacied sons, cousins, nephews or in-laws.

What’s become of all these brothers? Most, from the affluent suburb of Cleveland Heights, went on to college, then into the professions: medicine, law, education, business, the arts, the military. Many, troublemakers in their youth, gained local, and sometimes national, renown. Albert Ratner, ’46, is CEO of Forest City Enterprises, builder of San Francisco’s new Bloomingdale’s. Allan Jacobs, ’47, was San Francisco’s city planner for many years. Louis Levy heads a national medical foundation; Jeffrey Lieberman, a university; and Robert Goldberg, a bank. Several are authors. The Belkin brothers, Jules and Mike, are impresarios of entertainment.

Doctors and lawyers? A dime a dozen. Others have operated investment firms, ad, auto and insurance agencies. Still others are teachers, coaches, a fire fighter, a cop.

While B.A.T. folded in 1997 as an active fraternity at Heights High, it’s never been forgotten. A year ago, a few passives 60 and considerably older decided they’d press their brothers’ nostalgia buttons by floating a reunion. Could there possibly be any interest out there?

Over a dozen other brothers quickly formed a steering committee, and within months the reunion of a high-school fraternity that no longer existed was officially on. With attendance of nearly half the brothers alive today, it turned out to be the biggest and — all agreed — the best in B.A.T.’s three-quarter-century history. Just to see the brothers, separated by as much as four generations, reminiscing, laughing, and back-slapping and to hear their off-key singing of our raunchy frat songs of old, was worth the nearly 3000-mile journey many took to get there.

Nine years after our “death,” we’re still together and mean to stay that way. After all, our 100th anniversary is just 23 years away.

Cleveland native Saul Isler is a San Rafael writer and dining columnist for the Marinscope Newspapers in Marin County, Calif.

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I think I like today's Cleveland Heights better.  

Mark Kinsler, Lancaster, Ohio

Good informative  article but a bit heavy on the praise and worship. Nostalgia can do that.

Not all CHHS  BAT's did so well...sad to report..a quasi friend and an 'important' BAT Chris Narten (CHHS 64) committed a heroin based suicide in Berkeley, Ca circa 1969...He was summer of loving it...not.

 I remember them as very secretive and a tad arogant....and today...for me anyway...hard to be impressed by someone who is a lawyer...or Botox dermatologist.

It would be interesting to know more about the BAT's who failed and or were jailed... IMHO....But failure can be more interesting than success...just harder to live and die with...