Women Feeling at Home on Elk Range

Like the Moose, the Shriners and other clubs known for good works and bad hats, the 130-year-old Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks--one of America’s oldest and largest private fraternal organizations--was long a guy thing.

But since the Elks agreed to let women into the clubhouse three years ago, something interesting has happened. Women have joined, and more swiftly and smoothly than a buck might have imagined. And some have even made it to leader of the local herd.

Not that it didn’t require pounding at some lodge doors with legal briefs.

In Tacoma, Wash., home of the country’s largest Elks lodge, 250 women have been initiated into the order. Orange County has its first female Elk officer, Billie Villa. A half-dozen women throughout the country have ascended to exalted ruler, or CEO of their lodges. And in what may become the first Elk-to-Elk marriage, a pair of Mission Viejo members got engaged this year during a lodge meeting.

“He was on the microphone and said, ‘Now we have one more order of business,’ ” Elk Sara Franko, 44, recalled of the meeting at which her fiance, on bended knee, proposed.

“Who would have thought the Elks was a place to fall in love . . . with another Elk?” said Paul Bafford, 38, about his engagement.

As about 13,000 Elks gather in Anaheim today for their national convention, they will be addressing how the 1.25-million-member order can retain its traditions--from patriotic rituals and secret salute to $63 million in annual community service programs--while broadening its appeal.

Like other fraternal orders born generations ago, the Elks are aging and dying. Slightly more than 2% of Elks pass away each year, and membership is down about 23% from its 1980 peak of 1.65 million. It is part of a national drop in fraternal and civic club participation by those who have grown up with television, two-income parents and fathers expected to do more with the family than with cronies at the lodge.

So to avoid becoming an endangered species, the Elks must bring in new blood. And women, Elks officials say, appear to be a potential transfusion, though the terms they use to describe them sometimes verge on the politically incorrect.

“Two more women joined last night,” Joe Urban, 68, said Wednesday of his Mission Viejo Elks lodge, which has 607 members. “So we have seven now. . . . And we have a lady officer. She’s a high-class lady and she’s a darn good officer.”

The Mission Viejo Elks lodge is the first Orange County lodge in a generation to expand its den, offering arcade games for children, outdoor barbecue facilities and live dance entertainment on Friday nights. It has its share of the stereotype--paunchy older gents nursing highballs at the bar--but also athletic 20-something members and a diverse mix of profession and race.

In the rich tradition of bus driver and Raccoon lodge member Ralph Kramden of “The Honeymooners” fame, one of the Mission Viejo lodge’s past leaders works as a diesel mechanic for the county transit authority. One of the first African American members of the lodge was the late Superior Court Judge Marvin G. Weeks, presiding judge of Orange County Superior Court before he retired.

Image of White Establishment Lingers

The Elks leaders say they have no data on membership gender or race because they don’t ask such questions on applications. Scattered lawsuits by women rejected for membership persist.

And despite the Elks’ admittance of nonwhites in 1973, the image still lingers for some of a white establishment club of community fathers. The results of a “grand forum”--Elkdom’s highest court--at the Burbank lodge last year did not help. An Elks lodge leader was found not guilty of conduct unbecoming an Elk after he “jokingly” used a racial epithet twice in conversation with a newly admitted African American member.

But past Grand Exalted Ruler Frank Garland, whose title means national president, says the Elks are trying to weed out such dinosaurs, and his best guess is that the Elks have at least 5,000 women members. Other Elk leaders say the number is at least twice that, since 2,000 joined in the first year after the national leadership OKd women and a majority of more than 2,150 Elks lodges ratified the vote.

If such estimates are accurate, women are still only 2% of the Elk population, which is about the same percentage of Elks who are dying each year.

“In 20 years there won’t be any Elks left” if the organization does not add members, said Garland, an easygoing retired owner of a glass company who remains on the national advisory committee. “It’s one thing to keep members from quitting, but not so easy if they’re dead.”

The estimate of about 2% female membership holds true at Garland’s 900-member Centralia-Chehalis lodge in Washington, where there are 25 or 30 women members. Baby-sitters are provided at some lodges and playground equipment has been installed on the grounds, signs he says that the Elks are changing.

But not all that change has come easily.

“Unfortunately,” said Carlon O’Malley, national Elks president and a Pennsylvania judge whose daughters, 34 and 39, are Elks, “there are people who don’t want to change, so they don’t want an organization to change, and that is something you find in human nature. Not just in the Elks.”

Calling themselves the Jolly Corks, a group of New York actors formed a club in 1868 seeking a place to drink on Sundays and avoid blue laws. Later, the fellowship renamed itself the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the United States of America.

In its early years, the organization set its course on helping war veterans. The Elks provided an infirmary that was later donated to the U.S. government, becoming the country’s first VA hospital. Gen. John Joseph Pershing was an avid Elk, and Elks commonly were members of the military or boosters. To this day, Elks and their auxiliaries, variously known as Does, lady Elks, and Kleettes (elk spelled backward, pronounced klee-ettes), provide support for veterans, visiting patients of VA hospitals with gift baskets and gratitude.

Unabashedly patriotic, the Elks and their rituals have military overtones. Decades ago they stopped wearing the fez, but many traditions remain.

Volunteer Work a Big Draw for Women

The Elks say they contributed an estimated $6.5 million in scholarship money last year. President Clinton will thank them in a videotaped address today for the $63 million the Elks raised last year for their communities.

That volunteer work by Elks is often cited as a big draw by women who have joined their ranks.

But it was only after the Elks lost a costly 10-year legal battle that the order finally voted in the fall of 1995 to remove the word “male” from membership requirements. And even that followed a national vote in the early 1990s and the expenditure of $1.2 million to fight the lawsuit by Sharon Lee Schellenberg, a Rochester, Mich., real estate broker. She wanted to become an Elk so she could take her mother to bingo and lunch at the neighborhood lodge.

Schellenberg, whose business suffered a backlash in the early days of her court challenge, became an Elk 2 1/2 years ago by court order while awaiting the outcome of the appeal. Her attorney, Michael Curhan, said she frequented a different Elks club where the reception was less frosty.

Schellenberg, in her 40s, received no monetary damages from the Elks, only membership. Curhan’s firm took the case, referred by the American Civil Liberties Union, on a contingency basis and the Elks organization was ordered to pay all legal fees plus interest, Curhan said. Even after the 1995 Elks vote to allow female membership, the Elks Michigan lodge offered to pay Schellenberg and settle the case if she would never apply to join. She refused.

“She’s . . . not a bra-burning, card-carrying NOW member,” Curhan added. “They just poked the wrong bear.”

The distancing from feminism is echoed by women who have become Elks. It comes up while interviewing women members, especially those who refer to themselves as lady Elks. “I’m not a woman’s righter,” said a newly inducted female Elk from South Florida.

Glenda Cortez, whose husband is an Elk, was singing the praises of women members as she and her bowling team members took their turns at Forest Lanes in Lake Forest, Ill., on a recent Thursday night. She is not an Elk--why pay two membership fees and have to go to meetings, she says--but is an active volunteer and lodge visitor. With a you-know-what-I’m-saying wink, she observed that “it’s the women who usually get things done.” To which Elks lodge chaplain Billie Villa, the only female Elk officer in her county, half-protested: “Don’t listen to her. She’s practically a NOW member.”

And indeed it follows that those women who have successfully become part of the group probably did do so by not upsetting the herd. In a Florida Elks controversy, one woman was rejected as a member not because she was female but because, in the words of a member’s wife, “she was just too pushy.”

Some Resistance--From Women Too

Sometimes, a few female Elks said privately, resistance to women joining the lodge has come from other women, including wives of male Elks who fear that the auxiliaries will be drained or their husbands might like the new membership policy too much. Sometimes, the women Elks said, it’s the idea that men resist more than the women themselves.

Dawn Blankenship of Ridgefield, Wash., admits that she did not fancy being told no.

Blankenship, 44, works as an advertising sales rep for a community weekly. She owns four horses and has a seasonal business selling hay. She hunts. She hunts elk, with a lower-case “e”.

“I didn’t wake up as a little girl and say, ‘I want to be an Elk. . . . Maybe to shoot an elk,” she said. “But I wasn’t doing it for feminism, though there’s nothing wrong with feminism and I believe strongly in women’s issues. I wanted to join the Elks to rent the lodge when I wanted to, to have a safe place to socialize, as a single woman.”

However, soon after she joined, Blankenship became too consumed with building herself a new house to attend most functions, leaving some the impression that her motive for joining was publicity.

“I don’t really think they wanted women. As far as women go, I was OK,” Blankenship said with a chuckle. However, once she was initiated, most men were cordial.

Even Elks elders such as Frank Garland, 76, say there are some “old fogies, which I shouldn’t say ‘cause they’re my brother Elks, and they are gonna drag their feet, no matter what.” But his sons joined in their 20s and were among the younger wave of Elks who worked until they had a majority in favor of women joining.

“In 10 or 20 years, the Elks will probably have family memberships,” past national President Garland mused. “It will take a while--kind of like the federal government. You have a good idea but it takes some time to get it going.”