SMALLTOWN CLUBS

    HOME DEMONSTRATION CLUB, 1950S

There’s an enormous Masonic Lodge down the street from us---a two-story brick with its own big parking lot and dedicated brick sign with all the movable letters behind glass, announcing Stated Meetings and Thirty-Third Degrees and the quarterly Fish Fry, along with an annual Christmas season Breakfast with the Elves.

 

Eastern Star activities are set out as well, with Visiting Exalted Matrons leading the charge.   This building of the formal announcements and the permanent marquee tent out to the side like a Flea Market shelter are strange to me, in a Northern-City sort of way that I’ve never encountered in the South.  All our Masons in the South seemed to have their meetings up flights of stairs over side-street stores, with a small stairway painted a bashful white and disappearing into the dim reaches above.  (A weekend in Ann Arbor to visit Fairy Doors did reveal one person-sized door almost hidden between buildings, with the discreet “Masonic Lodge” and an arrow on a small sign pointing UP, so I suppose the Masons might have more magic beneath those aprons than most---maybe its their medieval, mystical origins).  But those little southern stairways we dared not climb DID seem to be entrances to a curving cave full of  secrets.  

 

And Secrets there were, I suppose, and though Daddy was Grand Master for quite some time, my own curiosity regarding those adult arcanities was as faint as my interest in the guy-stuff sold by the local Western Auto or Feed & Seed.  I did notice the avid interest of several local wives and Mamas in what they perceived to be a great Mystical Enigma Not For Them---they asked unanswered questions of their husbands; they snooped into pockets, and they discussed things and theories with fellow out-of-the-loop spouses whose curiosity and persuasion could not sway their tight-lipped mates, either.  

 

Every tee-ninecy town in our area seemed to have a Lions' Club---loud and proud and no secrets there---and a Shriners and Elks and Garden Club and Civic Club---each still as active in a sort of lecture circuit as in the 1890s when there was no TV.   Most towns boasted a Home Demonstration Club (with its own County Home Economist, in charge of keeping up and helping with and giving out brochures for daily chores and health needs and how-to-launder things, and specialized in the distribution of delicate mimeographed pages of recipes stapled inside pastel construction paper for holidays).   Ours was Miss Drane; she was a delicate, slender shirtwaist-dress woman of lovely manners and immaculate coiffure and still single, probably into her thirties, which bewildered us girls who were taking four years of Home Ec and attending our weekly FHA meetings about, you know, HOMEMAKING, with the expectation and hope of having a husband With Whom To.    We thought of a lot of things in capitals, I remember. 

 

What clubs or organizations, past or present, does your town or area have? Which ones do you wish were still around?