‘Hodapp in the Bronx Tuesday’

    

Chris Hodapp will be in New York for a speaking engagement Tuesday.

D. Hosler photo

Pelham Lodge 712, in the Bronx, will host America’s favorite Masonic author, raconteur, Dummy, etc.

Lodge tiles at 7:30. The lecture on Freemasonry will be very different from that you’ll receive from your wife upon your return home.

     

‘R.I.P. masonicdictionary.com’

    

Something last week reminded me of the venerable masonicdictionary.com, and upon venturing to visit, I found it was no more. Stephen Dafoe, the creator of the—I’ll call it—innovative resource, left Freemasonry years ago, so I guess it is understandable how he may have tired of paying to maintain the site and domain.

There was a lot to it, but the main attraction was a trove of essays in the twenty-first century revival of Masonic critical thinking. The writers (The Knights of the North), at Stephen’s prompting, tackled various problems facing the Masonic Order, from A to Z.

Too little, too late, perhaps, but I feel some pride when I recognize one of our bluntly voiced analyses impacting a lodge’s or grand lodge’s thinking. (Some grand masters believe good ideas come from their conferences, but that’s not exactly right.) Sorry to see it go.

The Knights of the North effectively became the Masonic Society in 2008.

The only remnant is a table of contents on this old Dummies post. My own contribution, a modified version of which I still trot out for speaking engagements, is reproduced here.

     

‘Cleveland Rocks’

     
I swore I’d never write about the fraudulent “Grand Orient of the USA” on The Magpie Mason, but its demise was so long ago I suppose this doesn’t matter. Looking for something else on Google a minute ago, I found this August 1 story concerning a Masonic temple in Cleveland. Once a historic place of sacred retreat for Masonic Speculative craftsmen, it soon will be dedicated to an operative purpose involving stone: rock climbing.

I think we’d have to peruse the Dummies blog to see the timeline of the whole story, but way back in the previous decade, a gaggle of rejects stole an entire Masonic lodge from its membership in Cleveland, and proceeded to secede from the Grand Lodge of Ohio. It had been Halcyon Lodge 498, but the five or ten little rascals behind the defection made it the “Grand Orient of the United States.” (GOOFUS to some of us.) The revolution was short lived.

Courtesy Fresh Water Cleveland

The former Masonic temple in question, located at 2831 Franklin Boulevard, is to become a center for rock climbing, yoga, and other activities after a $2.4 million renovation is completed, Fresh Water Cleveland reports, adding:

“About eight Masonic Lodges operated out of the building before an ownership dispute reduced that number to just one lodge (that eventually moved out, too). ‘It was the Masonic lodge here,’ says [Kevin] Wojton. ‘One lodge took ownership and kicked the others out. They ran out of money three years ago and locked the doors and walked away.’

“After sitting empty, the building has some physical repairs that must be addressed, including asbestos remediation and a new roof. Vandals stole pipes, and the rain soaked the interior. But Wojton sensed the potential. ‘We saw it as an iconic space,’ he says. ‘With the story and the narrative, we wanted to invest the time and energy.’

“Wojton says old engraved Masonic chairs, desks, gavels, and other ‘Masonic icons’ remain, not to mention paintings (even one of George Washington) and Art Deco design elements. Then there’s marble everywhere—on the floors, the walls, the staircase, even the bathrooms.

“‘It was definitely a different time,’ Wojton says. ‘We want to keep as much of the historic nature of the building as possible.’”

The new enterprise is expected to open for business at the end of this year, or early next. Click here to read Karin Connelly Rice’s story in Fresh Water Cleveland.
     

‘Arnold Palmer, 1929-2016’

     

Courtesy Ezekiel Bates Lodge 1870

Golf legend and Brother Mason Arnold Palmer died today, just a few weeks after his 87th birthday, in Pittsburgh. A member of Loyalhanna Lodge 275 in Pennsylvania since 1958, Palmer is one of those Famous Masons whose name appears on all those lists of famous Freemasons, and was one who received numerous accolades and awards in the fraternity.


     

‘Food for thought in Tennessee’

     

Magpie file photo.

This portrait of General Andrew Jackson by Charles Wilson Peale hangs in the office of the Grand Master of Pennsylvania in the Masonic Temple in Philadelphia. I don’t think art historians, or anyone else, are aware of its existence. I shot this photo in October 2007.


I typically avoid matters of Masonic politics and recognition on The Magpie Mason—I doubt my own powers of persuasion, and I don’t find these foibles all that interesting—but as today is the (249th) birthday of Andrew Jackson, there is something I cannot resist pointing out.

If you do not follow anything on Freemasonry in social media, you may not be aware of the public relations disaster being foisted upon the entire Masonic fraternity in the United States by two grand lodges down south: Georgia and Tennessee. Both recently have banned gay men from Masonic membership. As usual the most comprehensive and level-headed coverage can be found on the Dummies blog. Not only is the matter examined here and there in Masonic cyberspace, but more recently NPR and other mass media outlets have reported on it.

Tennessee has taken the additional step of proscribing Masonic membership for those who cohabitate without the benefit of marriage.

Enter Andrew Jackson, Grand Master of Masons in Tennessee, 1822-24.

In a tragedy of errors when Jackson was in his early twenties, he married Rachel Robards, the daughter of Jackson’s landlord who happened to have been married already to one Lewis Robards. She erroneously believed that first marriage, a very unhappy union, had been terminated, and that she was free to marry again. This was not the case, and her wedding to Jackson legally was viewed as bigamy and adultery. The Robards’ marriage eventually was ended in divorce in 1793 on the grounds of Rachel’s adultery. She and Jackson wed for the second time, and for keeps, several months later.

This would haunt Jackson through life, although it evidently did not affect his rise through the ranks of Tennessee Freemasonry. Actually, the record of his initiation is unknown today, but we know he served as Grand Master in the early 1820s. In 1806, he killed a man in a duel who had impugned his wife’s reputation. In his campaigns for the presidency, his opponents and enemies savagely exploited the illegal adulterous first marriage for political advantage. It worked in 1824, when Jackson lost to anti-Mason fanatic John Quincy Adams when the election was settled in the House of Representatives. As for Rachel, she would not see the White House. She died December 22, 1828 after Jackson’s election to the presidency, but before his inauguration in March 1829.

Her death did not satiate the puritans, and the Jackson administration would fall apart from another matrimonial scandal when Secretary of War John Eaton’s marriage to Margaret “Peggy” O’Neill was scrutinized. Eaton, a widower at 28, was a U.S. Senator from Tennessee and a Mason in Cumberland Lodge No. 8; Peggy was married to a Navy man named Timberlake who died overseas in 1828. It was thought Eaton arranged to have Timberlake deployed overseas so he could keep time with the wife during his absence. It also was thought the widow failed to observe a traditional period of mourning her husband’s demise before marrying again. The 1820s version of real life real housewives of Washington, DC conspired to shun the Eatons, keeping the couple from having any social life within the city of power, a very potent peer pressure indeed. The animus affected President Jackson’s cabinet to the extreme point where nearly all the cabinet members would resign only two years into the administration. It also ended Vice President John C. Calhoun’s presidential aspirations, as it was his wife who organized the ostracizing of the Eatons.

Political satire during the anti-Masonic hysteria in the early 1800s included illustrations such as this one depicting President Andrew Jackson, on the right, with members of his cabinet who also were Freemasons. This drawing appears in Light on Masonry, the massive compendium of Masonic ritual exposures, edited by Arturo de Hoyos, and published by the Scottish Rite Research Society in 2008.

There is resistance among Tennessee Freemasons to what has been done, but there also is support. The Grand Lodge will convene next week for its regular elections and balloting on legislation, so we’ll soon learn how this question will be settled. Follow the Dummies blog for that news.