This past month, the Elk Point Royal Purple lodge made their final donations to community groups, and bid a sad, final goodbye to their charter, one tap of the elderly gavel closing the lodge forever.
It was my job to make that tap, and it certainly wasn’t something I wanted to ever see or hear happen. I’ve been a member of that lodge, in both its many years as part of the Order of the Royal Purple and its short stay as part of the Royal Purple of Canada, since the spring of 1979, and received my 40-year pin only recently.
When I joined, a year after my husband joined the Elk Point Elks lodge, the Royal Purple had more than 50 members, and were the go-to group for catering in the busy Elks Hall, where we served wedding and graduation banquets, some so large it took two sittings with a flurry of fast dishwashing and drying in between, as well as coffee at countless weekly bingos. We were a busy and hard working group, and we supported the brother Elks in every way we could, and held our annual installation of officers with theirs, an evening that always concluded with a dance.
The Royal Purple was a proud group to belong to, a group with rules and regulations. Our blouse collars could not show above our blazer collars, we wore white skirts no matter how cold the weather, and we would not have dreamed of crossing our legs above the ankles while wearing regalia. We took pride in marching in perfect step with the others of our group, and performing rituals and drills exactly by the book, and we looked very good doing it.
We were also regulated by having to hold our meetings on the second Monday of the month without any changing of dates because of holidays or weather, and I missed a lot of meetings over the years when I had town council meetings that same night, except on Thanksgiving day, when I actually could attend the Royal Purple meeting, and the annual District Meeting, going to other lodges on a rotation basis.
Eventually, we were able to change our meeting date and I could attend more meetings, and become more involved in lodge activities, from Mother’s Day teas to fall craft sales, eventually becoming the lodge’s historian. It was in that capacity that I came to have custody of the lodge’s history album and was looking through it the other day before storing it away in a bulging file cabinet of Royal Purple memorabilia, some dating back to its 1961 beginnings.
This album was started in 2006, and included coverage of the 2006 district meeting, on the day after a foot of snow fell, when only the District Deputy, who came from Vermilion with a slight side trip into the ditch en route, and three hardy ladies from Myrnam, were there besides our own lodge members, with five other snowbound lodges phoning in their regrets.
The album shows initiations of new members, funeral cards of departed members, and many, many photos of activities we were involved in. A list of the executive from a decade ago includes four Past Honored Royal Ladies who have passed away, two who have moved away and two who have moved on to other interests, along with six of the eight who were still members until that final tap of the gavel.
The most recent of those who passed away passed that gavel, a briefcase filled with paperwork and the position of Honored Royal Lady on to me when illness overtook her and she could not continue to lead the lodge. We had given up working bingos in St. Paul when we ran out of sufficient workers, and after our hardworking casino crew came back from their final round of fundraising in July, we learned that it would be four years before we would be eligible for another, and made the extremely reluctant decision to bid farewell to the lodge that at two of the final members had been with for over 50 years.
Our lodge is closed, but some of us will always be Royal Purples at heart.
