The Moose Lodge - Part 1, Dad Becomes the Moose Manager

My dad, William R.(Buck) Buckingham, became the secretary and manager of the Kokomo Moose Lodge in 1946. I don’t know why he choose that particular career as he left one that seemed to have greater promise.

He knew electronics and had worked as a civilian instructor for the Army Air Corp during the war teaching airmen to operate and repair their radios. Mom claimed that federal officials approached him after the war to offer a position in the new space program, but he declined. For what ever the reason he quit his job in the lab at Delco radio and took a position that he held for the next twenty-five years.

The Moose Lodge, along with the other fraternal clubs - the Eagles, Elks, Masons, etc. - were prominent fixtures on the American landscape at mid-century. The lodges, combinations of social club, bar, restaurant, and nightclub, were active in local and national politics. They were also deeply involved in the community, sponsoring social events and participating in charitable activities.

In a sense the lodges operated in place of insurance companies. No one in my family had health or life insurance. We were not unusual in that respect, most middle class folk did without it - things were different then, doctors made house calls, you paid them at the door as they were leaving.
The Moose supported Mooseheart, an orphanage the kids and wife could go to should death make an unexpected appearance. Moosehaven was a retirement home in Florida available to older members. The other lodges offered their own form of “insurance”.

A good portion of the town’s people were affiliated with one or the other of the lodges, and the blacks had one too, The Keystone Club. Dad was also a member of the Elks and the Eagles. I always considered the Elks to be the upper crust of the lodges, but that opinion may not have merit.

There was an intercity-lodge council in which all the clubs came together to jointly plan many events. In those days the lodges, along with labor unions, acted as social glue, and they represented one leg of power for working and middle class America.

I was six years old when Dad went with the Moose, an age at which my understanding of the world was at the beginning of coherency. Before that there was only disjointed images of the war. Moose lodge activities formed one of those milestones of my life. There was the war and then there was the Moose.

I grew up around lodge activities, events such as: Saturday night dances and being endlessly bored in the baby-sitting area (I happily aged out of those in a few years); the Children’s Christmas program (at which each kid received a brown paper bag of candy, nuts and an orange - its contents identical to the ones provided in all the previous years), delivering food boxes to needy families with Dad (and sometimes recognizing the house, and knowing the kids inside); Fourth of July fireworks (and getting to serve “behind the lines“); Moosehaven in Florida (Dad drove an aged Moose member to the rest home in January 1953. Brother Don & I got to go as it was Christmas vacation); Mooseheart, “The City of Children” (We went on a chartered bus one time).
GO TO: Part 2, The Original Building