Time Takes a Toll : Fraternal Lodges Face a Bleak Future as Members Grow Older

If baldness weren’t enough to remind the men of Oxnard Masonic Lodge No. 341 that their membership is rapidly aging, two of the newest inductees make the point. They’re both morticians.

Members joke about the occasional hearse parked in the back of the lodge, in the same way as they kid one another about hair loss.

Eighty years of life has left Harold Colen with no more than a fringe of hair surrounding his dome. For this his brother Masons call him “Curly.”

“I just got a haircut yesterday,” Colen said, defending against yet another bald joke. “It cost me $10.”

“That’s because the barber has to spend so much time hunting for hair to cut,” retorted the jokester.

Aging membership is not entirely a laughing matter. Many fraternal orders such as Masons, Elks and others are facing declines that threaten the existence of the lodges, many of which have been integral parts of their communities for most of the century.

“I’d say we were within two or three months of closing,” said Wayne Spitzer, manager of the Oxnard Elks Lodge. Spitzer staved off the shut-down recently by renting out an adjacent building the lodge owns, but he sees the handwriting on the wall.

“I don’t think there will be such a thing as fraternal organizations in 15 years,” he said.

Ventura County has more than two dozen lodges representing six different fraternal orders, from the well-known Elks to the low-profile Eagles. As many as 12,000 people belong to these clubs. The Masons have five temples here while the less well-attended Odd Fellows have halls in Ventura and Santa Paula.

What is at risk is more than just a place for men to enjoy lunch and a game of cards. Their benefit barbecues pay for Little League uniforms, steak dinners fund health screenings for children and bingo games buy food for the needy during the holidays.

“There was a time in Oxnard that if you didn’t belong to the Elks, you were missing out on a big part of the community,” said former Oxnard Mayor A. Elliot Stoll. “They had programs to distribute food at Christmas, supported youth bands and baseball teams.”

The Oxnard Elks still distribute Christmas baskets as they have for more than 60 years, although the service is not without difficulties.

“I ran a request for food donations in ‘The Moo.’ That’s the club newsletter,” Spitzer said. “We got maybe three cans of corn and a can of peas.” In lieu of donations, bingo proceeds bought food for the holiday baskets.

Membership shortfalls are not so easily resolved.

Walk into any of these lodges and the smell of Barbasol is unmistakable. These are the men who fought The War, and if you have to ask which war you are clearly not one of them. Their forearms are tattooed with eagles, anchors and American flags (the one with 48 stars).

For decades, the Oxnard Elks numbered around 1,200. But 10 years ago, membership began to decline while the median age crept upward. Membership currently stands at just over 700 and the median age is 69. Therein lies the problem.

The National Center for Health Statistics calculates that a group of men with an average age of 69 has a mortality rate of 3% per year. Not surprisingly, many lodges composed of men in their 60s are declining at about 3% a year.

Time, tobacco and red meat has apparently caught up with many of them. Spitzer suddenly lost several friends in the last two years.

“They just wake up in the morning dead,” he lamented.

From a Different Era

“The men who built these organizations were products of World War I and World War II, both episodes in our history when there was a lot of bonding among men,” said USC sociologist Vern Bengston. “Baby boomers haven’t had that sort of generational, fraternal experience.”

And the ones who have don’t seem anxious to reconstruct the camaraderie of wartime. Vietnam veterans, for example, have comparatively low membership in the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, according to the national offices.

The decline that’s now cutting into the Elks and putting cracks through the Masons is an intensification of a trend that felled such groups as the Woodmen of the World and caused the Redmen to pale into oblivion. The Knights of Pythias, which had 1.8 million members at the turn of the century, now numbers only 76,000.

Back then, just about any town with a population over 5,000 had at least one lodge, its atmosphere redolent of tobacco smoke, fried food and fellowship.

All the lodges shared a taste for ritual and bombastic titles that are occasionally lampooned even in modern media. Howard Cunningham of television’s “Happy Days” was offended when anyone ridiculed the “grand pooh-bah,” leader of the fictitious Leopard Lodge.

Even Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble periodically recited the cacophonous password for their lodge, the Loyal Order of Water Buffalos.

Bengston said the founders of many fraternal groups were poking fun at the elaborate ritual of the venerable Masons when they established ceremonies for their own lodges.

“Some picked the most ridiculous thing they could come up with for their mascots,” Bengston said.

The moose, for example. How did an animal most people recognize as a shaggy deer with a nose drawn badly out of proportion become a symbol of strength and independence revered by more than 1.5 million men and women nationwide?

Sociologist Mary Anne Clawson, author of “Constructing Brotherhood,” said enrollment rituals mocked the somber tones so effectively that orders starting as spoofs quickly became solemn, a factor contributing to their decline.

Further erosion has come with service clubs that siphon off middle-class members. Clubs like Lions, Rotary and Optimists are different because fraternal groups have secret rituals (details of which are often available at public libraries). Service organizations typically are also more class-specific.

“Merchants, professionals and managers who aspire to business leadership in the community join service clubs,” Clawson said, “whereas fraternal orders believe that what you do in the outside world should not be a condition of membership.”

Marty Robertson, secretary of the Simi Valley Elks Lodge, states membership requirements as follows: “To be an Elk you need to be an American gentleman, believe in God and flag waving.”

As he said, you need to be male.

Although many organizations have women’s auxiliaries, the women must have some familial connection to male members.

Many have sought unsuccessfully to end the discrimination by legislation, but society seems poised to accomplish the gender blending that government cannot.

“The decline in fraternals is due in part to the remaking of the American family,” Bengston said. “With dual incomes becoming more and more common, men are sharing parenting tasks and they have less time to carouse with their buddies than they did 50 years ago.”

The mass media are providing increasing competition for the leisure time that men might have spent with their buddies. With 50 cable channels, VCR and interactive video games, who wants to listen to an aging veteran recount stories he’s been telling since VJ Day.

By and large, boomers couldn’t care less.

A.C. Butler, a mason in Oxnard since 1975, laments the fact that his son isn’t interested in the brotherhood. “Both he and his wife are working and they don’t have the time,” Butler said. “There’s just so much more to do these days than when we were growing up.”

Father and son masonry is a big thing since the Masons, as the oldest fraternal organization in America, value tradition. They are eager to recount their famous members, among them Presidents, signers of the Declaration of Independence and a guy named Snodgrass.

Fred Snodgrass was center fielder for the 1912 World Series New York Giants and a Mason in good standing at the Oxnard lodge. Snodgrass and the Giants were one out from winning the series when a Red Sox batter hit a routine fly ball to center. Snodgrass camped under it for the Series-winning catch.

He dropped it, of course, and Boston went on to win the game and the Series.

The Snodgrass episode isn’t the sort of story that makes an effective recruiting tool for the next generation of American Masonry. But Dwight Henry, former supervisor of the now defunct youth group at the Oxnard lodge, found bigger impediments to maintaining youth interest.

“The kids didn’t seem to have any support from their parents,” he said. “I don’t care whether you’re talking about the Boy Scouts or whatever, without parental support it doesn’t fly. I turned into an inexpensive baby-sitter.”

Fraternal Success Story

Baby-sitting, in a manner of speaking, is the key to one of the few fraternal success stories, Moose International Inc. Fraternal clubs aren’t offering day care yet, but Moose has repositioned itself to appeal more to families, and as a result membership is growing in Ventura County and nationally.

The 426-member lodge in Simi Valley has added several men between 25 to 35 years old, most with young children. The clubhouse has video games and pinball so younger members of the family can entertain themselves.

“We built a swimming pool,” said manager Jim Wass. “During the summer there’s 30 to 40 kids in there. We’ve also got family night where we serve a burger, fries and a drink for $2. The place is full of kids.”

The Moose is a solidly working-class fraternity, according to Louis Ortiz, Oxnard Moose member and state sergeant at arms. Members are likely to appear in the club room with tape measures clipped to their belts. In their wallets they carry snapshots of their powerboats.

Correspondingly, the headquarters in Moosehart, Ill., launched a sign-up drive that awards members with a blue-collar incentive: a set of jumper cables for every five prospects recruited.

In an effort to modernize their image, members changed the name from the Loyal Order of the Moose to the less archaic-sounding Moose International Inc. Together with the name change, the Moose eliminated the ceremonial velvet cape and the traditional headgear “the tah”--that’s hat spelled backward--and overhauled the enrollment ritual, all to great effect.

In Simi Valley alone, they have handed out six sets of jumper cables.

A Look at Some Fraternal Organizations

ELKS: An Elks information packet lists “Americanism” as the leading community affair that the Elks sponsor. In Ventura County, that translates to sponsorship for dozens of Little League teams.

Statewide, the Elks employ two traveling health workers to visit public schools where they administer eye tests and screen children for orthopedic diseases.

Nationally, contributions were off 4.7% last year. Officials fear the dip might mark the beginning of a long decline. Locally, bingo has emerged as a major funding source for charitable works.

MASONS: Masons are the oldest fraternity in America. Ironically, their secret ritual is what most people know them for. Like many fraternal organizations, the Masons look askance at service clubs, which they dismiss as being mainly business-oriented. Business is one of two topics barred from discussion in the lodge, the other is religion. Nevertheless, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops has for 200 years barred Catholics from the secret society. Masons are often accused of involvement in implausible, multinational conspiracies. Most recently, Serbian nationalists in the former Yugoslavia cited the “Judeo-Masonic order” as their enemy.

SHRINERS: Masons of the highest degree, they are best recognized for precision mini-bike drill teams and the like. Their antics support 19 orthopedic hospitals for children and three burn institutes.

Their $4-billion trust fund makes them better funded than many universities. Despite aging membership, the money keeps coming in, much of it as bequests in the wills of deceased members, according to an official at Shriners headquarters in Florida.

MOOSE: A solidly blue-collar organization and the only one that can report modest membership gains. There are seven lodges in Ventura County.

The Moose mainly looks after its own. The Moose school and orphanage in Moosehart, Ill., is primarily for those with some connection to the Moose, although some non-members are included. Only Moose members are eligible to attend Moosehaven, a retirement community in Florida where, among other amenities, beer costs just a nickel a glass.

Fraternal Moments

1866: The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks is founded by a group of fun-loving stage actors.

1871: The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (Shriners) is founded by a burlesque comedian who patterns the group after a secret society he allegedly encountered during a comedy tour of the Middle East.

1915: Professional “fraternalist” William J. Simmons starts the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, originally organized in the South after the Civil War. Simmons, who started the organization as a social club, earns more than $300,000 for himself and his partners over five years. The organization becomes racist and its ranks swell to more than 1.5 million.

1920: James J. Davis, founder and supreme dictator of the Loyal Order of the Moose, sells his share of the club for $600,000 and uses the proceeds to fund a successful Senate bid.

1989: The Moose abandons purple hat, gold tassel. Membership increases.

Source: “Constructing Brotherhood,” by Mary Ann Clawson (Princeton University Press, 1989)