Elks Lodge Looks to Families to Bolster Its Thinning Herd

Three or four times a week, Blake Stephens drops by the Elks Lodge, a rambling building on a hill near downtown Fullerton. He and his buddies have a few drinks and play some games -- as guys have done here for nearly half a century.

Sometimes, he also does his homework.

Along with his parents, 13-year-old Blake is a regular at the Elks Lodge -- an injection of youth into the aging veins of a venerable institution.

Once bastions of male bonding -- think of “Honeymooners” Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton at the Raccoon Lodge -- fraternal organizations such as the Elks, Moose and Eagles are increasingly putting out a welcome mat for women and children in an attempt to boost sagging membership and ensure their survival.

Instead of all-male fishing trips, for example, the Fullerton Elks Lodge sponsors family camping trips, helicopter rides and pizza, karaoke and taco nights -- plus on-site baby-sitting. With membership falling from 1,400 a decade ago to 651 today, the events have helped keep the lodge alive.

Families say the organization’s broader approach can offer a sense of community often missing in an age of social transience and fragmentation.

“We might not even be there” without the families’ presence, said Scott Stephens, Blake’s 43-year-old father and a past exalted ruler of the lodge. “The family-oriented events are pulling people in.... I love the place. The people, they remind me of the people I grew up with in Michigan.”

Stephens’ family offers an example of the changing face of fraternal organizations. His father belonged to the Eagles. Stephens never intended to join a fraternal club but was persuaded by the Elks after he was invited to a picnic a decade ago and grew to love it.

Now, his wife, Mary Kay, points out that their daughter Kendall “made her first appearance [at the lodge] at 10 days old” -- in a portable crib behind the bar.

“Times have changed, and society no longer fully supports male-dominated organizations like the Elks or Moose,” said Lester “Ted” Hess, a past national president of the Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks. “We realized that if we’re going to endure, we needed to reach out to women and young families.”

It’s unclear whether these measures will help stem the decline of the “animal clubs.” Collectively, the ranks of Elks, Moose and Eagles have thinned to 3 million, down from 4.6 million two decades ago. Over the long run, the decline has been more substantial: It’s estimated that a century ago, 1 in 3 men in the U.S. belonged to a fraternal organization.

The clubs offered more than a place where men mapped out community projects, played pool, tipped back beers and indulged in off-color humor. Fraternal organizations also provided benefits to working-class members that were not then generally available.

“They were mutual insurance organizations that offered sick benefits, death and burial insurance. They built hospitals, hired doctors, ran orphanages and elderly homes,” said David Beito, an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama who has written a book on the subject. “What was the government safety net in the 19th century? The poor house -- that was pretty much it. These organizations filled a need.”

Private insurers, unions and government programs such as unemployment insurance and Social Security all eroded the power of fraternal organizations prior to World War II. After the war, an array of sweeping societal shifts -- from the growth of television and individualism to two-income households -- undercut these tradition-laden clubs that increasingly seemed out of step with the times.

“The days of just go [to the lodge] and drink are gone,” said Chester Albright, retired supreme secretary for the Loyal Order of Moose.

Consider what happened to the once-grand Los Angeles Elks Lodge. Through the 1930s and ‘40s, the lodge had 8,000 members who luxuriated in an 11-story Park View building that boasted 160 overnight rooms, a bowling alley, Olympic-size swimming pool, a barbershop and several restaurants and lounges.

Today, the 185-member lodge holds sparsely attended meetings on the second floor of a building on Wilshire Boulevard. Members had left in droves, signing up with new lodges in Los Angeles’ suburbs and surrounding counties, said Ed Pitman, a past exalted ruler who joined in 1991.

Other older lodges have begun to reinvent themselves by targeting families.

At the Fraternal Order of Eagles’ Bethlehem, Pa., facility -- or “aerie” -- bingo games are organized for children. Typically, 300 kids show up, some sitting in their parents’ laps, to compete for gift certificates from a local toy store. The games have helped the lodge increase its membership by about 10%.

In Crawfordsville, Ind., an Elks Lodge stanched a 50% drop in membership by turning a large cloakroom into a baby-sitting facility decorated with pictures of pink hippos, squirrels and rabbits. Members’ children ride rocking horses, assemble picture puzzles and pretend to cook in a toy kitchen.

“We feel that if we find something to get the whole family involved, we’ll be able to sustain our longevity and be around a hundred years from now,” said Kenneth Moore, national spokesman for the Elks.

Of the approximately 1,950 Moose lodges nationwide, 861 have met requirements to become “family centers.” Those conditions include providing year-round activities for family members of all ages, with an emphasis on children, and setting aside space for play areas.

Moose membership is growing at lodges that have been designated as family centers, contributing to a 9% increase in members in the year that ended in April. “Now, all we have to do is get the other 1,100 lodges to go along and we’re all set,” said Donald Ross, director general of Moose International. “It’s sometimes been difficult to do. Our fathers left a lodge to us in which some of the older members don’t want change.”

The transition at Elks lodges has come gradually, said Scott Stephens of the Fullerton lodge, where son Blake plays in a teen game room -- the lodge’s former card room. “The old guys don’t sit around and play poker anymore,” Stephens said. “We’re designing things specifically geared toward families.”

For their model, the fraternal organizations looked to the resuscitation of the YMCA, said Calvin Morrill, a professor and chairman of the sociology department at UC Irvine.

“When the YMCA was almost going out of business in the 1970s, they opened themselves up to women,” Morrill said, putting an emphasis on a broader range of activities and becoming more of a community organization.

While the national Eagles and Moose clubs have yet to admit women as full-fledged members, the Elks broke from the pack in 1995 and allowed women to join.

The group’s leaders concluded that the decision was key to attracting a new generation of members, Hess said. While Elks officials do not know how many of the group’s 1 million members are women, they believe women have helped slow a decades-long slide in the size of the herd. Members continue to die faster than new ones join, but annual losses are nearly half of what they were a decade ago, and the number of new members has increased each year since 1998.

“I see many more younger members -- people in their mid-40s, and even younger than that,” said Moore, the group’s spokesman. “I see more and more women in leadership positions. They’re accepted by the men and they’re working together.”

But the assimilation hasn’t always been smooth.

Julie Vance said that despite being a familiar figure at her Provo, Utah, lodge since 1995, her ascension to exalted ruler grated on some of the older members.

“There’s a lot of men who still don’t want women in the organization,” she said. “You hear through the grapevine that women should just be in the auxiliary.”

Her husband, Don Smith, a member of the lodge, said his wife’s first months as leader were contentious. Some older members tried to conduct lodge business without her.

“She went to these guys and their committees and said, ‘I’m the exalted ruler -- and you’d better get used to it. And I want to know what’s going on all the time,’ ” Smith said.