A church comedy on the temple stage

The one-sentence notice is ordinary, and that is its value: the young people of a Methodist church and a Reagan High School club staging a western comedy at the Masonic temple on a Friday night in the spring of 1933. Earlier versions of this entry misread the notice as an interfaith production by a Methodist youth group and a Jewish student club. The clipping does not say that: the church was Grace Methodist, the club was the school’s Library Science Club, and the only Jewish organization in the column, the Houston Zionist District, met that day at the Hebrew Institute.

The lodge’s own rolls did cross faiths, as Freemasonry admits men of any faith who profess a belief in a Supreme Being. When Meyer K. Weiss died in 1969, his obituary set his two memberships side by side: Congregation Beth Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in Texas, and Reagan Masonic Lodge No. 1037. Rabbi H. J. Schachtel, who a few years earlier had delivered the invocation at a presidential inauguration, conducted the service.

The stage itself was booked solid that season: Reagan High’s honor seniors did a comedy called “The Hoodoo,” the Rainbow Girls ran their own productions, and a Heights music teacher staged a formal “juvenile wedding” with seventy children. Whatever the neighborhood was, the temple’s stage held it.