SOUTH BAY / COVER STORY : A Gray Matter : Lifestyle Changes, Aging Members Have Cut Numbers in Once-Strong Fraternal Groups Such as Kiwanis Club

It is nearly business as usual at an Inglewood Kiwanis Club weekly meeting: A dozen gray-haired members munch on fish and chips in a Motel 6 meeting room as the club’s president announces the death of a longtime member and distributes a brochure on a retirement home.

But this time, after a video presentation, a raffle and the final pleasantries, the 69-year-old club adjourned for the last time.

Its members, whose average age had risen to 74, voted recently to retire the blue-and-yellow Kiwanis banner and brass bell and disband, after membership plummeted and a last-ditch effort to recruit younger members failed.

Much had changed since the 1950s, when the club drew more than 100 of Inglewood’s movers and shakers, young judges and doctors who each week motored their Studebakers and Cadillacs to the Inglewood Country Club for lunch overlooking the 18th green.

“We’ve gotten a lot older, as has the world,” President John Nicosia told the small group before they walked out of the meeting for the last time.

They’re not alone. Although new clubs form from time to time, membership at decades-old South Bay fraternal lodges and service clubs--from the Carson Moose to the Manhattan Beach Soroptimist--has dropped off dramatically in recent years.

Members are graying, and many old-timers have died or retired and moved away. Young, enthusiastic upstarts, who build the baked-potato booth for the local fair or organize the annual pumpkin-sale fund-raiser, no longer join in the numbers they once did.

At stake is a world of weekly lunches and evening dances that, over the years, has brought together thousands of men and women to socialize, exchange business cards and raise thousands of dollars for charity.

The Inglewood Kiwanis contributed to the Inglewood YMCA, the Salvation Army and a local senior citizen’s club. And for many years, members gave scholarships to outstanding students at Inglewood High School.

“The older generation was more compassionate,” said Rusty Napolitano, 49, a regional Kiwanis representative who lamented that club membership has fallen 50% in much of Southern California in the past decade. “People would rather shoot someone than help them these days.”

It’s not that people don’t care, sociologists say. But many agree that transformations in the way people live are responsible for the decline: More people commute out of their hometowns to work these days, diminishing community ties; the ethnic mix of many communities has changed, and a century-long shift from collectivism toward individualism has left many less inclined toward group activities.

In addition, people have more leisure activities and charities to choose from now than ever before.

“Every time I go to my mailbox, I’m constantly solicited for donations and involvement in the local chapter of anything,” said sociologist Bob Harootyan, a senior researcher with the Washington-based American Assn. of Retired Persons. “You pick and choose.”

That’s not the world these clubs were born into. Most service and fraternal organizations were formed in the late 1800s and early 1900s out of a need for camaraderie and community service. All-male fraternal lodges like the Elks and Moose focused on brotherhood, while men’s clubs like the Rotary and women’s service groups like the Soroptimist raised money for charity as members quietly swapped business cards.

As clubs and lodges grew, many took on increasingly significant and visible roles in communities, welcoming new teachers, buying library books and sometimes even constructing city buildings. Politicians and police chiefs were expected to join.

“We used to say the Rotary owns the town, the Kiwanis run the town, and the Lions, they just have fun,” said former Inglewood Kiwanis Club member Walter Haskell, 84.

Business leaders saw club membership as a way to share their success with others in the community.

“When you were in business and you took out of the community, it was your responsibility to put something back,” recalled Bette Deziel, 68, who joined the women-only Manhattan Beach Soroptomist Club in 1952 after her husband, Don, bought a jewelry store in the city. He joined the local Kiwanis club several years later.

Each Monday at noon, Bette Deziel grabbed her purse from under a desk and strolled down Manhattan Beach Boulevard to a meeting hall near the base of the city pier to plan the next fund-raiser with the club’s 30 members. “I didn’t want to join a social club--a knife-and-fork club--I wanted to do service,” she said.

Over the years, Deziel served punch and cookies at monthly dances, raised money to erect a flagpole in front of City Hall and worked to build a swimming pool at a local school.

But the call-to-clubs has quieted over the years. In the last decade, Deziel’s club has lost 30% of its members. The remaining members decided recently to drop one of the club’s four meetings each month. “Most people say they don’t have the time anymore,” said Soroptomist member Sally Reinburg. “My opinion is you have time for what you want to do.”

At a recent gathering in a small room at the Radisson Plaza Hotel in Manhattan Beach, about a dozen professional women sipped iced tea as Reinburg asked for volunteers to spend a weekend working at the Manhattan Beach Old Hometown Fair, an annual festival that attracts many local service clubs. Reinburg was lucky: About 10 members scrawled their names on a sign-up sheet.

Such activities become increasingly difficult with declines in membership, but the Soroptomist members plan to sponsor a game booth and a baking contest to raise money for scholarships and literacy programs. Officials hope the club’s presence at the fair will also boost membership.

Members of the Manhattan Beach Lions Club hope that a booth selling broiled chicken will do the same. The club recently celebrated its 75th anniversary in the city, but membership has dipped to half what it was in the 1960s.

The Lions Club used to recruit new members who represented a varied line of professions, and sometimes would exclude an individual if the group already had a number of people in the candidate’s line of work.

“That was the original premise, but we don’t stick to that anymore because of (declining) membership, and we don’t want to turn people down,” said Bob Smith, who last year served as club president.

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At one time, service clubs also excluded members of the opposite sex, but in 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that clubs such as the Kiwanis and Rotary were public service organizations and must be open to both genders. Since then, the number of women has risen dramatically in many previously all-male local clubs.

Changes in the ethnic mix in some cities have also affected membership in the clubs. Inglewood, for example, was predominantly white before 1965, and by 1992 it was 50% black and 38% Latino. As the mix changed, clubs composed of mainly minority members came and went.

As the aging, all-white Kiwanis Club in Inglewood was calling it quits recently, a younger, predominantly African American Kiwanis Club planned its first meeting. The two clubs considered joining forces, but decided against it.

Members of the now-defunct white club say they tried to attract African Americans to their group, but none stayed. Ray Snowden, 57, of the new club said each organization has its own personality and that “some clubs are more playful than others.” Many members of the new club are in their 30s, he said.

“If the members (of the older club) were doing what they were supposed to be doing, their club wouldn’t have dwindled in membership,” Snowden said.

Like the service clubs, many local fraternal orders have suffered a decline in membership. South Bay Elk and Moose lodges that 50 years ago bustled with raucous poker games and noisy, smoke-filled bars have quieted in recent years.

The Carson Moose Lodge two decades ago claimed more than 1,000 members but today boasts less than 500. In Redondo Beach, the 75-year-old Elk’s Lodge has lost nearly 2,000 members since the 1970s, and the average age of the remaining 600 members is about 72, said Norman McHale, the lodge’s exalted ruler.

“One of the problems with this lodge is its age,” he said. “We lose about 30 members a year due to deaths.”

Rooms in the lodge resonate with Elk history. Yellowed newspaper clippings heralding lodge happenings are displayed in a large case near the entrance. And one room’s walls are lined with photographs of 75 years of former exalted rulers--more than half of them now deceased.

Like many area lodges, the Redondo Elks is scrambling to attract new members. The lodge recently added a workout room, complete with an exercise cycle and weight machines, as well as a sports bar, to attract younger members who might otherwise be lured to a trendy health club.

“We’re trying to change our image,” McHale said. “This place used to be so dark and dingy with the old ‘50s decor, so we’ve really been working on it.”

McHale said the lodge long ago dispensed with the illegal gambling activity that made headlines several years ago in Simi Valley, where officers confiscated video gambling machines from a Moose lodge.

In fact, Elks members sometimes mock lodge stereotypes, as well as some arguably archaic Elk titles, by calling exalted ruler McHale “the Grand Pooh-bah,” the title of the fictitious Leopard Lodge’s leader in television’s “Happy Days.”

The group has also tried to make the club more attractive to women. A musty odor in the lodge kept many wives away for years until members cleaned and redecorated the rooms, he said.

But women outnumbered men 5 to 1 recently for Thursday night line dancing in the main hall. The room echoed with “Achy Breaky Heart” as Lorraine Berro reminded members when to pivot and shift their feet. Four mounted elk heads looked on.

Even though many clubs are making an effort to include women, private fraternal lodges such as the Elks are not required to open their doors to them. Many have auxiliary clubs for members’ wives, but women are frequently excluded from lodge business meetings.

“Things are slowly changing,” McHale said. His wife, Melaney, who is a member of the lodge’s Deer club for women, said she doesn’t mind being excluded from dull business discussions.

“I think we’ve got it the best,” she said.

Hoping to attract more women and children, the Carson Moose recently changed the name of their meeting place from a “Lodge” to the Moose Family Center.

“We want people to think we’re more than a bingo palace or a gambling hall,” said lodge administrator Howard Duffy. “We’re trying to make these places where people can go for fun and relaxation and where they don’t have to worry about being molested.”

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Service clubs also experiment with new practices to attract new members.

When some members of a Torrance Rotary Club could no longer make time for the club’s weekly lunch meetings, some members started a breakfast club. Membership is down to only 17, but, for the first time, members plan to distribute invitation cards to attract others.

“We’re hoping to get membership back up into the 30s again,” said President William LeBrun, 64. “I think we’ve been really hurt by the economy, but I think things will turn around.”

A few clubs say enthusiasm and membership never wavered.

Officials in the 35-member Kayumanngi Lions Club, a predominantly Filipino club in Carson, say membership and youth interest are stronger than ever.

“Many of us came from a poor country and experienced a lot of hardships,” said former President Marcelino Ines Jr., 63. “We have enjoyed the American way of life, and we want to share what we have.”

And a Rotary club in Palos Verdes that was formed in 1962 has grown 30% in the past decade to more than 100 members, including many young professionals, said former President Mike Patterson.

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But such clubs are the exception in the South Bay, and many old-timers now must decide whether to struggle to revive their clubs and continue the century-old tradition or relegate them to memories and scrapbooks.

Inglewood Kiwanis member W. J. (Bill) Worthington, 88, who taught in local schools for more than 40 years, decided to join the Hawthorne Kiwanis rather than call it quits after decades in service clubs.

But Haskell, who joined the Inglewood Kiwanis Club in 1955 as a public relations representative for Southern California Edison, decided against it.

“I’m sad to see it go,” he said, but added that he would rather pursue other hobbies, such as amateur filmmaking.

“I’d rather make a complete ending rather than just let it disintegrate,” he said. “I think there’s a season for everything--a season to begin and a season to end. This is change, and (the club’s) no longer appropriate.”

Service Clubs and Fraternal Lodges

Lions: With a membership of 1.4 million men and women in 179 countries, the Lions are generally considered the world’s largest service organization. The first club was formed in Chicago in 1917 by an insurance agent seeking social interaction. Over the past three years, Lions clubs have raised $146 million to fight preventable and reversible blindness, club officials said. The South Bay has 22 clubs.

Rotary: Rotary International was formed in Chicago in 1905 by an attorney seeking camaraderie among men from varied professions. The club’s weekly meetings rotated from one member’s place of business to another, so the club was called “Rotary.” Over the years, the organization has grown to 1.2 million members in 150 countries. Last year, clubs donated nearly $53 million to educational and humanitarian programs, officials said. The South Bay has 18 clubs.

Kiwanis: Kiwanis International claims 327,000 members in 77 countries. The first club was formed in 1915 by two Detroit businessmen seeking networking opportunities. According to club literature, Kiwanis is an Indian name meaning “We have a good time” and “We make noise.” Last year, Kiwanis clubs raised about $18 million for children’s health causes, club officials said. There are 14 clubs in the South Bay.

Optimist: Optimist International was founded in 1919 in Kentucky for business networking and community service. The organization has a $40-million annual budget for charities and claims 157,000 members in the United States and Canada. Members are expected to project a positive outlook in the community. There are four clubs in the South Bay.

Soroptimist: The all-women Soroptimist club was formed in 1921 by 80 women seeking to do community service. The organization, which is unrelated to the Optimist clubs, claims 95,000 members in 111 countries. The name Soroptimist is roughly translated from Latin as “The best for women,” said spokeswoman Darlene Friedman. The organization emphasizes hands-on community work over fund raising, but clubs in 20 countries raised $500,000 to promote literacy, Friedman said. There are eight clubs in the South Bay.

Moose: The Loyal Order of Moose was founded in 1888 in Kentucky by five men who wanted a fraternal organization combining ritual with social activity. The name Moose was chosen because of the animal’s size, strength and devotion to protecting its family. The organization spends about $50 million a year to support a residential school for needy children, a retirement center and a drug-and-alcohol-awareness program for teen-agers. The Moose claim 1.7 million members in the United States, Canada and Great Britain. There are six lodges in the South Bay.

Elks: The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks claims 1.3 million members around the country. The fraternal order was formed in 1868 by an entertainer seeking social activity. The name Elks was chosen because the animal is “indigenous to North America and is quick and gentle and ferocious in defending its young,” said spokesman Mike Manning. Lodges are open to men 21 and older. Each year, the Elks donate about $132 million to various causes, including aid to war veterans. There are four lodges in the South Bay.