The factories making secret stuff for secret societies

Where do Masons get their fezzes?

(Wikimedia Commons)

Earlier this week, Fred at Orange Couch (the guy who tipped me off to New Orleans’ most notorious clown) showed us some photos of his great-grandfather, who was a member of the Kansas arm of the Anti-Horse Thief Association.

After looking up AHTA, I noticed these guys wore a sort of uniform, even though they weren’t an official law enforcement agency. They had their own regalia, too.

(A Catholic Mission)

Because we’re in New Orleans, it got me to thinking about how wardrobe is such an integral part of belonging to a club or a krewe. And that got me thinking about fraternal ritualwear. I wondered, where does a Mason source his lambskin apron? As it turns out, you really can buy anything on Amazon these days.

But before you could get your ritual acoutrements with fast, free Prime shipping, America was filled with specialized factories making fezzes, aprons, jewelry, and um, goats. (More on that in a minute.) And a lot of these companies are still around.

(Wikimedia Commons)

Harry Klitzner Company (now H.K. Fraternal) has been making Masonic supplies for more than 100 years. Harry started out at 14, working “as a platter's helper in someone else's jewelry shop,” the company notes. “When he went home, he made fraternal emblematic jewelry in the back of his mother's candy store. With homemade tools he hammered the designs. A goldfish bowl and enamel pots were used for dipping tanks. Owning a business with an American flag flying over the building was the young man's dream.”

D. Turin & Co.. which turns 100 next year, is the source for fezzes, whether you’re a member of the Masons, the Order of the Alhambra, Knights of Peter Claver, A.M.O.S. or D.O.K.K. Its motto is “experience a lost art in service and quality,” and looking at that Amazon listing, it’s hard not to disagree.

(D. Turin & Co.)

The most storied fraternal factory, though, is DeMoulin Brothers. It now makes marching band uniforms, but in the late 19th century, its star product was a bucking goat that members of the Modern Woodmen of America rode during their initiation.

The inventor of that goat was not Ed, or his brother U.S., but their eldest sibling, Erastus. All three brothers worked in the family blacksmith shop as young men, but Ed was out of there after almost losing this thumb. He and U.S. founded DeMoulin Bros., but “Ras” held off for a while. He liked being a blacksmith. But he was also their resident mechanical genius. He built the first “lodge goat,” in the blacksmith shop, and eventually he was pressured into coming into the fold.

So what was this goat? Maybe this is a cue to show, rather than tell:

(DeMoulin catalog, 1930, phoenixmasonry.com)

The description for “the Bucking Goat,” notes that it "can be made to gallop and buck by working the handle-bar up and down." Accessories included a fountain attachment, which could be attached "to produce spray of wtater from back of goat where candidate sits,” and electric stirrups, "magneto or jump-spark battery operated,” and, erm, a “goat blat,” a product that’s not described or explained.

“The Fuzzy Wonder” could be ordered as a regular-issue goat, but for $10 more you could swap out the goat body for a donkey, tiger or camel.

DeMoulin Bros., which has been based in Greenville, Illinois for its entire run, is less than an hour from St. Louis. Because any reporter will stretch what “local news” means when there’s a good story to be had, the company often showed up in STL papers, including this bit from Globe-Democrat columnist George Damon, circa 1954:

“But the men who laughed longest and loudest were the three DeMoulin Brothers,” Damon wrote. “It was they who were turning out these machines of gentle torture.”

One of those heart-stopping gag props was a guillotine, “proudly described as a ‘heathenish invention.’” The lodge brothers would art-direct it with a little bit of stage blood and a few bits of chopped off hair.

“Luckily for the lodge canddiate, the blade (made from brightly polished tin) always seemd to get stuck in its track as it fell, emitting a loud report from a black cartridge,” Damon wrote. “The 'execution' uusally was attempted by a member of 'another lodge' trying to get the candidate to reveal lodge secrets.”

The other big DeMoulin seller, he noted, came about because electricity was brand-new and fun to play around with. There was a huge section of “electric shocking gadgets — carpets, chairs, clothing, wire cages, teeter totters, canes, weight-lifing machines and even branding irons.”

Once the world had cars, movies, radios and TVs, no one needed to amuse themselves with lodge pranks. By the time he wrote his article, DeMoulin had switched over almost entirely to band uniforms, becuase the market in rocking-goats had dwindled to just about zero.

In an funny instance of things coming full circle, this article from the Effingham Democrat about a fire that destroyed the first factory 1907 notes that DeMoulin was the pioneer of free shipping, not Amazon, owing to the fact they were mailing heavy crates — holding mechanical goats — all over the country:

caption...

You can’t buy goats from DeMoulin, anymore, but you can see them at the DeMoulin Museum. You can also ride one: Wink-a-Dink, the museum’s resident lodge goat, has given 500+ rides since the venue opened in 2010. And once you’ve ridden Wink-a-Dink, it goes without saying you need to become a member of the Goat Rider’s Club, which doesn’t come with the gifting of a fez, sash or cufflinks — but at least there are no hazings required.

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STL folks in particular will want to bop over to Thomas’s Substack, where he’s assembling a history of KDHX at Silver Tray. He’s been posting a mad pace for the last week, interviewing past hosts — some who were on-mic for years, others just a short time — but it’s good stuff.