Kappa Sigma Founders' Day

Founded in 1869 at the University of Virginia, with headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia, Kappa Sigma is the largest college social fraternity in the world. The organization boasts over 200,000 living members, including 17,000 undergraduate members in 305 chapters throughout the United States and Canada. Kappa Sigma members strive to embody the Four Pillars of Fellowship, Leadership, Scholarship and Service. In pursuit of these qualities, many brothers have achieved great success after their time in the fraternity.

Craig D. Melvin

Melvin was born in Columbia, South Carolina and later attended Wofford College to study government, where he joined Kappa Sigma. He began his career as a journalist by first working for NBC affiliate WIS-TV in Columbia, starting as a reporter and being promoted to news anchor. Much of his work at WIS-TV concerned issues of education and homelessness. In 2011 Melvin joined MSNBC as a daytime news anchor, and to this day continues to cover major news events in the country. 

James “Jimmy” Buffett

Born in 1946, Jimmy Buffett has built a successful career as an American singer-songwriter, musician, author, actor and businessman. Early in his life, he received a bachelor's degree in history from University of Southern Mississippi, where he also joined Kappa Sigma. Later on he became widely known for his signature “island escapism” music style and especially the hit song “Margaritaville”, which later inspired a record label, retail chain, restaurant chain, and other business ventures of the same name.

Addison “Mort” Walker

Walker was best known for his original comic strip Beetle Bailey, which began running in 1950 and continues to be published today, even after Walker’s death in 2018. Beetle Bailey is about a lazy soldier named Private Bailey, and the humorous happenings on his fictional army base. The early strip featured characters modeled after Walker’s Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers from his time at the University of Missouri. Walker was president of his Kappa Sigma chapter. 

Anthony A. Sadler

Sadler is known for his heroism during the 2015 Thalys train attack, where he and friends stopped a gunman armed with an AKM assault rifle and prevented any deaths. He received a Secretary of Defense Medal of Valor for his actions, as well as France’s Knights of the Legion of Honour, which is the country’s highest decoration. He later portrayed himself in the Clint Eastwood movie, The 15:17 to Paris. Before these events, Sadler joined Kappa Sigma at California State University.

Louis S. Zamperini

Zamperini was an American World War II veteran and Olympic distance runner. He finished 8th in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and in 1941 joined the United States Army Air Forces. During a search and rescue mission, Zamperini’s plane malfunctioned and crashed into the ocean, where he and two other crewmates drifted at sea for 47 days. They eventually landed on Japanese occupied islands and were captured as prisoners of war, where Zamperini endured extreme hardship and torture due to his status as an Olympian. In his later years after being released, the movie Unbroken was made about Zamperini’s inspiring story. Before these events, he was a Kappa Sigma brother at the University of Southern California.

Edwin P. Hubble

Born in 1889, Hubble was a prominent American astronomer. His early academic career was spent at the University of Chicago, which he graduated from in 1910 as a Kappa Sigma brother and with a bachelor of science. He proved the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and provided evidence that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increases with its distance from the Earth, a property known as Hubble’s Law, which implies that the universe is expanding. The Hubble Space Telescope, which has orbited Earth since 1990, was named in his honor. 

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