Brother Roger W. Parkhurst ’65 was the first member of Phi Gamma Delta in his family. He made sure he wasn’t the last.

Parkhurst’s brother Bruce and Bruce’s son Bradley also became brothers, and his father was initiated as a faculty brother.

Parkhurst created quite a legacy at Lambda Iota Chapter.

“When I went there to rush (in 1963),” Parkhurst says of the Fijis, “I found them to be a solid group.”

Not only did Parkhurst start the trend of Parkhurst men joining Lambda Iota, he also came back to campus to see Bruce and their father’s initiation ceremony – which was the same night.

“I had the honor of pinning my badge on my dad at his initiation,” Parkhurst says with pride.

Following college, Parkhurst headed to D.C. to study law at George Washington University. He then worked as an attorney for a few years at Xerox Corporation before returning to Washington to enter private practice. Today, he’s a senior partner at Steptoe & Johnson, LLP.

But Parkhurst has never strayed far from Phi Gamma Delta. For the past 10 years, he’s been a member of the board of directors of the Phi Gamma Delta Educational Foundation.

The organization is “a charitable foundation that gathers funds, primarily from graduate brothers, and disperses those funds for charitable purposes,” Parkhurst says, “including leadership programs and education, that have to do with the educational leadership growth of undergraduate brothers.”

A native of West Lafayette, where his father was the registrar at Purdue, Parkhurst joined the Fijis to become more active on campus. In addition to gaining a group of brothers, Parkhurst also benefitted from the life lessons he picked up at Lambda Iota, among them the idea that “Membership is not for college days alone.”

“In your pledge class, you learn to work together as a group,” he says. “You see the conflicts that occur among people from time to time and learn to resolve them so everyone can go forward together.”