Mon Nov 9 09:10:22 PST 1998
Mon Nov 9 09:44:07 PST 1998
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My grandfather, Milton P. Firestone, was a Master Mason. Indeed, he was
Master of Ancient Landmark Lodge #5, St. Paul, Minnesota in 1916, at the
(for that time, incredible) age of 30. By that year, he was also a
Knight Commander of the Court of Honour in the Ancient and Accepted
Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction of the US, and ten years later, he
was coroneted an Inspector General Honorary of the Thirty-Third Degree.
A community leader, he participated in degrees, supported the
Fraternity, and was admired by all. Nearly forty years after his death
(in 1952) and halfway across the country, I have encountered men who
became Masons in St. Paul in the 1940s who still remembered him. But he
never spoke to me of Masonry, for I was not yet seven years old when he
passed to the Celestial Lodge. His brother, Allan L. Firestone, was a member of the same Lodge, as was Milton's younger son, George (my uncle), and Milton's older son, Linn (my father). But none of them spoke to me of Masonry. My father was never very active in Lodge, although he did take an occasional small role in a Scottish Rite degree. But it was not a major part of his life, I guess...although he did recently attend the Scottish Rite Valley in St. Paul to receive his 50-year pin. I don't know if he'd been there since we went together to see a couple of the degrees back in the early 1980s. I've never really asked him why. However, my mother's father, Harry A. Steiner, was also a Mason. He received the degrees in St. Louis--I believe in Cornerstone Lodge (number unknown to me) and took the Scottish Rite degrees there as well, both in the mid 1920s. Shortly thereafter, he and his family moved to Minneapolis, although many decades would elapse before he transferred his memberships to the Twin Cities; I remember hearing him being teased for being a "foreigner" as he wandered around Zuhrah events wearing his Moolah fez. Eventually he did become a local member of the Shrine, AASR, and Lynnhurst Lodge in Minneapolis. And Grandpa Harry did talk about Masonry. Oh, not a lot. But he mentioned that he went to dinner here and did that activity there. He wasn't a ritualist. I don't think he ever took part in the degrees, even a non-speaking part. But he did become a member of the Sunshine Committee, and he would spend a good chunk of his time after he retired visiting the Masons who, he said, "weren't so well off." This, from a man who was partly deaf and in his later years legally blind...and who, others said was getting "kind of vague" (although his oldest grandson never saw that, I assure you). So he kind of hinted here and there for years that I ought to become a Mason. (I didn't know then about the non-solicitation custom.) But I enrolled in a graduate program that took most of my evenings (except for the ones already committed to orchestra rehearsals), including the evening when Ancient Landmark Lodge #5 met. But eventually graduation neared, and I found that my evenings would be my own again. So I rather diffidently approached my father: "I've seen how much good being a Mason has done Harry. Do you think I could join?" There was a petition in my hands the next day. And so it was that on one of the coldest evenings I have ever experienced, a Thursday in late January 1977, I found myself in a small room being asked a series of questions by a man in a fancy apron (who later turned out to be the Master that year), beginning, "Do you seriously declare, upon your honor, before these gentlemen..." The rest is not so interesting.
Roger M. Firestone, 32 KCCH |