Eighty years ago, one of every three men belonged to a fraternal organization.
"I can remember a time when almost every black man in Douglas County was a Mason," said 75-year-old Verner Newman III, a past worshipful master at the Western Star Lodge No. 1.
"Of course, it's not like that now," he said.
Today, the Lawrence lodge, started by and for blacks in 1865, is down to 16 members.
"It's hard to get young people interested," Newman said.
Recent polls show less than one in four American men - black and white - belong to a civic or fraternal organization.
"Back in the early 1980s, we had 5,000 members," said Gary Ashton, governor of the Moose Lodge in Topeka. "Now, we're down to 1,500. We're still alive, but it's getting harder and harder, absolutely."
Reasons for the decline vary. In his 2000 best-selling book, "Bowling Alone," Harvard University professor Robert Putnam cited a long list of factors, including post-World War II skepticism; changing attitudes toward work and leisure, and the roles of men, women and families; urban sprawl; and most of all, television.
"Most of us are watching 'Friends' rather than having them," Putnam said during a 2001 Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center-sponsored summit at the Lied Center.
Ashton offered a different perspective.
"What hurt us first was liquor by the drink - before that you had to belong to a club to buy a drink," he said. "Now, you can get a drink in most any restaurant.
"Then the casinos (in Brown County) opened up," Ashton said. "That took a lot of our business."
For some, exclusivity, once a sought-after commodity, has become a liability.
"Sometimes I we think we ended up being our own worst enemy," said Robert Pfuetze, grand secretary at the Grand Lodge of Kansas A.F. & A.M. "For years, we didn't recruit. There was this idea that for somebody to join they had to ask."
"And then there's the whole thing about the Masons being a secret society," Pfuetze said. "Well, we're an organization that has a few secrets but no way are we a secret society. That's been blown way out of proportion."
Pfuetze said the Topeka lodge is looking for ways to reverse the trend.
"This is a great organization," he said. "But we're suffering - we're all suffering."
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