A superintendent dies at the exile hall

On June 12, 1941 the Chronicle reported the death of P. H. Obenour, about seventy, “building superintendent at the Reagan Masonic Temple, 801 Harvard.” He had climbed a ladder to the roof to watch a work crew and, after about five minutes, “fell to the roof dead.” Justice Tom Maes returned “a verdict of natural death”: a heart attack, not a fall.

The address is the point. In 1941 Reagan Lodge had been meeting for six years in rented rooms at Eighth and Harvard, three blocks south of the temple it had lost, and its notices called those rooms the Reagan Masonic Temple. “801 Harvard” is the 800 block. Obenour probably kept the exile hall, not this building, and if so his death notice is the only document yet found that gives that hall a street number.