The Middletown lodge of the Loyal Order of Moose is located in a storefront at a small strip mall on East Main Street. Next door, signs in the window of a Caribbean restaurant advertise oxtail and curried goat. Standing in the parking lot, it’s hard to believe that there’s really a fraternal order headquartered inside.
The American strip mall is a place of flimsy, low-rent commercialism, home to cheap ethnic cuisine, local video stores staffed by bored high school students, and an obligatory dry cleaner. Planted by developers far from natural population centers, strip malls are thought to be antithetical to the very idea of community. And so, although the entrance is clearly marked with a lighted sign reading “Moose Lodge 1547,” the first time visitor to the Middletown Moose club experiences a sense of cognitive dissonance when he first steps inside what might have once been a pet store and finds a real fraternal order, filled with older white couples drinking at a bar and shooting pool at a worn-out table.
Dean Bishop is sitting on one of the lodge’s only proper barstools, smoking Marlboros and drinking a Budweiser. The rest of the seats at the bar are a hodgepodge of mismatched office chairs, possibly surplus from Dean’s day job delivering modular offices. For the past nine years, Dean has served as the lodge’s administrator, a position subordinate only to the lodge’s governor in rank. At the beginning of Dean’s tenure, the Middletown Moose owned a big brick building on Randolph Road. By all accounts, it was quite nice. Then, in 1999, disaster struck.
As is frequently the case with uncomfortable episodes in the history of fraternal orders, the exact nature of the circumstances surrounding the sale of the lodge on Randolph Road remain murky. When I spoke with Dean, he told me that the order had grown too small to cover the costs associated with maintaining the building. At only 200 members, he said it was too much for them.
Other members tell a different story. According to John Krol, one of the officers took a lot of money for himself and took off. This account was corroborated by the treasurer of the Middletown Eagles Club, who said that such embezzlement is not at all rare among the officers of fraternal orders. However, no further information concerning the crooked Moose officer was offered, and none could be found in any of the press coverage of the sale of the Randolph Road lodge. Further, a LexisNexis search uncovered no relevant court records.
What is certain is that the Moose sold the lodge to a holding company for $398,000 in the early months of 1999, and that the holding company in turn sold the building to The Bethlehem Church that April. The Hartford Courant article announcing the sale quotes a relieved Dean Bishop, who said “It’s like this great big monkey is off our back.”
“It was a very heart-wrenching situation,” said June Bishop, Dean’s wife. “Without a lodge, we lost a lot of members.”
A friendly woman with a loud laugh, June is the chaplain of the parallel women’s order. She describes herself as a historian of the Moose, and seems to know more about the chapter than anyone else. During the period after the loss of the Randolph Road lodge, June was a part of the core group that kept the organization together. Officers meetings were held in the event hall at the Eagles Club, and the Bishop’s home address was listed in the national registry of Moose chapters as the address of the Middletown Lodge.
Finally, after a few years without a home, the remaining Moose took out a $1,700 a month lease on the strip mall storefront. It’s a small lodge, but it’s better than nothing.
Certain objects from the old Randolph Road property have migrated with the club. June points to a latch-hook rug decorated with a moose head that hangs on one wall. She claims that one member took it from the old lodge and kept it for years in her home so it could reclaim its proper place above the bar when a new lodge was found.
It’s hard not to notice, however, that there’s something very temporary about the clubhouse. Despite a television, dartboards, a pool table, and the obligatory NASCAR posters, the back room still looks empty and unlived-in. The bar itself is staffed by volunteer bartenders, and appears to be made up of discrete pieces that don’t fit very well together and are ready to be broken down and taken apart at a moment’s notice.
In fact, the Moose are working toward the purchase of a new lodge. A foam-core board behind the bar charts the progress of their building fund. On January 30th, the board indicated that the fund’s initial goal of $27,000 had been met. Larry Randall, the incoming governor of the lodge, said that there were no immediate plans to move, and that money was still being collected. “All we want is a place with space for the kids, and a horseshoe pit for us,” he said.
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