MOOSEHEART MAGAZINE
8
Childhood’s Greatest Opportunity
A Series of Impressions of Moosedom’s Philanthropy by Ada Patterson, of the New York Journal Staff
THE BIRTH OF, and BATTLE FOR an IDEA
(CONTINUED FROM LAST MONTH)
IN THE MACHINE SHOP AT MOOSEHEART
time, to the Home for Incurables. Since it was impossible for him to keep the job that was their support, and at the same time care for children aged one year, two, four and seven years, he did what seemed best to him. He sent the children to the nearest orphanage, where he could pay them frequent visits. He would return from them saying “The children don’t look well and they seem unhappy. But I don’t know what else to do for them.”
Walking home from his work, his head and shoulders bent with the weight of weariness and his anxiety to solve the problme of the welfare of his children, he heeded not the warning clang of an approaching street car. The car struck him. If he worried about the children again those worries were continued on another plane. Let us hope that his new vision was clear enough to see what befell the bereft children.
A “dun” from the orphanage for “money due for the care of the children” reached the local lodge. The case was reported to the Governors of MOOSEHEART. They ordered that the four little orphans be sent to the spot of which Fox River and Lincoln Highway nearly form the symbolic circle of defense.
The sad faced little group expanded wholesomely in the benign atmosphere. The oldest, nine years old, constituted himself spokesman. To the superintendent’s office he came from school at the time when every child may have audience, it was the children’s hour. He nestled between the superintendent’s knees. He climbed on one of them. The superintendent’s arm went round him and held him in place.
“Me and my brother and sisters was awful lonesome the two years we were at the orphanage.” He lifted a clean, earnest face, with a new ruddiness in its cheeks, to the children’s friend. “It seemed like we didn’t belong there nor nowhere. Here it’s all different.
“This morning when I was washing dishes I broke a cup. I began to bawl. I thought I would be licked. At the orphanage they beat me when I let a sugar bowl drop. But one of the boys came up to me and said, ‘Quit crying, kid. They never hit you at MOOSEHEART.׳”
“An’, Mr. Adams, the eatin’s great. We get white plates and silver knives and forks. We had tin plates to eat often’ where we wuz. Here we have bacon an’ eggs instead of bread and milk.
“Golly, don’t a fellow sleep here! The beds are as soft as feathers. We sleep between sheets. At the other place we slept betwen blankets.
“A fellow told me that I could play in the junior band if I want to and when my kid ■brother and sisters got bigger they could take piano lessons. Is that so ? Gee, but I like music. An’, Mr. Adams, it’s always kinda like music here.”
A Philadelphia Moose went to the temple one Saturday afternoon to pay his dues. “I hear a lot about the school at MOOSEHEART. I would like to see any pamphlets you have on the subject,” he said.
The Secretary handed him one. “You will be interested,” he said.
“No doubt.” The Moose buttoned up his coat and struck out in the face of a March wind. He was bowing his head before it and stubbornly fighting the wind as he started across one of the wide crossings off Broad Street. An automobile bearing an impatient passenger to the Broad Street station bore down upon him. It knocked him down and ran over him.
The tender hands that performed the last offices for the crushed body found, thrust deep into his pocket, the
(Continued on page 15)
the oaby was nine days oia, tne mother gave up her battle with grief and weakness.
It was a desolate Christmas for the little ones aged seven and four and two years, and nine days. But hope was on the horizon. The Lodge had sent the story to MOOSEHEART. The promise of a home at MOOSEHEART was their New Year’s gift.
Little Louisa weighed five pounds when she arrived at MOOSEHEART. A pitying widow asked the privilege of taking care of her. She was nursing a child of her own, but from the fount of her motherhood the seemingly dying baby drew sustenance.
How Louisa flourished! The five pounds soon became twenty-two. Her black eyes that had once been wells of misery had the radiance of stars. She laughs often, showing an increasing number of marvelous new teeth, like seed pearls. But she laughs too with her deep Italian eyes and with her merry little heart. Nowhere in. the world is there a happier baby than little Louisa. Her brothers and sister who visit her laugh too. They know that their sister is the prettiest as well as the happiest baby at MOOSEHEART. Life stretches, a sunny road,, before the children who had no Christmas because their mother lay dead on Christendom’s festal day.
At Granite City, 111., the home of a Loyal Moose was invaded by misfortune. It was necessary to send the wife, who had been ailing for a long
wasn’t ashamea of nis tears. Tne Moose trio carried the food to the house, then fell to work s.awing v/ood for the kitchen stove and to fend off the chill of the summer mornings and evenings in the far north.
One of the brothers hastened to MOOSEHEART. He told the story to Director General Davis.
“Don’t wait a minute,” said the Director General. “Go back as fast as the train will carry you and bring those children to MOOSEHEART. Yes, all of them.”
And they came, the girl of sixteen who had so bravely combatted appalling conditions, her four sisters and three brothers.
“I am sorry you didn’t come before,” said the Brother Moose who conducted them to MOOSEHEART. “Whenever a Moose family is in trouble the first thing to do is to let the Moose know.”
Half as large as the family with a sixteen-year-old girl at its head but filling as large a measure of gratitude and happiness, is the quartette of children whose dark eyes and olive complexions are the tokens of sunny Italy. They are Italian-Americans. Their father was stricken with influenza and literally choked to death. The widow and three children attended his funeral, which was given by the Moose of Struthers (Ohio) Lodge. Nineteen days after the native of Venice died was born a little black-eyed baby. On Christmas eve, when
Stories of Mooseheart Children
In the model nursery at MOOSEHEART, a lovely young girl lifts a black-eyed baby for the admiration of visitors. She is neat and attractive. Her smile is a happy one. But so is every smile one sees in the children’s town. There is no strain of effort in smiling. Aptly was written the song, “Mooseheart the Happiest.”
Yet this girl, assistant to the head of the nursery, has a story of a desperate fight with poverty, a fight that might have ended fatally but for the Loyal Order of Moose.
The memory of this star-eyed girl goes back to what seemed to be an unceasing fight with cold and crop failures, on a far northern farm.
She was sixteen and the eldest of nine children. The problem of the payments coming due on the farm and nine children anaemic through lack of food, faced her father. It was the beginning of a hard winter following other hard winters and disappointing summers.
“There’s only one thing to do,” her work-worn father said. “Or, rather, two things. I’ll have to get day’s work to do in the timber and you’ll have to go to town and get a job.”
The girl of flower-like prettiness found work in a laundry at Duluth. She earned six dollars a week. She lived on four of those and sent the two remaining dollars home.
The bitter northern winter passed. In the spring the girl sickened. Red spots polka dotted her face.
She went to the city dispensary.
“Looks as though you’ve caught smallpox. There’s a lot of it about. You probably contracted it by washing the clothes of some infected person. You will have to go to the pest house,” said the dispensary doctor. Stella’s case received the attention of the pest house physician .
“You haven’t smallpox, little girl,” he concluded. “This is a rash caused by bad food and bad air. Go home and take a rest and you’ll be all right. If you stay here you might really catch the smallpox.”
The girl walked twelve miles from the pest house to the farm. After a few days the menacing red spots appeared on the baby’s face. It died of smallpox. The mother contracted the dread disease. She too died. The girl’s father was the third to become ill, to fight the malady with what strength was left in his poorly nourished body, and died eight days after the girl came home. The last doctor was right. She had not had the smallpox. But she had carried the germs of the disease home from the pest house on her clothes.
The girl struggled on, caring as best she could for her seven younger brothers and sisters. Late in August she went to Duluth and told her story to Lodge No. 505 of the Loyal Order of Moose.
“I have done all I could,” she said. “There’s nothing to eat in the house. I wouldn’t have come to' you but the children are hungry. I might go to the county but such terrible things have happened that I am afraid.”
She remembered the doctor who had sent her to the pest house when she didn’t have the smallpox, and the other who sent her home a harbinger of death to her father and mother and infant brother.
An auto laden with three brother Moose and crowded by quantities of provisions followed the girl to her home. Seven children in rags gathered about the car. They stared from the depths of sunken eyes at their rescuers.. The cheeks of one of them was burning with fever.
One of the rescuing party wept and