Friday Night, Just Got Paid

Prince Hall--Founder of Black Masons

"Just around corner, just across the tracks . . ." The Temptations, 1969

Weather bleached floors greeted dancing feet at the door on Friday or Saturday nights depending on the football game. Music floated out the door with each new arrival letting the warmth slip past and into the night. Once inside, it took a few seconds for the eyes to adjust to the dim party lights, but once they cleared there was nothing to see except the other people.

The Masonic Lodge building sat at South Penn and East Cedar, just North of the railroad tracks, on the edge of the woods, which seemed only right considering the times. I started going there at nine-years-old when I attended a real Halloween costume party. Of course, in those days we had serious chaperones in fathers. We considered them old folks that just came to mess up the party, but looking back these were young men in the prime of their lives that had no qualms about taking you to the bridge.

Folding chairs provided seating and a 45 rpm stereo kept the feet sliding across the worn wooden floor. Of course, I was in my usual place--holding the wall up with my non-dancing buddies, waiting for a slow song. The word for us then was "lame." Today they'd call us "tired," "whack," and who knows what, the gist of the entire notion was that we were "uncool."

Occasionally, Sunday's would bring a jam-session with local musicians Ben Young, Pete Williams, Clarence Sharp, my brother Fuzzy and the fabulous "Gold Dust Twins", Netty and Betty Sharp. It was all good clean fun for a Sunday, especially considering there were no chaperones there. All of these musicians went on to distinguish themselves professionally, but we didn't know that then, to us they were just good. Every now and then Bob Wesley would drop past and hit us with a little serious crooning.

If I remember the Masonic Lodge for anything, it was the string of cars stretching up Cedar and Penn and across the railroad tracks into the woods. I remember it because people sometimes disappeared from the party when the chaperones weren't looking and went to the cars and steamed the windows. I wasn't one of the lucky ones because I didn't have a car and when I got one, the Masonic Hall was nothing but an abandoned building.

Years ago, long after the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge fell into disrepair, Gayle Anderson and I went past to look at it up close in full daylight. The red bricks still held firm, but the windows were boarded shut and the weeds grew wildly along the edges; the back steps had started to crumble and evidently had become a place for winos to sit, judging from the muscatel bottles stacked in a rude pile near the steps. Around the southwest corner of the building, the Southern Pacific train tracks nearly took off the hall's corner. We measured and found that the train only cleared the building by 38 inches, not much room for freight train rolling through.

Before we could leave a familiar gravely voice rang out.

"Hey! What you black motherfuckers doing down here?"

Then came the signature cackle that both Gayle and I knew so well. We both turned and answered in unison,

"John Gallagher."

That's another story that I'll tell another time. Meanwhile, does anyone have a picture of the Mason Lodge?

Don R Barbera