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 Iwas 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 1910showed 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.
