CHAPTER XLIV. A CHANCE TO REALIZE A DREAM

On October 27, 1906, I joined the Loyal Order of Moose at

Crawfordsville, Indiana, and a new chapter in my life began. The purpose

of the Order was merely social, but its vast possibilities took my

imagination by storm. For I believed that man's instinct for fraternity

was a great reservoir of social energy which, if harnessed aright, could

lift our civilization nearer to perfection.

On the night of my election and initiation to membership, the Supreme

Lodge was in convention and they requested me to make a talk. I

suggested a scheme to save the wastage of child life resulting from the

death of parents and the scattering of their babies; and also to provide

for the widows and aged. This problem had haunted me from boyhood when,

as I have told, I was the bearer of death news to the widows and orphans

of the mill town. I felt that the Loyal Order of Moose could cope with

this problem. They elected me supreme organizer and put me in charge

of the organization work, and after several years I showed so much zeal

that the office of director general was created and I was put in full

charge.

The Order was then nineteen years old, having been founded in St. Louis

as chartered in 1888, in Louisville, Kentucky. It had thrived for a

while and then dwindled. At the time I joined there were only two lodges

surviving, with a total roll of some two hundred and forty-six members.

I set to work with great enthusiasm, hoping to enroll a half million

men. This would make the Order strong enough to insure a home and an

education for all children left destitute by the death of members. In

fancy I again beheld the vision of long trains of lodge men going to

their yearly meeting, but this time, in a city of their own building,

and over the gateway to this red-roofed town I saw the legend:

THE CITY OF HAPPY CHILDREN

But alas for dreams! Any one can have them, but their realization is not

always possible. The men in the Moose before me had fought vainly for

these high ideals. At the end of my first year as director general I had

not made one-tenth the progress I had hoped for. Figuring on the rate

of progress I was making, I saw that a lifetime would be too short to

accomplish anything. It was then that I would have despaired, if my

Welsh blood had not been so stubborn. I summoned new courage and went on

with the work. At the end of the fourth year I began to see results

from my preliminary efforts. The convention of 1910 showed that the

membership was eighty thousand, distributed among three hundred and

thirty-three lodges. It was resolved to start the actual work of

founding an educational institution. A tax of two cents a week was

laid on members and later increased to four cents. Land was bought,

a building erected and in 1913 the school was dedicated by Thomas

R. Marshall, Vice-President of the United States. There were eleven

children established in the home. Soon the lodge membership increased

enormously. Having passed the hundred thousand mark it swept on to the

half million goal. The “Mooseheart idea,” as we called it, had caught

the imagination of the men. To-day the city of Mooseheart in the Fox

River Valley, thirty-seven miles west of Chicago, is the home of more

than a thousand fatherless children and one hundred and fifteen mothers

who are there with their children, and several old men whose working

days are over. The dream of the Moose has come true. In many ways the

“City of Happy Childhood” is the most beautiful and the most wonderful

city in the world.