The Golden Age · 1930–1935
Plays and musicals on the temple stage
1933
From the source
“The cast of the Will Lookum Matrimonial Bureau, a comedy to be given at 7:30 p.m. February 17 at the Reagan Masonic Hall, Eleventh and Harvard, by members of the Ladies Auxiliary No. 98 to the National Association of Letter Carriers.”
Houston Chronicle, February 9, 1933, p. 10; the photograph and its cutline, which names all eighteen players, are shown below.
The sponsors were the ladies’ auxiliary of the letter carriers, the postal workers whose national association dates to 1889. Their comedy was one night in what amounts to a repertory season: the temple’s auditorium was built with a real stage, and through the early thirties the neighborhood used it relentlessly.
The surviving titles read like a lost paperback rack: “Will Lookum Matrimonial Bureau”; “The Marriage of Jack and Jill,” performed by some seventy schoolchildren; “Eighteen-Carat Boob”; “Listen to Leon”; “The Heart Exchange”; “Chintz Cottage,” a Lutheran youth fundraiser; “The Stork Convention”; “Fun on the Sunset Limited,” named for the Southern Pacific streamliner that ran through Houston. Add Mrs. O. L. Morton’s rhythm orchestra, her formal “juvenile wedding,” and the Junior MacDowell club’s Christmas programs, and the corner starts to look like the Heights’ community theater, because it was.
The cast photograph below survives as one of the few printed images of the temple’s social life. Amateur theatricals were Depression economics at work: a free hall, a neighbor cast, and an audience that walked.
The source
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