Sir Knight
I stumbled into exploring the world of Freemasonry somewhat by accident. My aunt mentioned that her grandfather had been a Knight Templer. I found this baffling because the only Knights Templar I knew of were the militant medieval order disbanded by the pope in 1312. Soon after, while researching one of my great-great-grandfathers, I learned that he was also a Knight Templar, which cemented my interest in learning about the organization.
It Was a Most Thrilling Sight!
As I have written in a previous post, my great-grandmother Dorothy (Dollie) Loud grew up on cavalry posts across the western United States and, for high school, attended boarding school in Omaha, Nebraska. While Dollie was in Omaha during the mid-1890s, a particular highlight came when she and some of her school friends attended Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, most likely in 1896, when the show toured the Western states.
Jack Dempsey’s Rolex
When I was a child, my parents always received a cheesecake from Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Restaurant at Christmas. I didn’t really understand who Jack Dempsey was or why he sent us a cheesecake every year, but the cheesecake was delicious. As I got older, I came to understand that my grandfather had at one point served as Dempsey’s attorney, and my grandparents had become friends with Dempsey and his fourth wife Deanna. Sadly, however, Dempsey’s restaurant closed in 1974, marking the end of an era for my family.
She Has Always Exercised and Enjoyed Those Rights
As I said in my last post, my three times great-granduncle Elias Longley and his wife Margaret Vater Longley were idealists. Among Elias’s many publishing ventures was a newspaper, The Type of the Times. Its slogan was “Devoted to all true interests of the human race,” which, as one writer notes, included “women’s rights, as well as abolition, temperance, and even vegetarianism” (Durack 2020). Of these varied interests, the one to which Margaret, in particular, devoted the most time and energy was women’s suffrage.