The Golden Age · 1930–1935
An interfaith cast shares the temple stage
1933
From the source
“The young people’s department of Oliver Methodist Church, assisted by the Hebrew Temple Club of Reagan High School, will present ‘An Arizona Cowboy,’ a comedy-drama in the church annex at 8 p.m. Friday in Reagan Masonic Temple, Harvard and Eleventh.”
Houston Chronicle, April 5, 1933, p. 19, “City and County News in Brief.” Clip 1198422836, research archive.
The one-sentence notice trips over its own venue (the compositor left “church annex” standing next to “Reagan Masonic Temple”), but the cast pairing is plain enough: the youth of a Methodist congregation and the Jewish student club of Reagan High School, rehearsed together, on one bill, at a Masonic hall. The date is spring 1933, the same season the new government in Germany was burning books. In the Heights, the teenagers were staging a cowboy comedy across denominational lines.
The pairing was not an accident of one evening. Freemasonry admits men of any faith who profess a belief in a Supreme Being, and Reagan Lodge’s rolls bore that out for decades. 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.
The source
