Whitefish Order of the Moose reaches 100-year mark

In the early 1900s, the Loyal Order of the Moose was already reinventing itself from a men-only fraternal organization founded in 1888 to a community group driven to help children in need.

Whitefish Moose Lodge 642 was founded during those winds of change, on June 11, 1911, to be exact, and has been a force for community good since it began.

Gib Burk, 94, the Whitefish lodge’s oldest member, said he always encouraged Moose members to follow the Golden Rule as they planned activities: “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.”

“We’ve always been a philanthropic group to help others,” said Burk, who served as governor for the organization twice and was the Moose deputy supreme governor for Montana in 1977.

The lodge held meetings in various locations around Whitefish during the early years, sometimes in members’ homes or garages and other times at the International Order of Oddfellows Hall on Central Avenue. For a while the Whitefish Moose Lodge owned the building now occupied by the Palace Bar in downtown Whitefish.

In the 1930s the Loyal Order of Moose and its Women of the Moose counterpart began holding meetings in the basement of the Masonic Lodge on Second Street. It’s there where Moose members Shirley Ronseth and Shirley Jacobson remember the lodge’s popular Christmas Eve programs.

“I tap danced,” Jacobson recalled. “And I remember going up to Santa and saying ‘Daddy, what are you doing behind [that beard]?’”

“We got a Christmas dress every year,” Ronseth remembered, adding that the children of Moose members performed for the Christmas programs starting at a very early age.

Ronseth, Jacobson and their friend Margie Rupp all had parents who belonged to the lodge and “ran around together,” so they became well-acquainted with lodge activities.

Throughout the decades the lodge has participated in community activities. For a number of years the group sponsored both junior and adult rifle teams, marching units, the local drum and bugle corps, scouts and bowling activities.

The lodge sponsors a Little League team each year.

It also has long supported the organization’s Mooseheart Child City and School, a 1,000-acre community near Chicago for children and teens in need, and Moosehaven, a 70-acre retirement community for members, located near Jacksonville, Fla.

The Whitefish lodge acquired its current facility on 10th Street in 1948 when the organization bought the Silver Shadow dance hall from Ray Taylor for $25,000.

Burk recalled the struggle of making payments on the lodge. Certificates of indebtedness were sold to members at one point, allowing them to shoulder some of the financial load.

For several years the Moose Lodge continued to operate the Silver Shadow, putting on Friday night youth dances that drew teenagers from throughout the Flathead Valley.

“It was always packed,” Ronseth recalled. “There was rivalry (especially between Columbia Falls and Whitefish) but they left it outside at the door.”

Rupp remembers tagging along with her mother, Mary Rock, who fried hamburgers for the hungry teen crowd.

“The reason we got to go to the dances was because our moms cooked the hamburgers,” Ronseth added.

There were the usual shenanigans of teen events. A few kids crawled in through the window to avoid the cover charge. Rupp remembers meeting her future husband, Pat, at the window to stamp his hand from her still-moist stamp so he could get into the dance.

At 50 cents a head, the dances were a money-maker for the lodge. Cec Caferro had a band that played at the weekly dances, and Jacobson remembers the night always ended with “Blue Moon.”

Ronseth’s husband, Al, remembers the time the Columbia Falls High School football coach had gotten wind that some of his players had imbibed in alcohol consumption outside the Silver Shadow and made the whole team run five laps as punishment.

Rupp said various Moose members were assigned to check cars in the parking lot for underage drinking, but there were always a few who got away with it in the dark of the woods.

After several years the dances fell by the wayside and the Moose Lodge designated Friday nights for bingo. Social activities have been a big part of the Moose Lodge through the years. Picnics at Les Mason Park on Whitefish Lake and at Kalispell’s Woodland Park, and camping trips to “Moose Heaven,” a spot on the Stillwater River near Olney that Burk donated to the lodge, were always popular outings.

More than anything, the lodge has been a gathering place for both Moose members and the community, Jacobson said.

“It’s where Old Whitefish is,” she said.

Ronseth and Rupp noted the camaraderie of members through the years.

Some of the rituals and decorum associated with the organization have gone by the wayside in recent years as the Moose once again reinvents itself to attract and preserve membership in a fast-paced society. Ronseth, Rupp and Jacobson all lament the loss of some of those formalities.

But times are changing, they agree. No one knows what’s in store for the Moose organization, now officially called Moose, The Family Fraternity. The Whitefish lodge intends to begin its next century with a call to follow the international organization’s mission of “caring for young and old, bringing communities closer together and celebrating life.”

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.