MOOSEHEART MAGAZINE
Page Six
The Proof of The Pudding
Two Fathers
All different stories, showing in the lights and shadows of actual life how many different homes are under the protecting arm of Mooseheart.
Here is the story of two fathers, two men dwelling the width of the continent apart, two men as different in their ways of life as men could be. One man passed his peaceful days under the giant trees of California. The other man battled for existence in the smoke and fumes of a Pennsylvania glass factory town. One man was a desk worker; the other wore the grease stained overalls.
Brother George Shrieve of Englemine, California, was an accountant. He moved with his seven children from San Francisco and took a Post Office position in Englemine, hoping to cut down expenses and save some money. He lived in Englemine four years. So uneventful was the life of the Shrieve family that “Patty,” thirteen years old, after long thought, could only remember one outstanding happening; that was when the family moved from the city to Englemine. It was an ordinary American family, apparently comfortable. If Brother Shrieve laid awake nights wondering how he was going to find the money to educate his children he was only doing what hundreds of thousands of other American fathers are doing. He died ox pneumonia and left his family helpless.
Brother Ira D. Smith of New Kensington, Pa.
Five Young׳ Smiths
Mary, David, Colin, Robert and Aline, children of our late brother, Ira D. Smith of New Kensington,
Pa. Barbara was too small to go in the picture.
They are happy now at Mooseheart.
was a glass works foreman when he married. He became a glass blower. His health broke down at this and in a few years he had to take up casual employment that his strength was equal to. He had six children. During Brother Smith’s illnesses the family savings were spent. It was the common history of the man-killing trades. What a man can save from his high wages he will use up when his earning power is gone. Brother Smith battled to support his family as long as he could keep on his feet. He died leaving six children penniless.
Mooseheart has taken up the task of these two fathers. The children will be educated and when they go out into the world they can hold their own.
“Patty” Shrieve is a perfect illustration of how Mooseheart takes up a parent’s work. She was a child fond of books and study. It was her father’s ambition to qualify her for one of the higher secretarial positions. Now at Mooseheart she has already begun her special studies. At Mooseheart she will receive the best secretarial training that can be given at any school, no matter where.
Brother Smith would have been a contented man if he could have seen his children at Mooseheart on one of these balmy Indian Summer days: that have just passed. They were swinging on a porch swing enjoying the beautiful weather. Mary was in the middle with a little sister on each side. ;Behind them were big baskets of ferns. Across the graveled road were the velvet lawns and big trees.
“Mooseheart’s fine,” said Mary. “This is the nicest place I ever saw.”
and to tell me something about Mooseheart’s ideals. “You’ve been here a long time. See if you can’t get a little sentimental about us,” the big man suggested smilingly. Ruth laughed.
“I do love the old place, though,” she said as we strolled toward Babyville which is always the Mecca of the woman Mooseheart visitor.
“You see,” she went on, “when I came there was only one house here, that frame farm house over there. There were eleven children and we all stayed there with the matron. But even then we didn’t get. lonesome. There’s too much to do.”
I learned what a Mooseheart girl’s day is like. Here is the schedule of the week days, which are topped off with a good movie on Saturday night, and dances and parties on special occasions:
6 A. M.—She rises, dresses, and helps the younger children. She breakfasts, after helping to cook it, and she does her share of the dish washing.■ The spirit of co-operation is carried into the halls, and “she who does not work, does not eat”.
8:1-5—School whistle. Mooseheart campus full of trim little girls, sturdy boys, and a few first grade toddlers. Two hours of the girl’s morning devoted to vocational work in the grammar grades.
12:00—Hot dinner for everybody.
12:30—K. P. for the girls.
1:15—Afternoon school. High school girls learn how to keep house, cook, and make their own clothes.
4:00—Free time. Do as you please.
4:45—General	Assembly. Band plays,
speeches, songs. “Good fun”.
5:30—Free.
6:00—Supper. Dishes to wash.
7:15—Study hour and Bible reading.
The little girls go to bed about 8 o’clock and then the older ones are free to study, read, or play the piano.
“What?” I asked this typical Mooseheart girl who has come back now to work with the others. “What is the very best thing you know about Mooseheart ?”
She looked out over the thousand acres of park and farm land dotted with substantial, red roofed, modern buildings, toward the new Philadelphia lodge hospital, as fine as any city hospital in the middle west, toward the printery, the department store, and the trade buildings where every child receives an education for livelihood. She was mentally summing up all the elements of this vast, modern, American, educational scheme. Then she turned to me with her answer.
“I think it’s the spirit,” she said. “The true spirit of democracy and of production. It doesn’t matter here who you are. It’s what you produce that counts. Everybody knows that and so naturally we try to produce the best that’s in us.”
More than a thousand children at Mooseheart are getting hold of this spirit which they will later carry out into the world. It’s pretty good luggage isn’t it?
Now Safe and Happy at Mooseheart
There are g־ood times ahead of these children. George Shrieve, 7 ; John, 8 ; Harrison, 11. Their big sister, “Patty,״ aged 13, is the young lady in the white shoes. The three older children are with their mother.
Miss Mooseheart
By Lucy Calhoun
THEY were just two little girls then who had lost their Daddy. To their seven and ten year old minds the fact that the family funds would necessarily be cut down did not mean anything in comparison with the appalling strangeness, the lonesomeness that hung over the house. A house without a Daddy is no kind of a house at all to seven and ten year olds, as everyone knows. It was a terrible time, even with a mother there.
Then one day they discovered something encouraging. They found out that their wise Daddy had seen to it before he went away that his children would never be fatherless. He had arranged for them to have 600,000 fathers, adopted fathers, all brothers of his in the Loyal Order of Moose, all interested in the children of all other Moose, hoping for them, working for them. Some of these new fathers came to see them and they were taken to Mooseheart, the $5,000,000 home, school, and play place for Moose children. Then a new and wonderful life began.
That was eight years ago, when Mooseheart was as much a baby as any of the happy youngsters who beguile the visitors on baby row. It is of the older of these two little girls, the first students of Mooseheart, that I want to tell you, for she it was who acted as my guide on my first visit, and in her I found the heart of Mooseheart, the reason for that beautiful little City of Childhood, the flowering of a seed planted long ago and tended by good gardeners.
“Ask Ruth Beach to step in here, please,” said Superintendent Adams to the professional-looking student secretary who answered his desk buzzer, and turning to me he continued, “You’ll find her interesting. Here are some of the statistics. She’s been here since the school was started and has watched us grow. Last year she spent at Boston University’s new College of Secretarial Science and now she is back here working with us and saving her money to complete her college course. We call her the ‘old timer.’ She’s about e'ghteen.” He handed me some letters and paper״, from a file, and a copy of the; Seniors’ Book of Mooseheart in which some of you may have seen the picture of my “heroine”.
I learned that Ruth was the daughter of L. J. Beach of Helena, . Arkansas. Mother a nurse. Sister, Georgia, three years younger, still a student. Shortly after the admission of the two girls to Mooseheart the Helena lodge had been discontinued and Ruth and Georgia had been without a parent lodge until San Francisco had come to the rescue and given them a second adoption. There were little essays written by Ruth in the pile of papers. There were letters from Boston where she had numbered among her friends and sponsors such distinguished persons as Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard University, and other-leading Moose. There were requests to Superintendent Adams for permission to attend certain social affairs. And there was much about football, a wholesome American girl’s interest in athletics.
It was while I was reading this that the “old-timer” herself came in and I looked into a pair of clear, honest eyes under finely drawn eyebrows. There was no evasion in the glance. The girls of Mooseheart are taught to evade evasion of that kind. They do not fear the world. They gallantly square their young shoulders and look it full in the face. The “come hither” side glance of the modern city flapper is bad form at Mooseheart.
Ruth was wearing a becoming modified middy suit of an odd shade of soft grey blue. Her black hair was arranged rather simply, away from her forehead in a style which might have been trying to some types, but which suited her perfectly. She was as trim and neat as a well managed yacht, and there was an air of sweet serenity and friendly confidence about the way in which she acknowledged the introduction—modestly but without timidity, the bearing of the Mooseheart girl generally, I discovered.
The superintendent asked Ruth to be my guide
MISS RUTH BEACH Mooseheart ’20
An Example of Mooseheart Education