The "Shhh! Don't Tell Anybody I Wrote This!" Story

It was an ordinary day.  "Summertime an' the livin' is easy," says the old George Gershwin song that was released in 1935.  Goes on with..."Fish are jumpin' an' the cotton is high. Oh, yo' daddy's rich and yo' ma is good-lookin,' So hush, little baby, don' you cry. One of these mornin's you goin' to rise up singin,' Then you'll spread yo' wings an' you'll take to the sky. But till that mornin', there's a nothin' can harm you, With Daddy an' Mammy standin' by."  I can remember that from my youth, but not sure where I heard it first.  Think it was on my little transistor radio that I would take with me as a child to my pup tent which was a Christmas gift from my Aunt Doris that I would erect in the backyard of my home on North Queen Street in Lancaster when summer arrived.  Not a care in the world when you are a kid in the summertime.  It was there that I spent many a day in the summer, just wasting away my time.  Had a secret club with a few of my friends and they would visit me in the tent and we would make up secret codes much like some of our dads had who were members of the local Masonic Lodge.  Remember the Masonic Lodge?  Dad never talked about it much once he became a member, but I suspected it was a secret place where they did secret things.  The mind of a young boy can work that way you know.  That secret club was known as the Freemasons.  They are the oldest and largest fraternal order in the world.  Dad would tell me that unofficially, they were a secret society that helped shape modern society...whatever that meant.  He had to pay dues and wear this funny scarf when he went to his meetings.  The first documented reference to the Freemasons is in a poem from 1390.  

Masonic logo

The group was originally a stone- mason's guild which is why they are known as Masons.  Eventually it evolved to consist of less stone laying and more secret meetings.  In 1717 four Masonic lodges formed the Grand Lodge in England and started to keep more complete records of their history.  Today there are more than six million Freemasons all over the world with about one million of then in North America.  So, what do they do in their club meetings.  Well, they make plans to make their community a better place in which to live.  They believe in education and self-improvement and strive to improve their community.  One of the most important aspects of Freemasonry is charity.  Worldwide they raise more than $750 million towards philanthropic endeavors.  A bit more than my friends and I made selling the small neighborhood newspaper I printed on my printing press my Aunt Doris gave me for Christmas another year.  But, why wouldn't my dad talk about what he did?  Had to be a secret club I thought.  I do remember that he told me you had to be invited to be a Mason.  Someone at church had invited dad to be a member one year.  He said that being a mason was different than being a member of a church like St. James where we were members.  But, you had to be a member of a church to belong to the Freemasons.  When I began playing summer baseball, one of my coaches was a man by the name of Bob Beitzel.  

A piece of type showing the Masonic logo.

He had a print shop and I often talked to him about it.  Then when I became a teacher, teaching printing, I would visit with him for help from time to time.  He once approached me about the Freemasons and said he was the leader of the Lancaster group of Freemasons.  But, that's a far as it went.  I had enjoyed being a member of my summer tent club, but didn't care to be a Freemason as an adult.  Currently there are chapters of Freemasons around the world who still strive to raise money for good causes.  I admire them for doing that, but I had had enough of the club life as a child.  I did read the names of some very prominent Freemasons.  Names such as Benjamin Franklin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, J. Edgar Hoover, The Rev. Jesse Jackson, Buss Aldrin and Shaquille O'Neal; pretty impressive names.  Much easier to remember than Kenny Herr, Bill Heckel and Dave Greenwood who were members of my summer club.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.