The Golden Age · 1930–1935

The mayor helps host a DeMolay ballroom dance

Dec 1932

From the source

MISS DUNLOP HONORED.

“Mr. and Mrs. John Dunlop entertained Tuesday night with a large dance at the DeMolay ballroom of the Heights Masonic temple, in compliment to their daughter, Miss June Dunlop.

“Festoons of smilax and boughs of spruce and pine lined the walls of the ballroom, and at one end, the orchestra dais was transformed into a wooded scene of holiday greenery. Refreshment courses were passed from a lace-laid table decked with brilliant poinsettia blossoms and scarlet tapers in silver candelabra. The ice punch bowl frozen around fruit and flower clusters was garlanded with smilax and holly.

“The hosts were assisted in entertaining by Mayor and Mrs. Walter E. Monteith, Mr. and Mrs. D. Barker, Mr. and Mrs. T. C. Sweeney, Mr. and Mrs. Percy F. Heard …”

Houston Post, December 29, 1932, p. 5, as transcribed; the clipping shown below is the Chronicle’s report of December 28.

The date matters. December 27, 1932 fell in the fourth winter of the Depression, and Walter E. Monteith was a lame duck: Houston’s 44th mayor had just lost his re-election fight to Oscar Holcombe and had weeks left in office. He spent one of those evenings receiving guests at a Heights debutante dance, under chandeliers wound with smilax, beside a punch bowl that someone had frozen around whole fruit and flowers.

The room itself tells a story: the temple’s ballroom was called the DeMolay ballroom, named for the boys’ order that met upstairs. And the papers treated the night as news three times over: an advance notice on December 15, a same-day portrait of Miss Dunlop on the 28th, and this full account in the Post on the 29th. Society coverage was the neighborhood’s public record, and the Heights corner was an address worth printing.

Five months later the members would be fighting to pay down the mortgage, dinner by dinner. The mayor receiving guests in a forest-dressed ballroom while the debt clock ran is the golden age of this building in a single image. It had less than three years left.

The source

Newspaper society page with a photograph of a room with a large floral rug, a cartoon, a dress-pattern drawing and advertisements. — Houston Chronicle, Dec. 28, 1932, p. 5: the society page, reporting the Dunlop dance “at the De Molay ballroom of the Heights Masonic Temple.”

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Also: The Post’s account: Houston Post, Dec. 29, 1932, p. 5.