Beyond Relief The Masonic Homes at 125

A Continuation of The Greatest of These Is Charity

RELIEF BEYOND

THE MASONIC HOMES AT 125

BEYOND RELIEF

The Masonic Homes at 125

A Continuation of The Greatest of These Is Charity

Contents

1 The Rebirth: Modernizing the Masonic Homes p. 14

2 Evolving Youth Services: The Childrens Program and MCYAF p. 30

3 Extending Their Reach: Masonic Outreach Services p. 54

4 Leading the Field: Memory Care at the Masonic Homes p. 76

5 A Transformative Gambit: Acacia Creek p. 94

6 Opening the Gates: Community Relations p. 112

7 Retirement 2.0: Technology at the Masonic Homes p. 130

8 Form and Function: The Campus Master Plan p. 150

Milestones Introduction: Across the Years p. 10

Where History Lives On p. 26

When Destiny Chose Walter Wilcox p. 50

A Dark Day in the East Bay Hills p. 74

The Wandering Statue p. 90

Amid the Glory of Nature p. 108

It’s in the Soil p. 126

Beneath the Foundation, Solid Bones p. 144

Intelligent Design p. 148

Across the Years

For more than a century, Masons’ commitment to care has remained firm—even as everything else has changed.

Since 1898, the Masonic Homes of California has stood as a testament to compassion, support, and brotherly love.

For 125 years, it has embodied the commitment that every Mason makes to his brothers and their families. And for 125 years, whenever a Mason has walked through the doors of the Masonic Homes, they’ve found a place of respite and relief.

The Masonic Homes originally grew out of a statewide effort that Masons made to respond to the great cholera outbreak in Sacramento and San Francisco of 1850. That led to the creation of one of the first public hospitals in the state, the Odd Fellows and Masons’ Hospital in Fort Sutter. Three Sacramentoarea lodges shouldered the majority of that burden, contributing more

than $31,000 in direct funds and hospital costs during the outbreak. In today’s dollars, that amounts to something like $15,000 per member. It was a staggering amount, and a powerful symbol of California Masons’ commitment to their fellow members and their community. Half

The Masonic Homes opened in 1898 in Decoto, now Union City.

a century later, Masonic relief in California was centralized through the Masonic Widows and Orphans Home, which we now know as the Masonic Homes of California.

Although a great deal has changed since then—the name of the town it called home, Decoto, became Union City in 1959—the Masons’ commitment to care for one another has remained the bedrock upon which our organization is built. And it is still the generosity of the Masons of California that makes it possible.

One hundred and seventy years after that cholera outbreak spurred the fraternity into action, another pandemic swept through. And again, the Masons of California responded.

Through the Masonic Homes, they were able to ensure that their fellow members, their families, and the most vulnerable in their communities were able to access lifesaving health care, finances, mental health services, advice, and social support. The form that relief took could hardly have been any different than it was in 1850. But the same spirit of generosity and responsibility to those around them was evident.

As we celebrate our sesquicen-

tennial this year, we have a special opportunity to reflect on 125 years of making history—and look to an even brighter future. The story of the Masonic Homes is one of evolution and change, guided by an unwavering commitment to care. And look how far we’ve come!

Of course, this isn’t the first time our history has been committed to print. In 1987, the Grand Lodge of California published The Greatest of These Is Charity, an overview

of the first century of the Masonic Homes, from its founding through the opening of the first Adults Home in Covina. That’s an important dividing line in the organization's history, marking a clear expansion of the Masonic Homes’ services and the evolution of the Covina childrens’ program into what is now

the Masonic Center for Youth and Families. In the 36 years since then, we’ve built new structures dedicated to new services. We’ve launched entirely new divisions dedicated to new models of care, aimed at new groups of people.

So we’ll begin this chapter of the story at that moment, in the late 1980s. In Union City, the Lorber building, home of the skilled-nursing program, is under construction, as is the new Siminoff Center and lodge room. In Covina, the adult program is just getting off the ground. The programs that would become Masonic Outreach Services and the Masonic Center for Youth and Families are still years away. The “new” Masonic Homes of California is still in its infancy. So much change is yet to come.

I’ve had a front-row seat for much of it—as a member of the fraternity, later as a member of the Masonic Homes board of trustees, and ultimately as president and CEO of the organization. I’m unbelievably proud of all that we’ve accomplished since then. And it’s thanks to the Masons of California that we’ve been able to do it. Across the generations,

Masons have given their time, money, and energy to build this magnificent haven of relief. And in so doing, they’ve made a profound difference in the lives of those around them. Now, 125 years in, we have an obligation to preserve this treasure for the Masons of the future and their families. It will be our gift and our legacy.

On behalf of our residents, clients, and staff, and for the thousands of Masons, family members, widows,

and orphans who have walked up our steps and through our doors, I thank you for your support and generosity. The jewel in the crown of Masonry shines as brightly as ever.

— Gary Charland President and CEO, Masonic Homes of California

Siminoff Daylight No. 850

Destiny No. 856

Acalanes Fellowship No. 480

Above: The square and compass stands sentinel atop the Siminoff Center. Opposite: President and CEO Gary Charland.

CHAPTER ONE:

MODERNIZING THE MASONIC HOMES

THE REBIRTH

New Millennium, New Masonic Homes

A century-old organization plans for the future.

Inthe middle of the 1980s, leaders at the Masonic Homes of California were worried.

Left: Leaders of the Masonic Homes cut the ceremonial ribbon at the Acacia Apartments at Union City on September 29, 1984. Right: Three years later, ground was broken on a new hospital wing.

“As we draw closer to the 21st century, the need for the Masonic Homes becomes ever more apparent,” wrote Paul Boyar, the Union City administrator at the time. “With the graying of America … we will find ourselves in the midst of a senior housing crunch as never felt before.” Boyar proved prescient. And it was that warning that in many ways drew a line down the middle of the organization’s history, between what

had been the first version of the Masonic Homes—a nearly centuryold (at that time) home for aged Masons and their widows—and the modern, multi-campus health care organization it would soon become.

Consider: Since Boyar first raised the alarm about the urgent need to modernize the Masonic Homes, the organization has updated both of its residential campuses, in Union City and Covina; reshaped its clientele; opened a nationally ranked shortterm care clinic; and constructed new buildings dedicated to services

like memory care and assisted living it had never before offered. Further, it reenvisioned its model for youth and family services. It created brandnew support programs for members of all ages. It embraced new forms of health technology before everyone else, and pioneered new approaches to successful aging.

Boyar was right about the need to upgrade the Masonic Homes of California. What he couldn’t have imagined, however, was how encompassing that work would be.

More than three decades later, it’s clear that the Masonic Homes hasn’t just kept up with the changing times. The organization has fundamentally rethought how to fulfill its mission to provide support and relief to the fraternity and their families.

Across two different campuses (plus Acacia Creek, its not-forprofit sister community), multiple offshoots and service providers, comprising nearly 400 staff members and serving almost 2,000 clients throughout the state, there’s virtually no inch of the Masonic Homes that hasn’t been re-thought since then. Boyar was right. He just had no idea how right he was.

The Next Era 1987–1990

The change from the “old” homes to the “new” can fairly be said to have begun in 1987, with two themes: more space and more specialization.

The first of those modernization efforts was the construction in Covina of new living quarters for 116 senior residents. Prior to that, the Covina Masonic Home had for six decades been a children’s-only campus. But with the shrinking need for permanent housing for kids—and the swell of demand for senior housing that had the Northern California campus practically bulging at the seams—the decision was made to transition the Covina property into a multigenerational community.

“Today we not only turn this first shovel of earth, but we signify a new beginning for Covina,” Masonic Homes board president Kermit A. Jacobson announced at the groundbreaking. “This will be one of America’s most innovative living environments. Soon the wisdom of the elderly, the strength and vitality

The Siminoff Masonic Center and Lorber building were both constructed in 1987, a turning point in the Masonic Homes’ history.

of children, and the beauty of them both will adorn this Masonic Home.”

The first 12 Covina seniors, dubbed “the pioneers,” moved in on January 8, 1990. “I feel compelled to let you know how happy and satisfied we are with everything here!” wrote one of them just two weeks later.

“If we had any doubts concerning the wisdom of our decision to make the move to the Home, they have all been dispelled as everything has far exceeded anything we had anticipated!”

The other major modernizing update was the new Hugo Lorber building in Union City, providing 120 beds to residents in need of highly skilled nursing care. Boyar called the building—along with the adjacent Siminoff Masonic Center, home to

the campus’s first-ever on-campus lodge room, and built around the same time—“regal testaments to the fraternity’s undying commitment to bring the best to its members, wives, and widows.”

Perhaps less visible a change, but no less significant, also occured the same year. That’s when the Masonic Homes received a new state designation as a life care facility. In other words, it was no longer a place where seniors simply lived. It could also be counted upon for progressive health services.

Clockwise

1989.

“Our Home’s rehab department can be considered one of the leaders in the field,” wrote Boyar. “We have evolved as a community that offers a full range of housing, residential, and health care services. Our goal is to serve our residents over time as their physical and mental needs change.”

In 1991, Boyar told the board of trustees that he hoped to make the Masonic Homes the best such provider in California. “Their retort,” he noted, “was they wanted it to be the best in the nation.”

from top left: A couple pose in their two-bedroom apartment in Union City, circa 1960; the new Siminoff Masonic Center under construction in 1988; Melissa Ogren, 10, who had lived at the Covina Children’s Home for five years, places a time capsule in the cornerstone for the new Masonic Home for Adults at Covina in

A Tremendous Change

2000–present

By the time Larry Adamson was coming up the Grand Lodge line in the 2000s, the Masonic Homes was already close to his heart.

“In my mind, the Masonic Homes is the North Star of all Masonic charity,” says Adamson, who now serves as board chairman. “It’s what makes Freemasonry so special—the fact that our ancient brothers took a similar oath to care for one another.”

What really solidified his feelings, though, was when his parents moved in at Union City, a few years prior to his becoming grand master. Shortly before the move, his mother was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Her doctors thought she would only survive six to nine months. Instead, she lived at the Masonic Homes for two and a half years.

“I got to see my mother thrive for a period of time when the doctors told her she couldn’t,” says Adamson. “My entire family credits the care she received here for those extra years we got with her.”

For more than a century since its founding in 1898, the Masonic Homes provided compassionate housing to elderly Masons and their widows (and, through the Children’s Home, to orphans and needy youth) with limited means or few other options. In the 2000s, though, the Masonic Homes started seriously expanding on its basic suite of offerings. That included developing entirely new memory care services, like the ones that would help Adamson’s mother. It also included the birth of Masonic Outreach Services, which launched new programs to support elderly members and their family members at home, and later expanded to include members of all ages in need of support. The children’s program went through a series of transitions, resulting in a new community health model designed to serve as many California youth and families as possible in the ways they need most. And on campus, the Masonic Homes opened

The Masonic Homes’ pharmacy underwent significant upgrades as part of the 2020 campus master plan.

its services to the general public for the first time, welcoming non-Masons to the Acacia Creek Retirement Community, the Transitions shortterm rehabilitation clinic, and, in 2021, the Pavilion memory care and assisted-living community.

Since 2013, under the helm of president and CEO Gary Charland, the Masonic Homes has completed its transformation. Above and beyond the brick-and-mortar residences, it has become a statewide hub for

health care and support.

“The last 10 years have been a period of tremendous change within our organization,” Charland says. “It’s like going zero to 60. Not only did we construct and build on our campuses, but we created programs that have gained national attention. The Masonic Homes is out in the world on multiple fronts.”

Says Adamson, “Today, the Masonic Homes is not just about senior care. It’s about care, period. If

I look at where we were a decade ago and where we are today, I think it’s a real credit to the Masonic Homes’ leadership. They’re not afraid to test programs, to take risks, to move things forward. That’s how an organization grows.”

In 1998, the centennial of the Masonic Homes of California’s founding, Past Grand Master and Masonic Homes president Stanley M. Cazneaux put it simply: “The Masonic Homes exemplifies all that is best in

Freemasonry.” In the 25 years since, that’s been proven time and again.

“We have more to go,” Adamson says. “This is an evolution. Health care is changing. Senior health care is really changing. We’re not afraid to say, alright, where do we fit?”

In its new chapter, the Masonic Homes has become a lifeline for Masons, their families, and their communities, in more ways than early Masons could ever have imagined. In the years to come, Charland and Adamson see that trend only growing.

“My vision is that we’re the first call of choice when people need help,” Adamson explains. “Members have loved ones who may or may not be Masons. They have to make decisions about their families’ care, and they don’t know where to turn. We should be their first call.”

That, leaders say, has always been true of the fraternity.

“Think about how central that commitment is to Masonry,” Charland says. “You don’t have to go it alone in the world.”

Left: A pharmacist fills a presciption in the recently renovated Wollenberg building in Union City. Right: A special guest enjoys lunchtime in the Covina dining hall.

MILESTONES Where History Lives On

For more than a century, the Siminoff Temple has been one of the state’s most important Masonic sites.

Even with several lifetimes spent in Freemasonry, one day stands out in the Adamson family’s fraternal history. It was early 2008, and Larry Adamson was several months into his term as grand master of California. Together with his brother Richard, he’d traveled to the Masonic Homes campus in Union City, where their father, Doc, lived with their mother. That day, the Adamson brothers would lead the installation of their dad as the new master of Siminoff Daylight Lodge No. 850, inside the Siminoff Temple, surrounded by family and a standing-room-only group of their closest friends, neighbors, and Masonic brothers.

“My father wasn’t a real talkative guy, but that day he looked at me and said, ‘Thank you for doing this,’” Larry Adamson recalls. “That was a special moment for me, and probably the most sincere moment I ever had with him.”

It wasn’t just the familial nature of the event that made it memorable, Adamson says. It was also the setting: the Masonic Homes’ Siminoff Temple, just steps from where Adamson’s parents lived for more than a dozen years. As a result, the Masonic Homes remains deeply important to the family—so much so that Adamson later became chairman of its board of trustees. There, in the Masonic Homes’ lodge room, which in its various iterations has hosted Masonic events for more than 100 years, the family was able to celebrate not just a father and his sons, but multiple generations spent in Freemasonry.

The Siminoff Temple: A Cherished Home

Bathed in the colored light of its stained-glass windows and surrounded by Masonic antiques and relics going back to the earliest days of the state fraternity, the Siminoff lodge room in Union City is one of the most important places in California Masonry—and one where that feeling of tradition is palpable. Its history goes back almost to the founding of the campus itself.

In 1902, just four years after the first residents were admitted to the Masonic Widows and Orphans Home in Decoto, a wealthy San Francisco Mason named Morris Siminoff presented a gift of $30,000—more than $1 million in today’s dollars—to erect a Masonic temple there. Siminoff, a Russian immigrant who’d become a successful textile manufacturer in the Bay Area, was a member of Fidelity No. 120 in San Francisco (now named San Francisco

No. 120) and belonged to each of the chapters of the Scottish Rite. Not much else is known about Siminoff, although at one point he was recorded as having donated a shipment of musical equipment, band uniforms, and coats for the young orphans. Siminoff died suddenly in 1907, at the age of 44, likely as a result of injuries he suffered when he fell from a horse during a parade of the Knights Templar in San Francisco.

Siminoff’s gift, made alongside his wife, Emma, paid for the construction of a “splendid temple,” as it was described by the grand master at the time. The temple contained the lodge room, an assembly hall, and 16 new bedrooms for elderly residents. The addition of those rooms allowed the home to convert a former dormitory into its first widows’ quarters. The donation also funded the installation of a 350-pipe, electric-powered organ.

The cornerstone for the Siminoff Temple was laid on April 22, 1903; six months later, the building was formally

Left: The original Siminoff Temple, which was demolished in 1986.

Right: Stained-glass windows encircle the new Siminoff Masonic Center.

dedicated by Grand Master Orrin S. Henderson. More than 3,000 Masons made the trip to the East Bay hills to witness the event. On November 14, Eucalyptus No. 243 of Hayward conferred the first Masonic degree inside the temple; Sequoia No. 349 of Oakland and Alameda No. 167 of Centerville (now part of Fremont) would soon use it for third-degree conferrals of their own.

Yet for more than 100 years, no lodge permanently called the temple home. That wasn’t the original plan: In 1903, Grand Master Henderson “endorsed and advocated for the many advantages, too numerous to mention, that are to be derived” by forming a lodge at the Home. He even went so far as to suggest a name: Preston Lodge, in honor of Past Grand Master Edwin Preston (1895), who had died earlier that year.

It’s unclear why that lodge never came into being, but for more than a century, the Siminoff Temple remained a sort of Masonic home away from home, with no group meeting there regularly. By 1976, the temple had fallen into disrepair and was shuttered by state officials for failing to meet earthquake-safety standards.

A New Lodge Is Born

For the next decade, the campus was without a Masonic lodge, culminating in the demolition of the original temple in 1986. That same year, though, an ambitious new construction plan for the Masonic Homes brought the old temple back to life—sort of. As part of a $16 million development that included construction of the 120-bed

skilled-nursing facility named for benefactor Hugo Lorber, plans included building a new Masonic lodge room, to be housed alongside the campus chapel. Ground was broken on the project in 1987, and the new Siminoff Masonic Center, comprising the lodge room, foyer, and chapel, was dedicated by grand lodge officers on May 7, 1989.

The new facility was built from scratch, but designers went to great lengths to include elements of the original Siminoff Temple. Bricks from the 1903 structure were salvaged to construct the face of the new building, while the original altar was repurposed and reconditioned. The elaborate gas-powered chandelier that once hung in the temple’s entryway was unearthed by past grand masters Ronald Sherod and Alvin Weis, refurbished, and made electric. It now hangs above the lodge room.

However, the design flourish that commands the most attention is the expansive set of stained-glass windows. Its 56 panels, each measuring 4 by 4.5 feet, were fabricated by Judson Studios, and depict Masonic symbols including the square, plumb, and anchor. In addition to being so near the Masonic Homes’ chapel room, the colored windows lend the lodge room a special feeling of reverence.

Despite having a brand-new space available, it wasn’t until 2006 that the first seeds of a permanent lodge finally began to sprout. That year, a group of senior Masons living on campus began meeting to practice the Masonic degree conferral, “contributing where we could and sharing our expertise,” according to Bobby Joe McCain, one of the

original members of the group.

Recognizing an opportunity to make real a dream that at that point was 103 years old, the Grand Lodge in 2006 issued a dispensation to the group to meet as Siminoff Daylight Lodge, and on October 6, 2007, it received its formal charter.

In the 15 years since, the lodge has grown from 67 to 105 members. The lodge isn’t just for residents and staff, either: Just over 40 percent of its members live off campus. And an additional dozen of them are residents of Acacia Creek who had not previously been Masons—meaning the lodge has more than a few 50-year veterans as well as several newbies. For many, it’s the lodge building itself that inspired their initial curiosity about Freemasonry. Says McCain, “I think we have a very impressive-looking lodge room. It’s quite a draw.”

For emphasis, McCain points to a pair of murals on the lodge walls hand-painted by John Dahle Jr., a member of the lodge and a Masonic Homes resident who for years worked as a commercial artist. The murals on the north and south walls depict scenes from the building of King Solomon’s temple and feature old west typography, echoing the large mural Dahle painted several years ago in his home lodge, Nevada No. 13. “They’re gorgeous,” McCain says of the Siminoff pieces. “They both incorporate a lot of the teachings of Freemasonry. They’re more than just a piece of artwork in the building.”

To Adamson, who as a member of the Masonic Homes board visits the Siminoff lodge often, the space still holds a special place in his heart. “It’s a beautiful complex,” he says. “But it’s not just that. It’s really an experience. It’s an experience to go and see the history that’s there.”

Opposite: The newly built Siminoff Masonic Center (left) incorporates many elements from the original building (right), which was built in 1903.

EVOLVING YOUTH SERVICES

CHAPTER TWO: THE CHILDREN’S PROGRAM AND MCYAF

The Haven

How a 19th-century orphans’ home transformed into a national model of therapeutic care.

Everything started, in a way, with 16 Masonic orphans.

That was the first cohort, six girls and 10 boys, accepted into the Masonic Home for Widows and Orphans in 1899. From the earliest discussions of a centralized form of Masonic relief, there was the belief in an obligation for the fraternity to fill the shoes of deceased members. That included providing for the families they’d left behind—both young and old.

Looking across the Masonic Homes of California’s original campus now, it’s hard to see many traces of that early commitment to children. But for more than a century, children’s care was among the most important elements of the Masons’

charity program. Today, Masons continue that legacy of support through the Masonic Center for Youth and Families, a full-spectrum mental health and wellness provider for children, teens, and families, itself an extension of the Children’s Assistance Program that grew out of the early orphans project.

From little Walter Wilcox, the “Masonic orphan” sent by rail from New Orleans to Oakland with a tag around his neck and adopted by the Grand Lodge of California, to the team of counselors guiding teens through the pandemic via Zoom, the form of that support could hardly be more different today. But the motivation remains the same.

Above: The original Masonic Home for Children in San Gabriel, a former hotel. In 1916, the children’s home was relocated to Covina. Previous: Past Grand Master Charles M. Wollenberg, who served as a Masonic Homes board trustee from 1919–1959, stands with children outside the Covina administration building.

A Home for Children 1891–1989

Despite how central children were to the planning and execution of the first Masonic Home, they weren’t there very long. Upon its opening in Decoto in 1899, 19 boys and six girls joined five women and 16 elderly men in the Masonic Home’s inaugural class. A decade later, the number of children had doubled, and it was decided that they should have a space of their own.

That space, it turned out, was about 350 miles away.

There, in the Southern California town of San Gabriel, an association comprising Masons and members

of the Order of the Eastern Star, a women’s Masonic organization, had purchased a 100-room former tourist hotel on 10 acres, with designs on converting it to a home for elderly members of the Eastern Star. Instead, in 1909, the title to the building was transferred to the Masonic Homes of California, and 26 children with an average age of 12 moved in. For five years, the San Gabriel orphans’ home provided as many as 60 children with room, board, and all manner of social and cultural programs. The Southern Pacific Railway offered a special railcar and crew to transport them to Camp Wells, in the Angeles National Forest north of Azusa, for a summer vacation. The former hotel underwent significant upgrades in 1912, but twice suffered damage as a result of major flooding. (This was prior to the channelizing of the San Gabriel River.)

With the site still reeling from the damage and unable to accommodate further growth, in 1916 the board of the Masonic Homes relocated its wards to a new property on 35 acres of retired citrus ranch, just east of the town of Covina in the San Gabriel Valley. Its opening was

a true spectacle, with thousands of Southern California Masons on hand to witness the dedication. Past Grand Master Samuel Burke spoke grandly of the fraternity’s new forever home for children and the commitment it represented: Home, it is said, is Cupid’s resting place. There he practices his most cunning wiles.... There hope is cherished, charity nurtured. There the zephyrs smell the sweetest, there the waters are purest, there the stars shine the brightest. Every woodland path is but a Milky Way leading to the shrine of love and across yon brink of time fair lips whisper, Home, Sweet Home.

At Covina, the children lived in four dormitory buildings, divided by age and gender, and ate their meals in a large cafeteria. They grew up around horses and farm animals, chicken coops, and rabbit hutches. They played sports, formed a marching band, and, in 1923, founded a Boy Scout troop. They attended public schools by day— typically Charter Oak School—and

once a week gathered for movie night. They learned professional skills in an on-campus domesticscience college and manual-training building. In 1927, there were 183 children living on the grounds and an additional 25 supported outside the campus.

But in the 1950s and 1960s, orphanages were being closed in favor of licensed group homes. So the fraternity made an investment: In 1969, it demolished the four dormitory buildings and in their place commissioned the midcentury architects A. Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons to build eight cottages, each able to house up to 10 children. The new dwellings mimicked typical Southern California suburban homes—albeit in Jones’ elevated, hallmark style of open spaces.

More change was on the horizon. In 1987, responding to the needs of an aging population, the Masonic Homes broke ground on senior residences at the Covina campus. By then the Children’s Home had cared for more than 1,800 kids. Now—in an echo of the organization’s earliest days—they would have company.

Top: A 1931 photo shows Masonic Homes children at Charter Oak School in Pomona. Above: A young woman in the girls’ dorm.

Children and house matrons in Covina sit down to a group meal in this undated photo.

“Bringing the elderly and children in close proximity on this property is an innovative and generally nontraditional approach to adult living,” said Past Grand Master Kermit A. Jacobson, then president of the board of trustees.

“We can envision children and older adults fishing on the banks of our lake in Rainbow Park.”

The campus was renamed the Masonic Home at Covina, and children and senior residents were soon woven into one another’s lives. Senior residents attended graduation of the Home’s high school students and cheered on their baseball and football teams. They shared kitchen and dining areas—although the seniors were served restaurant-style while the kids ate family-style, a distinction “based on the truism that ‘children eat and adults dine,’” joked campus administrator John A. Rose.

In the world beyond the Covina campus, the times were changing.

During the ’80s and ’90s, the federal government steadily ramped up social services for children and families, and as a result the number of children requiring residential care tapered off. In 1997, with only a handful of kids left, the fraternity voted to open the residential program to children with no Masonic affiliation.

Not long after, they reinvented it again.

Reunifying Families 2000–2009

In 2000, with about 48 children still living at the Home, the board of the Masonic Homes embraced a new model, reflecting the latest research about child development and behavioral intervention. (In 2001, Girls and Boys Town—the organization that created the model—accredited the Covina children’s program as one of the “premier family teaching models in the country.”) As part of the shift, the Homes constructed eight new cottages, dedicated in 2002. There, Children gather inside the senior girls’ rumpus room at the Masonic Homes’ Covina campus (undated).

the children lived under the same roof with “house parents,” who were also family specialists.

“This new arrangement emphasizes family life, with its accompanying joys and responsibilities,” said Barbara Ten Broek, the director of children and community services, at the time. “It allows them to flourish as they learn social and academic skills, and acquire a host of other traits that will enable them to succeed.”

A few years later, the fraternity decided to take what the Girls and Boys Town model had shown them and build on it.

“From 2003 to 2009, we reshaped the program,” says chief strategic officer Sabrina Montes, who was then assisting with the children’s initiative. “We developed our own program based on values similar to Masonry and a belief that children belong with their families when they can safely be reunited. It was no longer a place where kids were dropped off and left behind. Children had the stability of a family environment, but parents and caregivers had to actively participate in the program.”

For the first time, the children’s

project became a short-term residential program, aimed at supporting family reunification over a period of about two years. Around the same time, the fraternity opened the Family Resource Center in Covina, a brick-and-mortar resource for families to get tutoring help, access support services, take parenting classes, learn about substance abuse treatment, and more. By 2008, when a project led by then–Grand Master Richard Hopper expanded its scope, the children’s program and the FRC had served more than 100 families and successfully reunited 35 of them.

“It was an amazing program,” Montes says. “We were getting families the tools they needed to be the healthiest, best families they could be.” Amid these successes, though, demand for residential programs—even on a short-term basis—continued to dwindle.

“We started with eight beautiful houses. Then we went down to six. Then five,” Montes recalls. By 2009, the residential program served just 15 children; only three had a Masonic connection.

So in 2009, the fraternity made an emotional decision: After 110 years, it was time to end residential care for kids and focus on the communityfacing work of the Family Resource Center.

“I truly believe that when we closed the residential program, we had perfected it,” Montes says. “But we knew that if kids had the right treatment early on, or their families got therapy, maybe it would never get to the point they had to be placed outside their homes in the first place.”

“Different times require different responses,” said then–Grand Master Larry Adamson and David Doan, the Masonic Homes’ board president, in a letter sent to the fraternity.

“The Masonic Homes of California has the potential, and the fraternal obligation, to do much more.”

The children’s program formally concluded in 2009.

Clockwise from top left: An undated photo of the Masonic Home for Children band; a group of children reading inside the Covina Home; the cover of a 2001 issue of California Freemason magazine shows children and staff at the Covina campus; a child diving into the Covina swimming pool.

Reaching Further 2010–2019

The Masonic Center for Youth and Families opened its doors in February 2011, based in a house in the San Francisco Presidio. The goal was to take a thoughtful, in-depth approach to understanding the struggles faced by children and their families—and then bring together every specialist they needed under one roof.

“We are taking leadership in a difficult, complex, and fragmented area of psychological services,” said Stephanie Kizziar, then vice president of youth and community services.

MCYAF’s range of offerings and single-point-of-service model stood out in the field. The center quickly earned recognition from the American Psychoanalytic Association. In its first five years, MCYAF provided mental health services to more than 300 children and their families.

It was a good start. But the fraternity’s core reason for closing its residential program persisted: a desire to reach more children and families. By 2015, the Masonic

Homes board decided to evolve MCYAF’s model to one framed by the principles of community health.

“Rather than hanging up a shingle that says this is what we do, you start by looking at the surrounding community and assessing its needs. Then you design programs to meet those needs,” explains Kimberly Rich, who became executive director in 2015.

MCYAF would still offer child, family, and group therapies, along with learning assessments and other kinds of support that kids and families desperately needed. But it would do a lot more to insert itself into the community so those families could find it in the first place.

It started by expanding MCYAF’s physical reach—and delving into its past. In December 2016, MCYAF opened a second clinic to serve the southern part of the state, housed in one of the old children’s group homes at the Masonic Home at Covina.

“We brought the kids back to Covina,” Rich says.

Stephanie

Kizziar speaks at the opening of the Masonic Center for Youth and Families in the San Francisco Presidio, in 2011.

The location also set MCYAF up well for an important partnership. Across the street on the Covina campus, in another former group home, was the Children’s Advocacy Center. The center is run by law enforcement and conducts traumainformed forensic interviews with children who have experienced or witnessed abuse.

The partnership with MCYAF fit like a hand in a glove. When a CAC interview is over, social workers often recommend mental health services for the child and their family members. This can be a tall order, since families still reeling from trauma must take on the burden of finding a provider and getting their child to an appointment. With MYCAF’s new clinic in Covina, child and family therapists were literally across the street. Childrens Advocacy Center founder John Pomroy, who previously served as a house parent at Covina’s old residential children’s program, even painted footsteps

leading out the CAC’s door and right to MCYAF.

Says Rich, “At CAC, they do all the investigating and prosecuting to get this criminal out of this child’s life. Then, when the child walks across the street, that’s when the healing begins.”

Over the next couple of years, MCYAF launched yearround workshops for schools and communities, including anti-bullying presentations for the Masonic youth orders, and a student workshop about stress management. In fall of 2019, about 100 teachers in the Southern California city of Alhambra attended a self-care workshop at MCYAF. In Northern California, parents and teachers learned how to support students with attention and learning difficulties. MCYAF partnered with the Covina Police Department on a program called the Youth Accountability Board, providing early intervention—and an alternative to detention—for

first-time juvenile offenders with a minor offense.

Those efforts had a salutary effect. Community referrals began pouring in from a variety of organizations: the CAC, local school districts, private schools, police departments, pediatricians, psychiatrists, and education specialists.

Between 2015 and 2019, MCYAF expanded the number of clients it served by 940 percent.

Responding to a Crisis 2020–present

When the pandemic struck, it exacerbated a youth mental health crisis that was long in the making. As lockdowns swept the nation, community providers went dark, unable to see patients because of the in-person models they relied on. MCYAF, meanwhile, had a solution ready to go. Back in 2017, it had begun piloting a telehealth

A welcoming lounge area inside the Masonic Center for Youth and Families’ Covina office—formerly one of the campus’ group homes for children.

program, enabling clients to meet with counselors over a secure video connection from home. At the time, MCYAF clinician Jenna Kemp declared it “the wave of the future.” Neither she nor anyone else realized how quickly that future would arrive.

When pandemic lockdowns began in March 2020, “all the other community mental health providers went months and months without seeing clients,” Rich explains. “We closed our in-person clinics on Friday, March 13. By Monday, all of our clients were hooked up with telehealth.”

Before 2020, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in five youths in the U.S. had a mental health condition. By 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that number had doubled. MCYAF’s mental health services were crucial, providing a lifeline to youth dealing with isolation and grief on top of the usual challenges of growing up.

Of course, it wasn’t just young people.

“The pandemic impacted all of us differently, but no one was spared,” Rich says.

Seniors were, and remain, a particularly vulnerable age group. At the Masonic Homes, where rigorous measures were keeping COVID-19 infections at bay, both residents and staff members were feeling the strain, too.

MCYAF and the Masonic Homes’ senior campuses joined forces. Using Zoom, MCYAF clinicians made hundreds of calls to check in on residents and staff members. Some led to online therapy sessions. Others simply offered a bright spot and a bit of social interaction during a lonely time. Since then, senior services have become an increasingly big part of the clientele.

In 2022, MCYAF earned its Staff at MCYAF are now able to meet with clients around the state virtually—a trend that grew during the pandemic.

Medicare certification, and today each campus of the Masonic Homes has a full-time MCYAF clinician on site. Rich hopes to expand therapeutic services for seniors beyond the Masonic Homes’ campuses soon. In the wake of the pandemic, a robust program has emerged. Far from being merely an offshoot of a long-since-shuttered orphans’ home, the Masonic Center for Youth and Families provides thousands of clients each year with affordable, confidential services for children and their families, both in person and online, within the fraternity and outside it. In addition to the senior residents of the Masonic Homes, the center offers support for Masons and their family members at every age and stage of life, from individual and family therapy to couples counseling.

In 2022, the center added Pomona Unified School District to its growing list of community partners. Schools throughout the state now refer students in need of mental health services to MCYAF. And MCYAF staff members travel onto campuses to meet students there. It’s a simple model—and amid a public shortage of mental health providers and a youth crisis of mental health, it’s nothing short of life-saving. Over 125 years of perfecting its programming, the Masonic Homes of California has arrived again with a program offering services that children and their families need most.

“No other community provider has the ability to do what we do,” Rich says. “It’s because of the charitable funding, and the vision, of the Masons of California. It is a rare thing in the field of child therapy and a point of great pride within our team.” Now as then, she says, “We put families first.”

Children at the Masonic Homes’ Covina campus play a game in this undated photo.

MILESTONES

When Destiny Chose Walter Wilcox

How a network of Masons assured the future of a young orphan—and helped inspire a century of children’s care.

On October 3, 1878, 4-year-old Walter Cary Wilcox was aboard a Louisiana train headed for Chicago and then Oakland, California. A packing ticket tied around his neck stated his plight: “The bearer of this is Walter Wilcox, who has been orphaned by the epidemic which has pervaded this city… I bespeak for him, on the part of railroad men between New Orleans and Chicago, every possible attention, looking to his comfort and protection.”

When Wilcox’s mother died of yellow fever in New Orleans, the funeral arrangers discovered a watch with a Masonic emblem among her belongings. They sent a petition for the orphan’s case to the Grand Lodge of Louisiana, which in turn purchased Wilcox’s train ticket to Oakland, where his grandmother lived.

Following his arduous journey, Wilcox received a warm welcome from the Masons of California, including Grand Master Nathaniel G. Curtis. Their empathy for his plight was so strong that the Grand Lodge of California offered to pay for his care. A special $20-per-month endowment was established to fund the effort. Famously, he became known as the “Masons’ Boy” in the press.

Just a decade later, Wilcox’s grandmother passed away, and Wilcox was again orphaned.

In stepped Nathan Spaulding. Spaulding, who’d made his fortune pioneering an adjustable saw blade at his mill in Amador County, was a six-term master of Oakland Lodge No. 188 and the grand treasurer of Masons in California. He was also mayor of Oakland in 1871–73 and, in 1888, a delegate to the Republican National Convention. Spaulding owned a mansion in the east Oakland neighborhood of Highland Park, was a trustee

of Stanford University, and was director of the Industrial Home for the Adult Blind.

Spaulding offered to adopt Wilcox and raise him as his own, and in October 1888 he was named the boy’s legal guardian. The Grand Lodge of California voted to increase the stipend for his care to $25 per month, which

Spaulding asked to be discontinued in 1890, since by then he’d accrued sufficient funds to cover the boy’s education. Writing to the Grand Lodge in 1891, Spaulding reported:

When I became his guardian I found him a bright, sensitive, active and kind boy, with no bad habits, but with poor health, and I learned that on account of his sickness, and other reasons, he had not attended school for many months, and that in his studies he was far behind other boys of his age, and so backward in this respect that to return him then to the public school, in the grade he would only be able to sustain, would have a tendency to discourage and dishearten him; and believing that it would meet with the approval of this Grand Lodge, and having a desire to do by the fatherless son of a Master Mason as I would like to have done to my own under like circumstances, I placed him in one of the best private schools in Oakland, where extra care was given him until he was far enough advanced to reenter the Grammar School, from which he graduated last May, with Honors.

Set against the backdrop of early deliberations over what would become the Masonic Home for Widows and Orphans, the story of the Masons’ Boy was a powerful reminder of the real-world impact that Masonic charity can have. A decade later, the first Masonic Home for Orphans opened just 20 miles south of Wilcox’s new home. And in 1895, Wilcox followed his mentor’s example, joining Oakland Lodge No. 188.

An Architectural Icon, Hiding in Plain Sight

If the simple lines, walls of glass, and low-slung design of the Masonic Homes in Covina seem quintessentially California modern, well, that’s because they are.

Designed by midcentury architect Archibald Quincy Jones, the former dean of the architecture department at USC (and designer of the famous Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage belonging to Walter Annenberg), Quincy was hired by the Masonic Homes board of trustees in 1968 to execute the campus master redevelopment plan. Between 1968 and 1973, that included the construction of eight new family-style cottages, in which children lived with house parents (rather than in the dormitories they’d previously occupied); a central community building that includes the cafeteria, library, and administration offices; plus new roadways and landscaping.

While the Covina project is not often listed among Jones’s most iconic designs, it features many of his work’s most distinctive features, from the high ceilings, angled rooflines, and post-and-beam construction to the emphasis on connective greenbelts. In that regard, his legacy is a lasting one. Though Jones was largely overshadowed by his more famous architectural contemporaries (and collaborators) Joseph Eichler and Richard Neutra, he did much to raise “the level of the tract house in California from the simple stucco box to a structure of beauty and logic,” wrote the architect Cory Buckner.

EXTENDING THEIR REACH

Beyond the Wall

How the Masonic Homes looked outward to deliver relief to a changing fraternity.

Freemasonry reached its 20thcentury zenith in the wake of World War II, a time when the fraternity was growing by 9 percent every year. In 1944, close to one in 20 eligible men in the state belonged to one of the Grand Lodge of California’s constituent lodges. By 1965, the fraternity counted nearly a quartermillion members.

Three decades later, that growth had long since stalled out. California’s Masonic rolls had been halved—while the state’s population had nearly doubled. An even more pressing concern, however, was the graying of the fraternity. The swell of young men who’d joined in the mid-century were approaching retirement age. Leaders of the Masonic Homes braced for that wave to crash onto its shores.

In 1988, then–Grand Master Leo B. Mark addressed the issue directly:

“Due to the advances in modern medicine and the increasing age of our membership, the needs of our dependent elderly continue to grow.”

Even with the Covina campus preparing to admit 100 seniors to what had previously been a home for children, and with the Union City campus at its 400-person capacity, the Masonic Homes struggled to scale up to meet increasing demand from its aging clientele. The organization needed to find new ways to respond to the need—and fulfill the Masons’ obligation to provide aid and relief to “distressed worthy brothers.”

The brick-and-mortar campuses of the Masonic Homes could provide only so much of that relief. To meet the increased call for aid, it would have to deliver services beyond its own walls. Stained glass at the Masonic Homes in Union City. Previous: Members of El Segundo Lodge No. 421 celebrate with Masonic Outreach Services staff in 2019.

The Birth of Masonic Outreach Services

1988–1999

As far back as the 1920s, the Masonic Homes had set aside money earmarked for “nonresident assistance.” Typically, that fund was used either to help those on the Masonic Homes waiting list cover in-home care or other expenses until they were able to move in, or to supplement lodge relief funds to support gravely ill or permanently disabled members ineligible for residency at the Homes.

In 1936, the Masonic Homes reported allocating just over $40,000 to these “outside relief” cases, including more than 85 clients in Northern California. By 1990, the old nonresident assistance program had grown to $316,000 and expanded to assist elderly members to age

in place. “In such cases they can retain their independence and the cost is less for the Homes to provide assistance,” wrote then–Grand Master Roy J. Henville.

In 1988, Philip Nichols was named the organization’s first director of outreach services, a position designed to work with lodges and applicants for Masonic assistance, along with their families, to arrange care for those better served beyond the Masonic Homes’ campuses. The nonresident assistance fund was folded into a new department: Masonic Outreach Services.

That same year, the department produced a Resource Guide for Seniors handout, which was distributed to lodges throughout the state. The guide included 38 subjects, including how to obtain transportation, in-home health care, and Meals on Wheels delivery. The intention was clear: The new Masonic Outreach Services team would connect more Masons with existing services. That would include those offered directly through the Masonic Homes, and also through public and state agencies in their own towns and communities.

In subsequent years, that messaging came into even greater focus: Connecting members with community-based care would be an equivalent option when it came to the question of providing relief—not just admission to the Masonic Homes. “Not all those who are distressed and in need can and should be helped at the Homes,” wrote Henville, then president of the board of trustees, in 1992. In many cases, he noted, it was preferable to both the individual and the organization to provide assistance right where members lived. “Understanding the system and what’s out there and how to access it, is the issue.”

In other words, the Masonic Homes was zeroing in on three crucial elements of what would become its approach to fraternal outreach: information, financial support, and lodge partners.

“It was a really proactive approach,” says Sabrina Montes, chief strategic officer of the Masonic Homes of California and the head of Masonic Outreach Services. “In a way, it was a template of what was to come.”

Laura Strom, a Masonic Outreach Services care manager, with Mildred Oberg, a resident of the Masonic Homes in Covina.

An Evolving Approach to Relief 2000s

In the new millennium, as the nation’s large population of baby boomers entered their senior years, two trends became clear: Compared with previous generations, boomers wanted to age at home. And many were running out of money.

“The financial resources that would have been sufficient to provide for them into their 70s can run out as they enter their 80s, 90s, and beyond—just at the time that their need for assistance is greater than ever,” wrote George Geanoulis, then a member of the board of trustees, in his board report.

The new Masonic Outreach Services program was the Masonic Homes’ best tool for confronting those challenges. MOS, as it came to be known, combined the financial support of the nonresident assistance program with resource sharing and access to centralized services, Residents board the Masonic Homes’ bus at the Covina campus.

a monthly case-management clinic at the Paradise Park Masonic community in Santa Cruz. “Our programs and services have changed and evolved over our history in response to the changing needs of our fraternity and the changing face of our society,” wrote Past Grand Master Allen B. Gresham, then president of the board. “They’ve had to.”

By 2009, MOS was firmly established. Every month, it provided financial assistance to about 185 seniors in the fraternal family, and referral or case-management services to another 200. Theodore and Mollie Berman were among them. That September, they wrote an open letter to the staff of MOS.

The Rise of Family Resources 2009–2012

As MOS expanded, the economy was crashing. Between December 2007 and June 2009, the United States went through its longest, and by many measures worst, economic recession since the Great Depression. Entire industries all but shut down: the finance market, real estate, construction, lending. Some 8.7 million Americans lost their jobs. More than 1.2 million lost their homes. Many of them were Masons.

was reinvented as the Masonic Assistance Line, a one-stop source of information about Masonic Outreach Services programs for members and family of all ages. With one phone call, they were connected to information and referrals within their own communities—and, if needed, applications to the Masonic Homes or MOS.

The challenge, as always, was getting the word out about the expanded services. In August 2009, the Masonic Homes’ trustees dispatched Montes and other MOS staff to do just that.

When the fairs were completed, the trustees asked MOS what they’d found. “We told them: Our Masons need jobs and they need money,” Montes recalls. They pitched an outreach program for younger Masons, to complement the one that existed for seniors.

including annual physical exams and medical alert systems. In 2002, the program served 74 clients. That grew to 100 the following year, at a rate of about $75 per person per day. At one point in 2004, demand for MOS services rose by a third in just four months. That year, the fraternity raised more than $650,000 for it.

Fundraising and planning around the Masonic Homes’ 2003 strategic plan centered on the growth of Masonic Outreach Services, which by then had established community partnerships for clients in need of assisted-living services and increased its staff of case managers statewide. The department briefly established

“Never did I think it possible that I would not be able, on my own, to provide shelter, food, medical, and daily needs for my wife and myself,” Theodore Berman wrote. “To say that we were in deep despair would be the understatement of the century. We were at our very end.… You enabled us to keep our dignity and self respect.”

Little did they—or anyone— know, an entirely new population was about to need the same support.

“It was a scary time,” says Montes, who in 2009 had just taken on the role of head of Masonic Outreach Services. “These are Masons around 45 to 55 years old, with kids in college, who’ve been a realtor or a broker their whole life. In some families, it was both the Mason and his wife who lost jobs. People were losing their homes because they couldn’t pay their mortgages.”

Around the same time, thanks to a grand master’s project that began as the Family Resource Center, the Masonic Homes’ intake hotline

Over three months, MOS held six Masonic resource fairs up and down California, from Redding to San Diego. They handed out applications and information on unemployment benefits, affordable utilities programs, housing programs, food stamps, and general relief. They also asked members what else they needed.

In October 2009, the fraternity introduced what’s now known as Masonic Family Outreach Services: financial and nonfinancial case management for members and their families under the age of 60. The board had just one caveat: Financial support for Masons under 60 was limited to one year or less.

“The board said, ‘You cannot let a Masonic family become homeless. You have to do everything in your power,’” Montes says. “We were tasked with this huge responsibility to quickly get people in action and moving forward.”

The entire outreach team consisted of half a dozen care

“Masonic

Outreach

saved my life.”

Masonic Outreach Services manager Quyhn Tran trains Masons in the lodge outreach program in February 2016.

managers. In addition to their senior clients, they began meeting with under-60 Masons to help problemsolve their way, in a year or less, out of what often seemed like impossible situations.

“It took the most creative planning imaginable,” Montes says. “We were telling people in their forties, ‘You’re going to need to reinvent yourself. Could you do retraining through the state of California? Could you get a license to drive a bus? Is there a trade you could get into in six to nine months in a field that’s hiring?’” If a Mason found a job in another state, MOS would help cover the costs of the move.

For Craig Wood, a 59-year-old member of Anaheim Lodge No. 207, MOS changed everything. In the span of a few years, he’d lost his job, his home, and then his health. The same day he called MOS, he was assigned a care manager who helped him apply for food stamps, petition and eventually win a Social Security disability claim, and connect with emotional support. Without all that, he said, he’d be homeless.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, “Masonic Outreach saved my life.”

The Lodge Outreach Program

2010s

As the economy clawed its way back, the need for support among Masons under 60 gradually declined. While the MFOS program would remain in place, the referral and case-management elements came to dominate the financialassistance arm. “We are finding that providing good guidance, support, encouragement, and referrals is sufficient for many Masons, who need just that level of help to navigate the sometimes-confusing system,” wrote David Doan, then president of the board, in 2012. But among the fraternity’s older population, the need for outreach services continued to grow. Housing and health care costs were persistently rising, while the value of the dollar was steadily dropping. By 2013, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve System, about a The entryway to the Masonic Homes’ Union City campus, headquarters of Masonic Outreach Services.

quarter of all people over 60 years old were struggling with “major financial stress.”

In other words, older Masons and their widows were hurting. Lodges for many years offered charitable programs to assist elderly members, often outside the auspices of Masonic Outreach Services. In San Diego, one member in particular had been working the phones. Joe Jackson, of Joseph L. Shell Daylight Lodge No. 837 and Heartland Lodge No. 576, was known for reaching out to members and widows on a weekly basis to check on their well-being. As the MOS program ramped up, Jackson became one of its biggest evangelists, often recommending that members he spoke to apply for services.

By 2011, he and fellow Masonic division leaders John Heisner (who would go on to be elected grand master in 2016–17) and Jim Kurupas had a growing appreciation for the power of MOS. Jackson and the group approached Montes with a question: Could MOS train them in the basics of social work?

“We said, ‘Yeah, sure—Joe acts like he works for us anyway,’” Montes recalls with a laugh.

In August 2012, after nearly a year of preparation, 13 Masons arrived at the Masonic Homes’ Covina campus for their first training session. They walked away with an armful of outreach resources, new relationships with neighboring lodges, and advice for every Mason interested in helping out. “By the end, we had a training binder essentially built by Masons for Masons,” Montes says. “We could offer it to lodges and say: If you want to do outreach, this is how you can do it more effectively.”

In 2014, MOS took that show on the road. Over the next six years, the department rolled out the newly minted Lodge Outreach Program at quarterly meetings in every part of the state. Along the way, MOS and local lodges partnered on several truly remarkable feats. In one such instance, they rescued an elderly Mason who had been living in his car for years. In San Luis Obispo, they helped a member pay rent and afford medication. They secured a stable living situation for a member in La Mesa who could no longer care for his ailing wife.

By 2020, the Lodge Outreach Program trainings had been rolled

Masons meet at Point Loma No. 620 in July 2014 as part of the Lodge Outreach Services training.

out to every part of California, wrapping up in the Central Valley. It’s now an ongoing initiative for lodges, a powerful source of member engagement, and, most important, a safety net for the fraternity’s most vulnerable members. The San Diego vision is a statewide reality. “We had to have Grand Lodge backing, we had to have services available, and then we had to have the lodges and the leadership promote it, teach it, instill it in the leaders,” Heisner says. “Now it’s here to stay.”

Jackson passed away in 2012. In honor of his commitment to serving the needs of his fellow members, the Grand Lodge created the Joe Jackson Award in 2014, given each year to the lodge that best exemplifies his spirit of outreach.

As the Lodge Outreach Program was unfolding throughout the state,

MOS was also growing in its ability to offer other crucial—and often lifesaving—programs. In 2017, to help members navigate the confusion of community-based services, it introduced the Masonic Value Network. The network was, in essence, a listing of local senior care services and providers that had been vetted by MOS staff. In 2018, the MVN grew to include a prescription-drug discount program.

Masonic Outreach also played a role in more acute crises. During the devastating Woolsey and Carr fires, MOS staff organized an allhands-on-deck task force to check on Masons and widows in the fire zones and offer support or connect them to local services. In three days, the task force made nearly 1,400 phone calls. As California’s megafires spark with increasing frequency, MOS has

become the fraternity’s primary point of contact for affected members.

In June 2019, with real estate prices soaring in California, MOS welcomed its first residents to a new program called Shared Housing. Located in two of the unused former children’s homes on the Covina campus of the Masonic Homes of California, the initiative provides affordable co-housing for up to 14 Masonic seniors age 62 and over who are able to live independently. John Parcher, then a 64-year-old artist and actor, was among the first cohort to move into the home, which offered a private bedroom and bathroom, plus a shared living room, dining area, kitchen, and outdoor space. “Those

Quynh Tran speaks at a lodge outreach services event in San Diego.

of us with modest means have few options,” he said. “But here’s a beautiful, affordable home that provides privacy and community.”

This marked a successful, energizing chapter in MOS history. Yes, there were new challenges, especially for the fraternity’s aging population. But with innovative programming and steady charitable support, MOS was rising to meet them.

Then the pandemic hit.

The Pandemic and the Future of MOS

2020–present

For the Masonic Homes of California, the COVID-19 pandemic was an epochal crisis. Senior homes were among the hardest-hit communities anywhere in the country, and the restrictions put in place to curb the spread made life on campus a grind for both residents and staff.

But it wasn’t just on campus that the pandemic upended things. Much like in 2009, during the Great Recession, the Masonic Outreach Services line was inundated with calls for help from members suddenly

out of work or unable to access care and services from shuttered state agencies. “This was worse, because nothing was open,” Montes says. “People needed money yesterday.”

That was in March 2020, months before unemployment benefits and other government relief kicked in. The Grand Lodge of California, the California Masonic Foundation, and the Masonic Homes together made a swift decision. A new crisis fund would provide one-time financial assistance for any lodge member or their spouse. Even Masons from other states who were living in California would be eligible. The name of the effort, echoing the language of the obligation Masons take in their second degree, was the Distressed Worthy Brother Relief Fund. No sooner had the plan come together than the phone started ringing. Within 48 hours of the first email blast announcing the creation of the fund and calling for donations to it, MOS had feverishly pulled together a program to access

Danilo Manalansan (left) and John Parcher enjoy a cup of coffee and a laugh at the Shared Housing residence in Covina.

and distribute financial support.

By mid-May, it had fulfilled about 100 formal requests for financial assistance and fielded countless calls, offering information and referrals. It connected jobless Masons with companies that were hiring, helped families access state and federal aid, and informed them about protections and community support. Throughout 2020, MOS served an additional 100 people each month with financial support and case management.

Todd Tei, a Burbank Mason with a 6-year-old daughter, was one of them. When the pandemic struck, his events business went under. A few months later, the replacement job he’d miraculously secured vanished when that company, too, was forced to close. With Tei unable to pay rent, his landlord threatened eviction. From MOS, he received legal advice about his rights as a renter, help creating payment plans for his utilities and cell phone bills, and financial assistance from the fund that helped get him back on his feet.

“This crazy situation has shown me that these brothers are truly like the family I never had,” Tei said.

“The Distressed Worthy Brother Relief Fund really gets to the heart of what it means to be a Mason,” said Doug Ismail, vice president of the California Masonic Foundation, which raised more than half a million dollars in the first six months of the campaign. “During a time of uncertainty, brothers find that they can count on each other.”

During one of the most chaotic, challenging, and frightening times in memory, Masons were able to live up to their highest ideals of caring for the people around them. And they did it through Masonic Outreach Services.

Far from simply supplementing the “meager pensions or incomes” of seniors as they awaited entry into the Masonic Homes, as Henville had written in 1990, MOS has grown into the main apparatus by which the organization delivers relief to its statewide membership.

Looking forward, MOS will

continue to provide for members and their families during moments of crisis and everyday struggles, for every age and stage of life. Along the path of Masonic relief, it has become a crucial channel, flowing outward to meet fraternal family where they are—figuratively and literally. “MOS has no boundaries,” Montes says. “We go wherever we need to go.” One care manager described it as a magic wand they get to wave over members’ and families’ lives. “People are amazed when they finally call and learn what MOS can do for them. We’re here for all of life’s challenges,” they said.

For MHC president Gary Charland, Masonic Outreach Services is the distillation of what the Masonic Homes is all about. “When we make that commitment to take care of each other, they’re not just empty words,” he says. “Through MOS, we do it. We absolutely do it.”

A stained-glass window inside Siminoff Temple, at the Masonic Homes in Union City, lists the Masonic cardinal virtues.

Workers sift through the rubble of the destroyed DC-6 aircraft.

MILESTONES

A Dark Day in the East Bay Hills

When United Flight 615 crashed just above the Masonic Homes, it was the worst air disaster in state history.

It was a cool, cloudy early morning in the East Bay on August 24, 1951. Low clouds from the marine layer were interlaced in the hills above Union City. At 4:28 a.m., a booming crash was heard just behind the Masonic Homes of California, waking up area residents as far away as Hayward. One witness recalled that it sounded like thunder coming from the hills.

As residents stumbled outside to see what was happening, a second explosion was heard, and the amber glow of a grass fire could be seen along the ridge. It marked the crash site of United Flight 615. All 44 passengers, including two infants, along with six crew perished. “It’s terrible. I’m almost sick from the sight of it,” Chief Roland Bender of the Decoto Fire Department said at the time. “No one could have lived.… There is nothing left of that plane but a few pieces of jumbled metal.”

The crash, which occurred just over a mile from the campus, is little more than a footnote in the history of the fraternity—it wasn’t even mentioned in the Proceedings of the Grand Lodge for 1951. But at the time, the event rocked the Tri-City area to its core and represented the worst air disaster in California history. (In 2023, it remains the fifth worst.) Wreckage from the crash was found more than half a mile from where the DC-6 plowed into the eastern side of Tolman Peak before cartwheeling over the top of the hill and into the canyon below. The fuel tanks exploded on impact. The cause of the crash was confusion involving the plane’s instrument landing system. As the plane approached the Oakland airport, just 14 miles away, the pilot’s radio was tuned to a beacon in the nearby town of Newark; meanwhile, the first officer’s was tuned to the Hayward beacon. As a result, the plane had veered three miles off course. Rather than descending into Oakland from above the flats next to the bay, it did so over the East Bay hills, still partially obscured by cloud cover. The aftermath of the crash was a scene of chaos and agony, with first responders struggling to reach the remote site. According to a history prepared by Timothy Swenson of the Washington Township Museum of Local History:

Horses were used to move the bodies from the ravine, down the creek and to a number of jeeps waiting at the end of the bulldozed road. The jeeps carried the bodies to a farm

house, where they were loaded into hearses and taken to the auditorium of Decoto Elementary School… One of the deputies said this about the crash site, ‘The best way to describe it was like you had thrown a ripe fruit against a Hayward Daily newspaper, had just come back from Korea. He described the scene this way: ‘...In my whole time in Korea, I

Today, there’s little left to commemorate the disaster. The local history museum held a 50th-anniversary exhibition dedicated to the event, but by and large, its memory has evaporated like the early-morning mist.

However, even to this day, intrepid hikers who make the five-mile trek along the Tolman Peak Trail to the crash site often find scraps of metal debris lying innocuously among the tall, gently waving grass.

LEADING THE FIELD

CHAPTER FOUR: MEMORY CARE AT THE MASONIC HOMES

“The piano had always been there. But having that time to focus, and having that chance to hear a particular song, somebody inside her woke up.”

Forget Me Not

Inside the Masonic Homes’s innovative approach to memory care.

Betsy rarely spoke anymore.

When she arrived as a resident at the Masonic Homes of California’s Union City campus, she required help with many of the basic activities of daily living. Most of the time, she couldn’t recall the simplest details of her life, which had been long and rich.

But one afternoon, listening to classical music in the parlor with her memory care group, she rose from her seat, walked to the piano, and began to perform.

“Nobody knew she could play,” recalls Christina Drislane, the campus’s director of memory care.

To an outsider, a moment like this seems like a miracle. But to the memory care staff at the Masonic Homes, it’s the result of an approach that has been decades in the making. Today, dementia is often talked about as an epidemic. Every 65 seconds, someone in the U.S. develops Alzheimer’s or another memory-loss condition. It’s estimated that one in three seniors dies with some form of the disease.

Back in 1981, when golden age movie star Rita Hayworth was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she became a public face for memory loss. The world had little awareness of such diseases, and even less of an idea of how they were treated. That changed quickly: By 1994, Left: A resident of the Masonic Homes shows off her watercolors, part of the Compass Club memory care program. Previous: The interior of the new Pavilion at the Masonic Homes, which specializes in memory care services.

when former U.S. president Ronald Reagan shared that he, too, had been diagnosed, Alzheimer’s and dementia had become household terms. Researchers began exploring special support for memory care, like living environments that prevented residents from wandering away.

At the Masonic Homes, the challenges of memory care have been well-known for some time. In 1990, the Union City campus completed construction on a secure, dedicated dementia unit within its newly built skilled-nursing facility, known as the Lorber building. A little more than a decade later, it had increased staff training and developed an entirely new memory care program, called Traditions, to serve as many as 16 residents in the assisted-living ward.

At a time when there were still more questions than answers surrounding memory care, Traditions got a lot right through sheer compassion. Its success wasn’t just about providing a dedicated space for residents with severe dementia. It was about surrounding

“The Masonic Homes is extremely forward-thinking about these interventions.”

them with a supportive network. As part of their mission, Traditions staff “let residents know they’re there for them,” explains director Jeanette Jones. They focused on promoting social interactions and staving off the isolation that often accompanies and exacerbates memory-loss conditions. Staffers fondly referred to their work as the “best friends approach” to Alzheimer’s care.

Early results were encouraging, but it was only the start. By the midaughts, the Masonic Homes was looking for new ways to nudge the field of memory care forward. That included saying yes to researchers like Nidhi Mahendra and her team from Cal State East Bay, who approached the Masonic Homes with an unusual idea. At the time, most experts assumed that people with

dementia were at the mercy of an unrelenting disease. Mahendra’s team suspected otherwise. “Administrators at other places still treated us with some amount of suspicion and cynicism,” Mahendra said. “But the Masonic Homes is extremely forwardthinking about these interventions and the potential benefits for the residents.”

From 2007 to 2011, Mahendra and her team worked with 40 residents at the Union City campus, including several from the Traditions unit. They helped a former lounge singer regain the confidence to perform. They taught a resident who had been struggling with technology how to master the microwave. In other words, they proved that individuals with memory loss can regain lost skills and even acquire new ones.

Christina Drislane, the Masonic Homes director of memory care, speaks with a resident in Union City.

It signaled a new era in memory care. Diagnosis was no longer the end of the story.

Emerging as a Leader 2010s–present

Thanks to clinical researchers like Mahendra, by the end of the decade the world had a new understanding of memory care. In the right kind of environment, supported by expert caregivers, a person with dementia could continue to enjoy a substantial quality of life.

It was hopeful news. But for care communities, it was also complicated. Keeping up with new discoveries meant rethinking everything, from facilities design to program execution. Not everyone was ready for that kind of transformation.

But the Masonic Homes was. And in 2011, it laid out a strategic objective to develop state-of-the-art memory care protocols.

“The Masonic Homes is committed to be a leader in this field,” wrote Past Grand Master David R. Doan, then president of the Masonic Homes board of trustees, in 2012.

“We are looking at new ideas on how to slow down the loss of memory, how to keep a person with memory issues with their family and in their home longer, and how to help them maintain their dignity and quality of life despite their condition.”

By 2013, both campuses offered access to brain-boosting computer programs in collaboration with experts like T.J. McCullen, a psychological sciences researcher at Case Western Reserve University. With the help of a memory care design professional, the Union City campus totally reengineered the Traditions unit in 2014, knocking down walls, redesigning visual cues, and turning the former dining area into a gathering space. Outside the first-floor Grider gym and physical therapy area, staff transformed an abandoned juice bar into the Blue Zone Café, a hub for social activities

Opposite: Masonic Homes resident Woody Hibbs and volunteer John O’Hara work in the communal garden. Top right: A resident apartment inside the Pavilion, the newly built memory care building in Union City. Bottom right: Residents lounge in a common area in the new health center in Covina.

that offered a menu focused on foods associated with brain health.

All these changes were leading to an even bigger one. Rather than wait for someone to come up with a cutting-edge memory care program, the Masonic Homes decided to create its own. It was ready, as Doan had promised, to be a leader in the field.

In 2015, the organization turned to Joseph Pritchard, now the Masonic Homes’ chief operating officer, who at the time had just been appointed director of memory care. Pritchard and his team immersed themselves in the available research.

“We updated our activities. We brought in better training for staff. And more importantly, we expanded our focus: What happens before you develop dementia?” Pritchard recalls.

By the end of the year, the Union City campus had launched a brand-new memory care program, called Stepping Stones, designed to diagnose memory loss and create interventions for residents

throughout the campus, not just those in the Traditions program. Stepping Stones was a progressive, campuswide model that aimed to support residents during four distinct stages of brain health.

The first step of the program is designed for residents still in their cognitive prime. The approach is proactive: Residents have access to computer programs in a Brain Fitness Gym; the healthy food and social outlet of the Blue Zone Café; and a slew of activities designed to enhance memory and cognitive health, from art to music to gardening.

The second step is for residents who are still physically independent but beginning to experience early symptoms of memory loss. To support residents at this crucial stage, Pritchard and his team created something no one else had thought of: a day program they named the Compass Club. For a few hours daily, participants are guided through carefully designed activities with the help of highly trained staff.

The program has several innovative features, such as its mobile format, which utilizes various areas around the campus, making the most of space restrictions and keeping participants connected to the wider community. It is therefore able to meet each resident’s challenges and strengths, with staff ready at every turn to emphasize activities that spark joy.

“It’s really important to be flexible with a program like this. You’re adapting to the individual journey that each person goes through with memory loss,” Drislane says. “We’ve learned that there are constructive ways to do that.”

As dementia reaches more advanced stages, individuals benefit from being in a single familiar space.

Phase three of Stepping Stones calls for moving residents into the Traditions assisted-living unit, which was redesigned in 2014 according to a “neighborhood” model—a best practice for adults struggling with memory loss. The fourth and final

The newly opened health center in Covina features a dedicated memory care floor, as well as assisted-living services.

phase provides memory care in a skilled-nursing setting, for the most severe stages of dementia.

Even at these final stages of memory loss, residents’ days are organized around the routines and activities that mean the most to them. That can be different things for different people. For instance, staff might make sure that a resident never parts with a beloved doll. For another resident, there might be repeat viewings of a favorite World War II–era film. Caregivers know which songs help resident rest and which help them engage.

“We want to find moments of connection each day,” Drislane says. “If there’s a point in the day when a resident smiles, we have given them back something that may not have happened in quite a while. There is no point in memory loss when that is unattainable. You just need to create opportunities for it.”

That approach has won the Masonic Homes recognition. In 2016, Pritchard presented on Compass Club at the LeadingAge California conference, and two other communities soon created their own versions of it. Two years later, the

conference invited him to present on the Stepping Stones program’s fourstep approach.

As Pritchard shared with those audiences, the Masonic Homes model is making a difference. Usually, once a person is diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, they progress from early to moderate stages within a year or two. Since launching Stepping Stones, the Masonic Homes has been able to extend that timeline to as many as four years.

“By investing money and staff, the fraternity has changed the lives of residents here,” Pritchard says.

Memory Care for the Community

2020–present

The Masonic Homes has continued to double down on its promise to be a leader in memory care. In recent years, that has included creating a lot more capacity for a need that continues to grow.

Renovations in Union City have more than quadrupled the campus’s capacity for full-time memory care. As of 2021, the fifth floor of

the Wollenberg building is now a dedicated memory care community, while the third and fourth floors offer memory and assisted-living care as needed.

In late 2021, the Pavilion at the Masonic Homes opened in Union City—a brand-new, two-story facility offering memory care and assistedliving services to California Masons and their family members, residents of the Acacia Creek Retirement Community, and, for the first time, the general public.

The Pavilion embodies the best of everything the Masonic Homes has learned in the field of memory conditions. It incorporates three levels of care and offers a range of supportive programs like aquatic and horticultural therapy. It even features a sensory garden filled with flowers and plants selected to stimulate the senses, an important treatment for cognitive decline.

Clockwise from top left: Masonic Homes chief operating officer Joseph Prichard is among the volunteers at the annual East Bay Alzheimer’s Walk; staff lead residents in a drum circle as part of the Compass Club memory care program; the Masonic Homes team holds yellow flowers during the Alzheimer’s Walk; a resident smiles during a memory care music class.

From the moment the Pavilion opened its doors, it proved essential not just for an aging fraternal family, but for their loved ones, friends, and neighbors in the community, too. Three Acacia Creek residents were among the first cohort to move in. One had been struggling with cognitive issues for the past year. Rather than move her away from the campus community she loved, her family had been draining their savings to bring in 24/7 care.

“When the Pavilion opened, it was the light at the end of the tunnel,” Pritchard says.

In Covina, there is a similar light on the horizon. Previously, residents needing skilled nursing or specialized memory care had to move off campus to get it. By the end of 2023, a brand-new, state-ofthe-art skilled-nursing building will open in Covina, with 16 apartments dedicated to memory care. Meaning that at last, residents in need of those services they can remain where they’ve built their lives, beside the people they love.

It’s something Masonic Homes leaders have been working toward for a long time. When president and CEO Gary Charland first saw the renderings for the building, he was nearly moved to tears.

“I thought, Wow. This is what we need to provide for our fraternity,” he says. “Not only did we create programs that have gained national attention, but we are building amazing structures to hold them. I would put our programs and facilities up against any in the country.”

It’s the culmination of efforts that began decades ago, and a vision that hasn’t wavered since. As an aging population navigates the difficult journey of dementia, the Masonic Homes has promised to walk beside them—and lead the way forward.

“We’re ahead of the curve,” Pritchard says. “This is where everyone should be.”

Left: The Pavilion at the Masonic Homes in Union City. Right: The entrance to the new health center in Covina.

MILESTONES

The Wandering Statue

How a memorial to the Stanford family ended up in a Masonic Homes cemetery.

First it was a monument to a death in of one of California’s most prominent families. Then, for years, a testament to the state’s Masonic fraternity. Today the marble statue of a bowed angel that’s visible from Mission Boulevard in Hayward is a universal symbol of grief and empathy, relatable to anyone dealing with sorrow or loss. The statue, which marks the Masonic plot within the Chapel of the Chimes Cemetery, has certainly seen a lot of California history. In its first iteration, it was commissioned by none other than Jane Stanford, who along with her husband, Leland Stanford, the former governor and railroad kingpin, cofounded Stanford University. The statue was meant to commemorate Jane Stanford’s brother Henry, who died in 1901. Made by a well-known Italian artist named Antonio Bernieri, it was a replica of one made by the American William Wetmore Story, then living in Rome, called The Angel of Grief Weeping Over the Dismantled Altar of Life.

The statue, which depicts an angel slumped in despair, was placed in the central arboretum of Stanford University. However, the 1906 earthquake greatly damaged the seven-ton Carrara-marble artwork and its cupola. In 1908, another of Stanford’s brothers, Charles Lathrop, arranged to have a replacement made. That replacement remains at Stanford, having been restored in 1996.

As for what happened to the original in the aftermath of the earthquake, that remains a mystery. But in 1920, the Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of California noted, “Through the generosity of Brother Max Hornlein, the beautiful statue of ‘Grief,’ formerly resting in the grounds of Stanford University, now occupies the center of the Home cemetery, as a memorial to our departed.” The Masonic Homes cemetery, less than a mile north of the campus up Mission Boulevard in Hayward, has since been incorporated into the Chapel of the Chimes funeral home.

It’s not known how Hornlein came to donate the statue. A successful turn-of-the-century businessman in Sacramento, Hornlein was born in Milwaukee in 1859 and moved to California with his parents a decade later. Together with his twin brother, Hugo, he began working at the Central House Hotel on K Street in Sacramento as a teenager, and in 1888 purchased the hotel and bar. The brothers also owned land in Fresno, Tulare, and Lassen counties, and Max Hornlein later became a member of the Sacramento County Republican Central Committee. In 1884, he married Jennie Pulaski.

By 1890, Hornlein was listed as a member of Sacramento Lodge No. 40, as was Hugo. Both were also members of the Knights of Pythias. Max Hornlein died in 1926, though his gift to the fraternity lives on for future generations to observe and contemplate.

A statue of a weeping angel adorns the old Masonic plot at Chapel of the Chimes Cemetery in Hayward.

Residents gather in a communal lounge inside the Masonic Homes in Covina.

A

TRANSFORMATIVE GAMBIT

The Welcome Party

At Acacia Creek, the Masonic Homes’ senior care expertise is on tap for the masses.

Marty Crowningshield looked out at the crowd filling up the fifth-floor lobby of the Acacia Creek retirement community. It was 2019, and the space had been transformed into a makeshift stage for the debut performance of The Case of the Motorcoach Murders, the secondever production put on by Acacia Creek’s resident drama club. Crowningshield was playing the lead. The script had been proposed and adapted by the club’s late founder, resident Earl Graves.

In the audience, successful-aging coach Penny Vittoria cheered them on. The production might not have been quite ready for Broadway, but for the staff and residents at Acacia Creek, the sister organization of the Masonic Homes of California that opened in 2010, it served an important purpose—and illustrated precisely what the community adds to the life of the campus it shares with the Masonic Homes. “Residents are using the skills, abilities, and expertise that they bring to Acacia Creek,” Vittoria says. “We have people who have a passion and we want them to share that with us— to develop into their leadership and help facilitate new programs.”

For the leaders of Acacia Creek and the Masonic Homes, there’s real science behind this, since adults who remain empowered, challenged, and well-rounded as they age experience better health outcomes.

Left: Roger Baird pulls a pint at Acacia Creek’s resident-run bar, the Turkey Roost. Previous: An overhead view of Acacia Creek in Union City.

At Acacia Creek, a not-forprofit continuing-care retirement community open to both Masons and the general public, that research has been transformed into an entire lifestyle philosophy. Beyond the theater group, the community boasts more than 30 clubs, almost all of them created and led by residents, while resident councils keep the campus humming. There are Bay Area outings and volunteer opportunities, top-notch exercise amenities to stay physically fit, and programs for everything from cognitive and spiritual health to social life.

For older adults who want life’s adventures to continue as they age, this is the place to do it. But for both Acacia Creek and the Masonic Homes, just getting here has been an adventure in its own right.

A Novel Idea 2000s

By the turn of the 21st century, the Masonic Homes of California was doing well financially. The wait list was longer than ever. And the board of trustees was eager to innovate.

“We were starting to bulge out the sides with folks that wanted to come in,” says Past Grand Master Ken Nagel, who was among the trustees at the time. He and a handful of others convened what they dubbed the Out-of-the-Box-Thinking Committee.

Early renderings for Acacia Creek locations in Covina and Union City. The Covina plan was ultimately scrapped; the Union City location opened in 2010.

“There were no bad ideas,” Nagel says.

“We said, ‘Let’s throw everything out there that we can possibly think of and see what sticks.’”

One idea originated from Nagel’s home lodge. Decades earlier, an outside company had arranged to

build a retirement center on the property of Liberty No. 299 in Santa Clara. In addition to benefiting the local community, the move tidily secured the lodge’s financial future. The Masonic Homes committee batted around its own version of the idea. “We said, beyond the charitable side of the Masonic Homes, wouldn’t it be nice to create a choice retirement community for our members, on our own property?” Nagel remembers. “A place where members, if they made a decision to move into a retirement complex, could spend their money with us, rather than going to an outside community?”

In his vision, the Masonic Homes would continue to provide the senior care it always had—and continue to serve those with limited means through an assignment-of-assets contract. The newly proposed community would, as a point of differentiation, offer a market-rate Masonic alternative.

Members backed up the committee’s instincts. At the 2005 Annual Communication, the board held sessions to gauge interest in new, upscale Masonic senior living communities. “Our surveys and focus

groups told us that the fraternity was interested,” reported then–board president Allen B. Gresham.

The Acacia Creek retirement community, located on the south side of the Masonic Homes in Union City, opened in 2010. The two organizations share many of the campuses’ amenities.

Soon, it was full steam ahead: The Masonic Homes formed two new corporations, Acacia Creek at Covina and Acacia Creek at Union City, to develop plans for new continuingcare retirement communities on each of the Masonic Homes’ existing campuses. They would largely share amenities but exist as market-rate alternatives, without the charitable underwriting of the Masonic Homes. They brought in developers and architects. In fall 2007, they held a groundbreaking ceremony at the Union City site. They made plans to start turning dirt.

Unfortunately, no one could have planned for what happened next.

Reenvisioning the Community 2008–2015

In 2008, the financial crisis descended over the nation. As people watched their retirement funds dip with the stock market, some delayed plans to retire. Others who had planned

on using their home as collateral for entry into a retirement community found that housing prices had collapsed and suddenly lacked the necessary funds. Needless to say, it was not a great time to build and market a luxury retirement community. “We could not have started the Acacia Creek project at a worse point in history even if we tried,” Nagel says.

In light of the staggering financial challenges, the plans for Acacia Creek at Covina were scrapped. But in Union City, crews had already begun construction. The community would be built, one way or another. Problem was, it was now hard to find enough California Masons to fill it. The trustees saw only one path forward: open Acacia Creek to nonMasons. It would be the first Masonic Homes of California service to open to the public.

“It was a huge decision,” says Nagel. “And as it turns out, it was a very good decision.”

On March 1, 2010, Acacia Creek opened its doors. Seven residents moved in that first day, part of a group that came to be known as “the founders.” Like pioneers setting out

west, they were not only putting down their own roots, but they were shaping the community for everyone who followed. They formed leadership councils, helped write the dining and events calendars, and applied for a permit to operate the Turkey Roost, a resident-run bar.

“We are creating an environment. It changes and it’s dynamic,” said Richard Thompson, who served as the first president of the Acacia Creek resident council, upon its opening. “Many of us have been in the industry, manned a department, or had our own business. We want to have a say in what’s happening.”

But, as pioneering often goes, there were bumps in the road. The housing market had not yet rebounded. In its first year, applications for Acacia Creek were a trickle rather than a flow. “It was like a ghost town,” says Nagel, who presided over the community’s opening ceremonies as grand master. “I have this visual in my mind of the empty, enormous

2010.

Ground was broken on Acacia Creek in 2007; the doors opened March 1,

dining room, thinking, ‘What have we built here? Were we right in doing this?’”

The week of the ribbon cutting, Nagel found one of the new residents roaming the hall. “This place is so big, and there are so few people, I’m lost. I don’t know how to get back to civilization,” he said. Nagel pointed him in the right direction.

The community was luxuriously equipped and poised to become a champion of successful aging. But by 2011, for all its merits, it was at roughly a quarter capacity. At that point, the board of directors brought in a new executive vice president. Chuck Major had built his career turning around troubled properties. In that moment, Acacia Creek certainly fit the bill. “I prayed to the Lord, Give me one more success,” Major recalls. “Let me get this community full.”

Of the Residents, by the Residents 2015–present

Major’s prayers were answered. By the end of 2012, Acacia Creek had welcomed its 100th resident. In early 2015, it hit full capacity. Until the pandemic, it remained above 90 percent occupancy—and become an example of what aging can look like at its very best.

More than the stunning bay views and spacious apartments, new residents are drawn to the campus by its culture.

Where the Masonic Homes rests on 125 years of history and tradition, Acacia Creek’s leaders and early residents had to forge their own identity. Today, Acacia Creek is certified as a Center for Successful Aging,

“Residents call us a cruise ship on land.”

a designation bestowed on select senior communities that have committed themselves to industry-leading programming and operations.

(Acacia Creek is one of just 12 such communities nationwide, and the only one in California.) That certification draws on groundbreaking research by the MacArthur Foundation that suggesting that as much as 70 percent of the physiological effects of aging are determined by lifestyle choices rather than genetics. The idea, then, is to foster a highly engaged lifestyle where residents continue to grow and learn as they age. From its residentled clubs and activities to its staff of successful aging coaches, everything at Acacia Creek is designed to maximize independence, growth, and personal fulfillment. Hence, The Case of the Motorcoach Murders. The approach works. Since the community opened its doors, residents at Acacia Creek have enjoyed better health, nutrition, and rates of physical activity than those at retirement facilities elsewhere in the country, and many of those still living at home. In 2019, almost 94 percent said they engaged in

Acacia Creek’s Doris Chow leads a tai chi class for a group of fellow residents.

intellectual pursuits each week. A whopping 74.3 percent volunteered at least once a month—three times the national average. The list goes on. “Residents call us a cruise ship on land,” Major says. “There’s so much going on. They tell us what they want, and we help them make it happen. We promote their independence. We promote their physical, mental, social, and spiritual well-being.”

Those aren’t empty boasts. Besides embracing these best practices, Acacia Creek fastidiously measures their outcomes. In fact, the Successful Aging certification it has received requires intensive documentation of residents’ overall health and well-being.

“Quite frankly, we have been so successful and engaged with these principles that we’re used as an example and model for other communities out there,” Major says. The fraternity’s vision for a vibrant sister retirement community, where residents can thrive in mind, body, and spirit, has become a reality—and then some.

Epilogue: Beyond the Fraternity

Back during the throes of the Great Recession, when the fraternity chose to open Acacia Creek to the general public, it was an admittedly fraught, financially driven decision. “It was a big brouhaha at the time,” Major says. “But you know what? It’s a big piece of the Acacia Creek success story.”

Today, the resident roster is roughly half-and-half, dispersed evenly between Masons and the general public. Beyond the financial boon, that has reinforced the fact that some of Masonry’s best work happens in mixed company. “When we decided to invite non-Masons to live in the community, one of our concerns was the fear of ‘them’ and ‘us,’ creating two different hierarchies,” Nagel says. “That could not have been further from what actually happened. They’ve blended together, and it’s a fantastic relationship.”

Sometimes it has even added to the fraternity’s ranks. So far, 13 Acacia Creek residents have joined

Masonry, as have several staff members, including Major.

In 2015, Don Keysor was one of them. “When we got here, I told myself: We live here in a Masonic place—we ought to learn something about it,” he said then. Within months, he had submitted his application. Another resident, Gene Gire, had lived and taught in Union City his whole life, but had never visited the Masonic Homes or, to his knowledge, known a Mason. Then he moved into Acacia Creek and decided to become one. “They were people I wanted to hang around with and they have the same values that I have, so why not?”

Of course, many non-Masons remain just that. But by virtue of living in a community founded on the fraternity’s core values, they tend to develop an admiration for Freemasonry and for all it has built, including Acacia Creek.

As Major puts it, “The folks who come in here get a taste of the fraternity. They talk to the guys and hear the stories and find out the good the organization does. And that resonates.”

Acacia Creek fosters an active social life— and an active life, period. Clockwise from top left: Acacia Creek residents Joseph Elleard, Harvey McAninch, and John Mason, members of the on-campus Masonic lodge; Doris Wong plays shuffleboard; fellow resident Leonard Smith tries his hand at horseshoes.

Amid the Glory of Nature

The Masonic Homes’ outdoor degree site is a labor of love— and a tribute to fellowship.

Every structure has a creation story—a tale of the hands that built it and the forces that compelled them to. In Masonry, the most famous is Solomon’s Temple. More than 150,000 Masons worked for seven years building a monument to the glory of God.

The members of Siminoff Daylight Lodge No. 850 know something about that. So do those of Pleasanton Lodge No. 321, Mosaic Lodge No. 218, Alameda Lodge No. 167, and Acacia Lodge No. 243. Starting in 2010, those groups came together to build a new place to practice Masonry in California. In a picturesque canyon tucked behind the Masonic Homes in Union City, they cleared and graded land. They dug ditches. They hauled dirt. They laid pipe and poured concrete. For almost three years, more than 40 men—some skilled in construction, some who’d never come closer than the symbolic tools of the lodge—leveled and plumbed, measured and squared. And they sweated.

“We didn’t contract anything out,” boasted the late Jack McClellan, then a resident of the Masonic Homes and a retired general contractor. “We did it all ourselves.” In 2010, McClellan was serving as master of the on-campus Siminoff Lodge and led his fellow members in advocating for an outdoor site. When they got the go-ahead, he became the site’s de facto Hiram Abiff (the architect of Solomon’s Temple), drawing up the plans and supervising the work.

Today, lodges throughout the state travel to the site on weekends to perform degree ceremonies. They do their work protected on three sides by hills and on the fourth by a cluster of young redwoods.

Before the site was built, this corner of the campus was enjoyed exclusively by the cows that wandered over from the grazing fields to the east. Now visitors are shuttled in carts down a fire road winding steeply past a line of redwood trees; approaching the site, they enter a space marked by their dappled shade. These 30 or so saplings will eventually soar up to 80 feet, completing a cathedral in the open air.

The site has a dirt floor, in keeping with the tradition of outdoor degrees. It also has a meticulous border of curbs and gutters, so runoff from the hills won’t compromise footing. It’s furnished with permanent pedestals, as well

as a concrete altar and lecterns poured by Masonic inspector Charles Jeronimo, a brickmason by trade. Several other Masonic Homes residents contributed, as well: Dick Sullivan, an electrician, installed an irrigation system; Byron Corley, a former sailmaker, made a canvas canopy, sewn on the machine he brought with him when he moved into Acacia Creek. William Fretz crafted the leaded stained-glass panels that adorn each officer station.

“I can’t emphasize enough what a team effort this was,” McClellan said upon its completion. “A lot of skill went into it, and a lot of hard labor and fellowship.”

Opposite, left: Masons Dick Sullivan, John Martinez, and Ken Hamm (from left) salute the flag at the Masonic Homes’ outdoor degree site. Right: Hamm and the late Jack McClellan place a stained-glass image of the sun rising in the east above the master’s seat.

Getting Their Wings

The late Jack Wright flew with the Blue Angels. Dick Sullivan piloted a B-52 in the Air Force. Both, however, admitted that in many ways, flying their model aircraft at the Masonic Homes’ on-campus airfield was even more difficult. “When you’re landing, the model plane comes straight at you—it's not like sitting in an aircraft,” the late Jack McClellan said in 2018.

All three men were part of the Masonic Homes’ Flying Club, a group of approximately one dozen members of the Masonic Homes and Acacia Creek who transformed a barren stretch of hillside behind the Union City campus into a 100-foot-long asphalt runway. Members typically fly their own craft, but the club has two model planes it loans to novices, as well as a flight simulator.

“I got a real sense of accomplishment,” McClellan said. ”It's not easy to take off and land perfectly every time. The first time I flew, it was kind of scary—I even had shaky knees. But I kept trying. It’s really fun.”

CHAPTER SIX: COMMUNITY RELATIONS

OPENING THE GATES

Looking Out, Looking In

A fraternal institution opens its doors—slowly.

It’s a sunny fall morning, and Helen Kennedy is watching a parade of wagging tails and goofy costumes wend its way up the hillside to the Masonic Homes in Union City. The annual Mutt Strut is run by her nonprofit, the New Haven Schools Foundation, to benefit local educational programs. It’s a favorite of the district’s kids and families— and, of course, their dogs. The residents of the Masonic Homes and Acacia Creek love it too, lining the route to cheer on their two- and fourlegged neighbors.

That’s a far cry from what the scene was like when Kennedy was growing up in Union City. As a teen in the 1970s, she volunteered with seniors at the Masonic Homes as a candy striper. Then, she regarded the imposing brick edifice with equal parts awe and trepidation. Everyone knew of the Masonic Homes, towering as it did over the town. But most had no personal connection with the place. Some of her friends were even kind of spooked by it. That’s all different now, she says. In her decade with the school district foundation, Kennedy says, the retirement community’s local image has taken a 180-degree turn. “I’ve seen this fundamental change in the Masonic Homes’ approach,” she says. “Now they’re an integral part of the community.”

Left: A scenic overlook provides views of Union City and, beyond it, the San Francisco Bay. Previous: The front entrance of the new Pavilion at the Masonic Homes— now open to the general public.

An Unplanned Experiment 2000–2014

For modern California Masons, community relations are front and center. Indeed, Masons and lodges are typically known for their zeal for civic engagement.

In contrast, throughout its first 100-some years, the Masonic Homes of California mostly kept to itself. This was largely a reflection of the times. Members of the Greatest Generation joined the fraternity in droves in the ’40s and ’50s, and as they aged, it became a tall task just keeping up with demand for senior housing. The Masonic Homes could, and did, focus its services on members only. With the exception of some scholarships and a few volunteer opportunities for people like Kennedy, it didn’t mingle much with the community around it.

Then, in 2008, the recession arrived. The financial collapse came just in time to upend the fraternity’s original designs for Acacia Creek, the planned market-rate Masonic senior community that had barely begun construction. The only way

to keep the project financially viable was to welcome applications from outside the fraternity. For the first time in California, Masons would share a Masonic-owned retirement community with non-Masons.

When Acacia Creek opened on the Union City campus in 2010, members watched with interest—and many with skepticism—to see how the experiment would go. Whether or not they were ready for it, the gates would be thrown open.

Fraternally, and financially, it was a roaring success. On campus, residents enjoyed their new neighbors regardless of their Masonic bona fides. Some nonmembers wound up joining the fraternity. Even those who didn’t often became de facto ambassadors, reporting back to curious family members what they were learning by sheer proximity.

Fred Sorsabal, a past grand master whose leadership shaped the Masonic Homes in crucial ways, remembers seeing it all play out. “It helped with the public perception of the fraternity,” he says. “Folks who are at Acacia Creek can see what the Masonic mission is. Instead of

Two- and fourlegged members of the community participate in the annual Mutt Strut— one of several public events held at the Masonic Homes each year.

sitting on the outside, they can see what we do.”

Of course, beyond Acacia Creek, the vast majority of people in town were still on the outside. Many still didn’t know what to think of the Masonic Homes. That, too, was about to change.

A Shift in Perspective

2014

For much of 2014, the Masonic Homes was at the center of a roiling debate in the East Bay.

Feeling the pressure to create more capacity to serve seniors— and particularly those in need of advanced levels of care, like dealing with memory loss and the need for skilled nursing—leaders of the Masonic Homes proposed an ambitious plan to develop a 63-acre parcel along Mission Boulevard, a green space known as the flatlands. Years earlier, however, the town’s

The flatlands below the Masonic Homes— once the site of a proposed development.

voters had passed the Hillside Area Plan, intended to spare Union City’s iconic rolling hills from housing and office development. That plan included the land on which the Masonic Homes campus sits— including the flatlands.

That meant that building there would require a public vote to rezone the parcel and to amend the hillside plan. The organization believed its proposal aligned with the measure, as it included only low-rise construction; it also enhanced the plan with several community amenities. In addition to the new health care facilities, it proposed construction of a new public park, trails, a small vineyard, and a community garden, in addition to some low-density housing and space for limited small-scale retail, like a coffee shop.

But when they asked their neighbors for permission to build, it did not go well. One opponent of the measure wrote a letter to the local newspaper warning, “All [the Masonic Homes] want to do is get the land out of protection and then sell it to developers.” Another worried,

“It wants to unprotect this land and build a strip mall.”

Gary Charland, who’d been appointed as the Masonic Homes’ president and CEO just months earlier, tried to reassure his neighbors what the organization stood for. “For us, this is a way to bring the community together in a way that benefits the city,” he insisted to reporters. “We have a 116year history of caring for seniors in this community.… We don’t want to do anything that’s inconsistent with our mission.”

Still, the damage was done. Measure KK lost by an almost 2-to-1 vote. For the Masonic Homes board of trustees, it was a wake-up call.

“When the Masonic Homes lost the vote for the flatlands, it pointed out the fact that nobody knew who we were. We hadn’t established a good community rapport. We hadn’t participated in community organizations,” Charland says. “If you want the community to respect you, you have a responsibility to be a good corporate citizen. The flatlands project really instilled

that need for the Masonic Homes to be visible in the community.”

At it turned out, the ballot-box defeat would ultimately lead to an entirely new way of thinking for the Masonic Homes.

Health Care, a New Way

2015–2022

The vote over the flatlands wasn’t the only issue confronting the board at the time. A need was emerging among residents for a new kind of service: a dedicated space to stay during the recovery phase after a surgery, stroke, or major illness. That sort of rehab requires a higher level of monitoring and care. In fact, the request dovetailed with what appeared to be a service gap in the wider community—something Charland had seen up close in his previous post as executive director of the Washington Township Medical Foundation.

Here it was, then: a reason and an opportunity for the Masonic Homes to open up.

Charland and the board jumped at the chance. The Masonic Homes’ new short-term rehabilitation clinic, named Transitions, opened in 2015 on the Union City campus. From day one, it maintained an uncommon commitment to comfort. Then and now, Transitions patients often compare their stay to a hotel experience, thanks to upscale amenities and an emphasis on physical and mental ease.

Between its services—everything from orthopedics to cardiology—and access to specialists like dietitians and physical therapists, it was unlike any other clinic in the area, and maybe the country. “We modeled Transitions for the future of the senior care industry,” then-administrator Franco Diamond said upon its opening.

Transitions was also a model for the future of the Masonic Homes. It was the first time the organization had offered services outside of the fraternity—to people of all ages from the tricity region and beyond.

If Transitions was a test, it passed with flying colors: It raised the bar for the entire short-stay care industry, earning U.S. News

& World Report recognition as one of the nation’s top rehabilitation centers. It also confirmed that the organization’s decision to open its doors was the right one.

Six years later, with the launch of the Pavilion at the Masonic Homes, that story had come full-circle. The Pavilion, located on the southern portion of campus, offers the critical memory care and high-acuity assisted living that had once been proposed for the flatlands development. And it’s available not only to California Masons and their family members, but to the general public as well.

Recently, Helen Kennedy of the New Haven Schools Foundation toured the Pavilion with her motherin-law. Recalling her old memories of the Masonic Homes of the 1970s, she was stunned at the transformation.

“It was a beautiful place,” Kennedy says. “Kind people. Beautiful views of nature. Activities. I thought, I would be comfortable having a member of our family here for care.” This sentiment

Staff members at the Masonic Homes in Union City gather at the nursing station, a hub of activity.

Left: Members of the Hayward bethel of Job’s Daughters adorn a Christmas tree during the yearly holiday party and tree-lighting ceremony at the Masonic Homes. Above: Masonic Homes of California CEO and president Gary Charland presents a scholarship as part of its Pathways program in 2018, given through the New Haven Schools Foundation.

is echoed by families throughout the area—Masons and otherwise—who need this specific type of care. Says Joseph Pritchard, the chief operating officer for the Masonic Homes, “For so many people in our community, the Pavilion is exactly what they need."

The Heart of a Healthy Community 2022–present

After more than a century of keeping its gates largely closed, the Masonic Homes has swung them open and invited its neighbors to get to know them better. Says Charland, “A decade ago, no one knew who we were. Now you mention the Masonic Homes, and everybody knows us. We’ve truly integrated ourselves into the community.”

That includes the families who visit the campus for the annual HarvestFest and Mutt Strut, and the SummerFest in Covina. It includes elected representatives who come up the hill for the annual Christmas-tree lighting. It includes county and state officials, who turned to the Masonic

Homes for help defining policies during the COVID-19 pandemic; fellow health systems, who have referred countless patients to its rehabilitation program and even begun modeling their own shortterm and memory care programs after the Masonic Homes’; and community health organizations and first responders, who turn to the Community Advocacy Center in Covina to care for families in the wake of serious trauma.

And it’s about to include the next generation of health care professionals. To address the mounting shortage of nurses and front-line professionals in health care, the Masonic Homes recently partnered with Unitek Learning to create a Nursing Assistant Training Program on its Union City campus, approved by the California Department of Public Health.

Amid all this change, the Masonic

Homes’ mission has remained steadfast: to provide care for members in need. But within that mission, and in the increasingly complex landscape of health care, it has found a path forward that includes the wider world.

“The community has needs. As long as we always give our membership priority, why not be that partner and provide the services they need?” says Larry Adamson, the current chair of the Masonic Homes board of trustees. “Over the last 125 years, our brothers have been so charitable that we now have the ability to do things other senior care facilities can’t even consider.

“We can make this a better place for everybody.”

Masonic Homes executive director Soledad Martinez speaks with a senior resident at the Union City campus.

Fraternal and community leaders gather to break ground on Dig Deep Farms in 2022.

MILESTONES

It’s in the Soil

A novel partnership is keeping the Masonic Homes’ agricultural heritage alive.

It isn’t just onions, leeks, and kale that are set to be planted at the base of the Masonic Homes of California campus in Union City. For the organizers behind the 10acre plot that’s being transformed into an unlikely urban farm, there’s hope that the seeds of an even bigger change can take root here.

In 2022, Dig Deep Farms began turning over soil in the flatlands just off Mission Boulevard to transform into its latest East Bay agricultural oasis. The effort is a program by the Alameda County Deputy Sheriff’s Association to help teens learn about nutrition and sustainable farming through hands-on work in living gardens. The program also offers fellowships and job training to the recently incarcerated. Food harvested from the program’s six East Bay farms is sold or distributed through the Alameda County Community Food Bank and other sites.

The partnership with the Masonic Homes was spearheaded by the late Alameda County supervisor Richard Valle, who years earlier had helped the campus establish a program to divert much of its food waste, turning it into compost by combining it with manure from a horse ranch located just east of the campus. Together with the nonprofit Math Nucleus, that compost is then used in a reforestation effort to reintroduce native trees on the campus.

While the Dig Deep partnership is new, it isn’t the first time the Masonic Homes has had a thriving agricultural life.

In its early days, the Masonic Homes was nearly selfsufficient, thanks to a massive farm operation. In 1915, that included a dairy with 15 cows, along with 65 hogs, more than 2,000 chickens, and ducks and turkeys. In addition,

the campus boasted a large vegetable garden full of Jackson potatoes, barley, peas, beets, squash, and onions; an orchard of sugar prune trees that produced six tons of dried fruit annually; cornfields; and berry gardens full of blackberry and loganberry bushes. In 1903, its vineyard supplied local wineries with 1.5 tons of grapes.

For many years, the field along Mission was also home to a riot of gladiolas, which were later pulled up and replanted in the Central Valley. In fact, the gladiola is so closely associated with Union City, it’s part of the town seal. And since 1985, Union City has hosted an annual gladiola festival.

In recent years, the Masonic Homes has also used its grounds for hay, which is sold to local farms, and for beekeeping, which helps ensure pollination of wildflowers and crops, and also yields honey.

RETIREMENT

CHAPTER SEVEN: TECHNOLOGY AT THE MASONIC HOMES

2.0

Plugging In

At the Masonic Homes, a commitment to tech befits its proximity to Silicon Valley.

Henry had never been much of a talker, even when his wife was alive. But since her death two years prior, his terseness had deepened into something more like withdrawal. Some days, staff couldn’t coax him out of his room.

But when the cat was placed in his arms, he lit up.

“Hi, cutie,” he cooed. “Aren’t you a beauty?” The cat meowed. Henry scratched gently behind its ears, and it tilted its head. Henry could feel its steady, soothing heartbeat. It was love at first sight.

The next week, Henry accepted an invitation to a campus tea party, mostly because pets were invited, too. A dozen or so residents gathered with dogs and cats settled in their laps. Henry, usually nervous in a crowd, seemed at ease.

Meanwhile, all the pets were astonishingly well behaved. No accidents. No runaways. None of them even begged for table scraps.

Then again, they were all robots. A surprising scene for a 125-yearold retirement home? Perhaps. But research shows it’s also a therapeutic one. Seniors, especially those experiencing memory loss, are at especially high risk of isolation, which can bring on and exacerbate a raft of other health issues. Robotic pets are one solution. The simple companionship they provide has been shown to decrease stress and anxiety, even leading to reduced need for pain medication and fewer problem behaviors.

Opposite: A digital display shows the calendar of events and dining menu. Previous: A robotic cat sits quietly in a resident’s apartment—one of several unexpected tech rollouts.

Then there’s the other benefit:

“The residents just love them,” says James MacRae, the organization’s innovations project manager.

At the Masonic Homes of California, dozens of robotic cats and dogs have been distributed to interested seniors, evidence of a company-wide willingness to research, test, and ultimately adopt new technologies that improve the lives of staff and residents. Petbots are just the tip of the iceberg. From robotic rolling valets and virtual reality goggles to smart toilets and mattresses, when it comes to plugging seniors into Silicon Valley’s latest innovations, the Masonic Homes has positioned itself on technology’s cutting edge. Now, rather than a stuffy old-folks’ home, it’s seen as a high-tech industry leader.

Welcome to the Digital Age 1994–2016

In the early 1900s, locals referred to the southern region of the San Francisco Bay as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight.” But by the 1970s, the fields

of apricots, cherries, and peaches had been replaced by semiconductor manufacturers. And locals had a new name for the region: Silicon Valley.

The Masonic Homes in Union City were just 20 minutes away. It didn’t take long to feel the influence.

It started gradually, as so many transformations do. In 1994, the director of the Masonic Homes’ Management Information System department formed a computer users’ group of about 20 interested residents, who taught themselves word processing and graphic design. By 1997, “seventeen residents were trained to surf the internet with America Online,” reported Michael Donegan, recreation coordinator at the Union City campus, in California Freemason magazine. He detailed what this meant for any reader who hadn’t yet experienced the web themselves: “They have already begun downloading information,

Left: T.J. McCullen, a psychological sciences researcher from Case Western University, and executive director Mary Contois show off a senior-friendly tablet.

Right: A client of Masonic Outreach Services wears virtual reality goggles as part of a pilot initiative.

uploading photos of themselves to friends and relatives and found a lot of new friends on e-mail.” That year, the campus added a computer room with six more terminals.

“The residents of the Masonic Homes have always been a very progressive group of individuals to follow up with their desire to learn and experience new ventures,” said Donegan. “They are to be commended for their enthusiasm to learn.”

By the 2010s, the Masonic Homes was positioning itself as something of an early adopter.

For instance, while many American businesses were struggling to incorporate videoconferencing, both

of the Masonic Homes’ campuses had already set aside space for it well before the pandemic. The rooms came to known as Skype labs: cozy spaces, designed to look and feel like a living room, containing PCs equipped with video chat software. A support team made up of IT staff and computer-savvy resident volunteers stood by to facilitate technology that, to many, was astonishing. Residents who remembered life before indoor plumbing were suddenly sitting face-to-face with family members thousands of miles away.

“I wanted the residents to reconnect with family and friends and take distance out of the equation,”

said Michael Forsyth, then director of IT client services. “Hearing on the phone is great, but being able to see the expressions on a face is always better.” That was certainly the case for 103-year-old Mary Schwartz, who chatted with her daughter and granddaughter.

It was part of a series of hightech investments. In 2013, the Masonic Homes’ Union City gym was renovated with state-of-the-art equipment, including USB sticks

loaded up with personalized workout plans. “This equipment does most of the thinking for you,” marveled one resident. Around the same time, both campuses began providing access to brain-boosting computer programs, in what’s now known as the Brain Fitness Gym, drawing upon research on how technology can help stave off memory loss.

Then, a milestone: In 2016, the Masonic Homes hosted the Masonic Communities and Services

Association Conference, an annual meeting of Masonic senior care communities. A theme of innovation and technology was chosen. “We said, we’re in Silicon Valley, let’s take on technology,” says president and CEO Gary Charland.

The Masonic Homes didn’t want to just talk about what was possible. The staff wanted to demonstrate it. The organization teamed up with tech giants including Amazon to retrofit two resident apartments as

Above: Members of the Masonic Homes’ first computer users’ group, in the mid1990s. Right: Visitors flock to the Union City campus to tour a “smart apartment” during the Masonic Communities and Services Association Conference in 2016.

“smart apartments,” kitted out with motion-triggered lighting and voicecontrolled thermostats. The concept of a smart home was just coming into the mainstream. Thanks to those conversations, the Masonic Homes saw the potential long before other senior communities.

“There’s interest from a number of companies in leveraging these smart apartments to showcase some of their newest technology and prove its efficacy,” Michael Skaff, then the chief operating officer for the Masons of California, said at the time. “It’s a chance for us to be on the cutting edge.”

When conference attendees explored the smart apartments, they got an aspirational glimpse of what such technology could mean for senior care. They also recognized that the organization was leading the way. “The Masonic Homes was becoming known as a leader in technology,” Charland says.

“We want to look forward. We want someone to go out and look for new technology.”

A Part of the Conversation

2017–present

In recent decades, it became clear that the health care industry was facing a staffing shortage, and the aging care industry especially. When Charland took over as the Masonic Homes’ president and CEO in 2013, that dilemma was top of mind.

“My philosophy has always been that we are facing a crisis of human resources,” Charland explains. “The only way we’re going to be able to meet the needs of the baby boomers that are entering the senior care industry is to find ways to make our workers more efficient. The way to do that is through technology.”

In 2020, under Charland’s

instruction, the Masonic Homes created a new division: the innovations department. Charland sat down with his newly hired innovations project manager, James MacRae, and told him: “We want to look forward. We want someone to go out and look for new technology.”

MacRae turned to Silicon Valley for ideas—but also looked farther afield. In Japan, for instance, staffing shortages in senior care facilities had already reached critical levels, and tech companies were at the forefront of developing new tools for aging care. He struck up conversations with other retirement communities and health care companies to see where the Masonic Homes could work smarter. And he started bringing gadgets to work.

Right: Jack McClellan (left) and Harold Scott use a USB stick to upload their health settings to exercise equipment in the Masonic Homes’ Grider gym in 2013. Today, the settings can be controlled via key fob.

In short order, many of the features that the Masonic Homes previewed in the 2016 smart apartment were incorporated throughout the entire campus.

Alexa, the voice of the Amazon Echo smart speaker, is now ubiquitous, with increasingly intuitive voice commands. If a resident wants to call their grandchild or ask about the weather, it’s as simple as asking. (One resident fondly refers to Alexa as her “roommate.”) The technology works in hallways and common spaces too. Light out in the hallway? No problem. Need a nurse? Right away.

Nowadays, the Masonic Homes is regularly approached by tech companies interested in piloting products and services—a win-win way to test and refine new offerings. Among the most promising of these was a senior-friendly tablet called Breezie. Since introducing the equipment in 2019, Masonic Outreach Services has begun incorporating them to keep seniors connected at home. As part of the pilot, twice a week a group of 10 senior clients of Masonic Outreach Services log on for a video chat, guided by MOS interns and graduate students in social work,

to test new uses for the devices. Among the possibilities were virtual tours of several museums. One tester mentioned that she’d always wanted to go ziplining. Several months later, armed with a pair of VR goggles and the app, she did—virtually, anyway.

Another recent pilot involved several models of smart toilets. Such commodes use built-in sensors to collect data on toilet use—rather than relying on the user to track their own behavior—and can analyze urine and stool for various health issues. Such toilets can also detect disease markers for certain kinds of cancer, as well as irritable bowel syndrome and kidney failure. A smart mattress tracks how often seniors get out of bed in the night—an especially important issue for those dealing with memory loss and prone to wandering.

That’s not all. Starting in late 2022, the Masonic Homes was included in a pilot program to introduce a new robotic caddy called the Labrador Retriever. The device uses lIDar remote sensing to guide it through a room or building so it’s able to fetch or deliver small items. Tell it, “Take this drink to the living room,” and it’s

able to do so. For older adults who struggle with mobility, relieving them of small errands like that can help unlock new possibilities for staying independent. And for an industry facing acute staffing shortages, its potential is equally evident. “We’ll have them do the more mundane tasks so the staff can focus on care,” MacRae says. “This helps residents stay independent longer.”

When Labrador announced the pilot program, the list of partners included giants of the senior care industry like Nationwide and Eskaton—organizations with dozens or hundreds of campuses. Right there alongside them was the comparatively tiny Masonic Homes.

“The Masonic Homes are part of the conversation,” says Joseph Pritchard, chief operating officer. “We’re never going to hire 50 computer programmers to develop code. But we can be the place that helps as a pilot center for that to happen.”

Sometimes, though, the Masonic Homes is able to develop new apps— sort of. For instance, Pritchard recalls, a common request from residents is to have Alexa read aloud the dining

A resident mans the controls in a flight simulator. Such games are shown to help boost brain health and stave off cognitive decline.

room menu for that night. So MacRae helped bring together Viibrant— the software company behind its online activities calendar—and representatives from Amazon. The companies worked together to develop the new program, and now list each another as technology partners. Best of all, the residents were able to have someone tell them what’s for dinner. “The companies tailor-make stuff for our community and then broaden it out to other communities,” MacRae says. “We can actually drive the industry.”

Looking Forward 2023 and beyond

Describing the Masonic Homes’ tech strategy, MacRae insists that “we don’t just roll out new tech because it’s fun. It has to improve lives.”

That doesn’t mean it can’t also be fun.

These days, a virtual-passport program allows residents from both

Residents’ health infomation is uploaded to exercise machinery using a smart fob that automatically inputs their settings.

Masonic Homes campuses to use VR goggles to “visit” destinations like Rome and Paris. With every site they tour, they get a stamp in a passport.

In Union City, the exercise and fitness equipment that once seemed groundbreaking, with its USB stick full of exercise information, has been replaced with even smarter gear. Now residents scan a fob and the equipment resets to their preferred resistance and seat height. At both campuses, digital signs in hallways and common areas keep residents up to date on campus news and events, sharing videos from Charland and other leaders.

All these advances add up to a major difference in the care and quality of life for residents of the Masonic Homes. It’s also a way to free up an increasingly in-demand staff for tasks where their skills and heart can have the greatest impact.

“Technology is ever-evolving,” MacRae says. “The Masonic Homes are evolving with it.”

It’s also driving the next wave of innovation. Today the Masonic Homes is part of the Thrive Alliance, a group of leading nonprofit

providers across the country dedicated to new discoveries and innovative solutions in senior care. Charland serves on the board of one of its member organizations, which brings together innovators, researchers, and health care providers from across the country. The Masonic Homes has also invested $1 million in the Ziegler LinkAge fund to spur innovation in technology services for senior aging markets.

Through these connections and others, leaders from the Masonic Homes are regularly invited to discussions with tech-industry leaders, and have become a regular presence at LeadingAge California, a conference that features the latest trends in aging services.

At these discussions, they’re often shoulder-to-shoulder with leaders from companies like Eskaton and Atria, with 30-plus and 300-plus properties, respectively.

“When we’re sitting at the table, I’m thinking, We’re the smallest in the room and we’re sitting next to the CEOs of the largest companies in America,” Charland says. “I’m really proud of that.”

Beneath the Foundation, Solid Bones

Remembering when a millionyear-old fossil turned up beneath the Union City grounds.

Sure, the seniors at the Masonic Homes in Union City sometimes jokingly refer to themselves as dinosaurs. But in terms of geologic time, they’re practically tadpoles, at least compared with the campus’s previous inhabitants. That was brought into dramatic relief one day in 1971. In preparation for a planned redevelopment, construction workers dug test trenches throughout the campus to examine foundation conditions. The longest of the trenches was 1,290 feet.

That’s where, at a depth of 16.5 feet, workers discovered the skull and tusks of a prehistoric mammoth. After identifying the remains, archaeologists from the California Academy of Sciences were called in to lead the exhumation of the fossils. The remains were taken to the Grand Lodge of California’s archive for safekeeping until they could be donated to a museum.

The Columbian mammoth was, for a period during the late Pleistocene period (beginning 2.6 million years ago and ending 11,700 years ago) perhaps the mightiest of the megafauna that roamed the San Francisco Bay Area. Standing 13 feet tall and weighing up to 24,000 pounds, it was twice the size of a modern-day African elephant.

The fossil discovery at the Masonic Homes may have been significant, but it was not unheard of for the area.

In fact, during the 1940s, a group of “boy paleontologists” gained national attention on television, on the radio, and in Life magazine for excavating more than 29,000 fossils

from the Bell Sand and Gravel Quarry, about eight miles south of the Masonic Homes at the base of the Irvington Hills in what is now Fremont. Among their discoveries were mammoths, saber cats, horses, camels, a dire wolf, and a never-before-seen species of antelope with four antlers, called Tetrameryx irvingtonensis

According to the Washington Township Museum of Local History, the finds were so significant that

Irvington was given its own marker in geologic time. That didn’t stop the inexorable march of progress from trampling over it, though: In 1970, the quarry site was sold to the state and leveled for the construction of today’s interstate 680–route 238 interchange. Meaning that whatever other fossils might have been contained there have been permanently paved over—at least for the next millennium or two.

Workers dig under what would become the Sedam building in this 1971 photo.

A marble sculpture erected in 2011 at the front gate of the Masonic Homes represents the transformation of natural rock to polished stone—a central metaphor in Freemasonry.

Slabs feature images of various Masonic symbols.

Intelligent Design

Signage at the Masonic Homes lends fraternal icons a contemporary edge.

In 2018, when Bob Guerin, principal of Sausalito-based graphic design studio Propp + Guerin, took on the task of modernizing the signage throughout the Masonic Homes of California’s Union City campus, Gary Charland, the organization’s president and CEO, recommended that he read a certain piece of literature to get acquainted with the 300-year-old fraternity: Freemasons for Dummies.

The book served as a crash course, and Guerin says it added fuel to what was already a long-running fascination with Masonic symbols. “I’m always interested in looking at iconography for meanings that go beyond the initial view,” he says.

The result, which can be seen throughout the Masonic Homes, does a bit of the same. Guerin’s intricate designs and patterns now adorn each building, helping residents and visitors navigate the campus—all while containing Masonic motifs that suggest an even deeper meaning, at least to the trained eye. As he explains it, the designs are a blend of forward-looking California innovation and deep-rooted fraternal tradition. “I love the fact that these new designs are going to stand the test of time,” he says Here, Guerin walks us through a few of his favorite Masonic designs.

A Star Is Reborn

A symbol of truth in darkness, this design, based on the 10-pronged BLAZING STAR, adorns wall-mounted trellises on the Head building of the Masonic Homes in Union City. “It carries a sense of responsibility,” Guerin says of the motif, which he re-created as a repeating pattern to great Moorish effect.

Working Together

Representing unity and industry, the BEEHIVE is one of the fraternity’s most cherished symbols. Taking a cue from the honeycomb-shaped concrete tiles of the Sedam building’s outdoor plaza, this pattern boasts impressive dimensionality even in small doses, such as on the building’s door numbers.

A Simpler G

The LETTER G at the center of the square and compass represents geometry, the elegant math upon which stonemasonry is founded. For the signage at the Siminoff Masonic Center, Guerin simplified the letterform and created a pattern of interlocking G’s—not unlike the iconic logo of Gucci.

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE CAMPUS MASTER PLAN

FORM AND FUNCTION

Born Again

A visionary plan returns the luster to the “jewel of California Freemasonry.”

It didn’t take long for the message to be received. Past Grand Master John Lowe, then chairman of the Masonic Homes board of trustees, was among those getting the bumpy tour. “He turned to me and said, ‘OK, we get it!’” Charland recalls.

In 2014, Masonic Homes president Gary Charland planned a ruse. Prior to a quarterly board meeting, he packed each trustee into golf carts and took them on an impromptu tour of the Union City campus. “I specifically made sure we hit every bump in the road,” Charland says with a chuckle. There were plenty. He also pointed out the things that were missing— namely, sidewalks and walkways for pedestrians. On a campus known for its natural beauty and views of the San Francisco Bay, there wasn’t an easy way for residents to enjoy the outdoors. Charland made sure board members noticed that, too.

Then, Charland brought his tour inside. He pointed out cracked tiles and wasted space. He was unsparing. Finally, he turned to the challenge of caring for an aging population and what it meant for the Masonic Homes of California for the next 10, 20, or 100 years. He returned to a phrase he’d heard from several past grand masters: The Masonic Homes is the jewel in the crown of California Freemasonry. Since its founding in 1898, the care, culture, and support offered through the Masonic Homes have been among the finest in the field. But all that good work depended on infrastructure. And major upgrades were now needed. The jewel needed polishing. For nearly a decade, Charland invoked that phrase to inspire the fraternity to embrace an expansive plan to transform the Masonic Homes’ campuses. Now on the verge

of his retirement, he is heaving a sigh of relief—and satisfaction.

“We have an obligation to keep that jewel shining,” Charland says. “Modernizing our Masonic Homes and expanding our services has been the honor of my career.”

The Road Map 2013–2017

Anyone who’s owned a home knows the work of maintaining it is neverending. And when it comes to renovations, it’s common knowledge that even simple upgrades can require a staggering investment of time, money, and—frankly—courage.

By 2014, when Charland pulled his golf-cart stunt, he knew in his heart that the Masonic Homes needed all of the above.

Speaking to his board, Charland pointed out wasted spaces such as empty parking lots. He spoke about tech upgrades, from robot assistants to faster internet. Most of all, he talked about the the need to act now.

About 7 in 10 people over the age

of 65 will need some form of longterm care as they age. As life spans have increased, so too have the needs of the elderly. And with a wave

of baby boomers fast approaching, organizations like the Masonic Homes are bracing for impact.

By 2014, the Masonic Homes

part of the campus master plan.

was already feeling that pressure. Masons and their family members were facing a wait time of about two years to move in—with some people unable to make it that long. Meanwhile, on both campuses, the average age of residents had risen to an all-time high of 87 years old. And

increasingly, those older residents were coming in with more serious health issues.

“The need for assisted living on our campuses was increasing,” says chief operating officer Joseph Pritchard. Not long after touring the

campuses, the board voted a resounding “yes” on a long-range Campus Master Plan to address those challenges. They named the first phase Roadmap 2020. It was ambitious, audacious, and consistent with the Masonic Homes way.

“Most senior living places have operated the same way for 35 or 40 years,” Pritchard says. “If the regulations don’t change, they don’t change. The Masonic Homes of California is proactive. We say, ‘This is what we see as the needs of our residents, and here’s how we need to adjust to it.’”

The fraternity stepped up in support, donating funds through the Let’s Write the Future campaign to support senior health and youth education. By March of 2020, contributions to the new fund had already surpassed the original goal of $5 million. All told, Let’s Write the Future brought in $7.5 million to help kickstart construction efforts—the largest fundraising campaign in California Masonic history. Big changes were on the way.

Above: An early rendering of the health center in Covina, which opened in 2023. Previous: A common space in the recently renovated Wollenberg building in Union City. Like the health center in Covina, it was

The Transformation 2020–2023

In general, 2020 was not a popular time for new construction, as the world dealt with the pandemic’s economic impact. But you’d never know it based on the scene unfolding at the Masonic Homes campuses.

“The new memory care and assisted living center in Union City is rising before our eyes,” announced Masonic Homes board chair and past grand master Larry Adamson at the 2020 Annual Communication.

In addition to all-new facilities for memory care and skilled-nursing support in both Union City and Covina, the ’60s-era Adams and Wollenberg buildings in Union City were also getting extensive upgrades. Adams was updated into an ADAaccessible assisted-living residence, complete with a community garden, a shared kitchen and bar area, and adaptable common rooms that function as lounges and meeting

rooms (and in one case, a movie screening room). Next door, the Wollenberg building, originally constructed as the Masonic Homes’ on-campus hospital, also went under

From left: A newly paved walkway connecting Sedam plaza to the Siminoff Masonic Center also features a veterans’ memorial fountain; both campuses have been redesigned according to a neighborhood model centered around shared lounges (seen in Covina at top, and in the Wollenberg building in Union City at bottom); residents stroll the idyllic grounds of the Masonic Homes in Covina; the Wollenberg building, seen here from the south, has been completely renovated to accomodate more assisted-living and memory care beds.

“We say, ‘This is what we see as the needs of our residents, and here’s how we need to adjust to it.’”

the knife. In addition to renovating resident apartments and shared lounge areas, the plan called for the top two floors of the building to be set aside for assisted-living and memory care services, and are now able to flex between uses based on current and future needs. “We grow as our residents grow,” Pritchard explains. All told, the campuses increased the total share of its capacity set aside for assisted-living needs, and raised the number of dedicated memory care suites from just eight, prerenovation, to between 30 and 46 now, depending on the configuration.

And it isn’t just a matter of increasing capacity. In each of the new or renovated spaces, apartments were arranged in clusters surrounding a shared lounge space—a setup

known as the neighborhood model, a best practice in senior communities.

It’s a favorite with residents, and has been shown to slow the progress of cognitive decline. “For all our decisions,” Pritchard says, “we’d ask: ‘What’s going on in the industry? What needs do we see with our own residents?’ When those factors melded, that was a definite yes for us.”

Throughout the campus, droughttolerant landscaping is injecting life into previously barren spaces. A new honeycomb-themed pavement walkway was laid leading up to Siminoff Masonic Center, while the cracked, uneven surface of Sedam plaza, home to many of the campus’ outdoor gatherings, was reconfigured and repaved. New walkways and scenic lookouts were added along the main road winding up to the campus from Mission Boulevard.

In 2021, the Pavilion at the Masonic Homes opened in Union City, offering 28 memory care and assisted-living residences open to Masons, residents of Acacia Creek, and—for the first time—members of the general public.

In Southern California, the Covina campus has also undergone

The striking front entrance of the newly opened health center in Covina, offering skilled nursing, memory care, and short-term rehab.

significant changes, by converting the former children’s homes into novel uses. That began in 2016 with the launch of the Masonic Center for Youth and Families’ new offices, and continued in 2019 as another former children’s home was converted into the first-of-its-kind shared-housing program for independent seniors. Yet another of the old homes is planned to be converted into a memory care neighborhood, and there are also plans to replace the old swimming pool with an indoor facility.

All that work has set the stage for the biggest upgrade of all: the opening, in 2023, of the health center in Covina, featuring 32 apartments dedicated to memory care, skilled nursing, and short-term rehab. At last, residents can remain on campus for these types of services, ensuring they’ll be surrounded by those closest to them when they’re at their most vulnerable—an important milestone in the organization’s history.

“We no longer need to separate a husband from his wife, a widow from her friends,” Charland says.

Looking Ahead

2023 and beyond

Back in 1960, in response to a $1.3 million fundraising coup, a Masonic historian declared, “The operation of the Homes is big business today!”

By comparison, the 2020 master plan amounted to $140 million. Every dollar has gone toward transforming the lives of those in need. Systemwide, the organization has increased capacity by 58 percent.

The average wait time for a new resident to move in has dropped from more than two years to, in most cases, nothing. For someone with a diagnosis of dementia, that can mean the difference between a rapid decline at home versus a gentle journey among caring staff.

“Nothing in the state can even remotely compare,” Charland says of the system upgrades. “We’re going to be proud of these buildings in 50 years. This is who we are.”

These days, when Charland drives to the Union City campus, he sees residents strolling the new sidewalks along the main drive and relaxing at scenic overlooks. His favorite viewing area looks west, over the San Francisco Bay. Other areas have been turned into outdoor spaces for community gatherings. A veterans memorial stands in the heart of the campus. The crown jewel of Masonry is shining bright.

“The campus master plan wasn’t just about trying to update the space,” Charland says. “It was about making the campuses a beautiful destination. When I leave work and see our residents watching the sunset, enjoying the views, I’m telling you—it does my heart good.”

Today, the Masonic Homes is a trusted expert in senior care, memory care, and assisted-living services. And with the completion of the campus master plan, it’s now an even stronger testament to the charitable values of Freemasonry. An aerial view of the serpentine walkways at the Masonic Homes in Covina.

The Leaders

Masonic Homes of California executives.

1898–1904: I.R. Aiken, superintendent

1904–05: Hiram N. Rucker, superintendent

1906–09: William H. Edwards, superintendent

1909: H.W. Martin, interim superintendent

2000–07: Deborah E. Stebbins, executive vice president

2008–12: Melvin Matsumoto, executive vice president

2013: Stephanie Kizziar, interim executive vice president

2013–23: Gary G. Charland, president and CEO

DECOTO (UNION CITY)

1909–41: Frank B. Hartman, superintendent

1941–56: James R. Eubanks, superintendent

1956–71: Gail H. David, superintendent

1966: Hugh B. Herring, acting superintendent

1971–74: Hugh B. Herring, superintendent

1974–76: Joseph M. Olafson, superintendent

1976–89: J. Burton Brown, administrator

1989–95: Paul Boyar, administrator

1993–2001: Kelly Wiest, administrator

2001–08: Robert M. Fallon, administrator

2001–14: Dixie Reeve, administrator/executive director

2014–15: Mary Contois, executive director

2015–17: Franco Diamond, executive director

2017–present: Soledad Martinez, executive director

COVINA

1906–21: Edward Spencer, managing trustee/superintendent

1921–23: Leland S. Drew, superintendent

1923–27: Maude E. Miller, superintendent

1927–45: John M. Downen, superintendent

1945–48: Paul C. Parry, superintendent

1948–66: Robert M. Henry, superintendent

1966–81: James C. Blaine, superintendent

1982–95: John A. Rose, administrator

1995: Hilma J. Mautz, interim administrator

1995–2001: Dale Ankney, administrator

2001–22: Judy Figueroa, administrator/executive director

2002–08: John E. Howl, executive director

2022–present: Vincent Gonzaga, executive director

AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

2001: Barbara Ten Broek executive director, children’s program

2001–13: Stephanie Kizziar, executive director/ vice president, Masonic outreach and children’s services

2008–09: Robert Fallon, executive director, senior services

2008–10: John Howl, vice president, strategic development

2009–present: Sabrina Montes, director/executive vice president, Masonic Outreach Services

2014–present: Kimberly Rich, executive director, Masonic Center for Youth and Families

PRESIDENTS OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES

1881–92: William F. Perry, chairman of special committee

1893–95: Edward M. Preston, past grand master

1896–1904: Charles L. Patton, past grand master

1905–07: Edward Peabody

1908–19: William S. Wells, past grand master

1920–29, 31–59: Charles M. Wollenberg, past grand master

1930: James B. Gist, past grand master

1960: Arthur M. Warren, past grand master

1961–65: Edgar V. Stewart, past grand master

1966–67: L. Harold Anderson, past grand master

1968–69: Alfred F. Breslauer, past grand master

1970–71: Donald A. Campbell

1972–74: Myron E. Smith, past grand master

1975–76: Donald B. McCaw, past grand master

1977–78: Ralph H. Head

1979: Jack H. Peloian

1980–87: Kermit A. Jacobson, past grand master

1988: Chester R. MacPhee, past grand master

1989: Hambleton F. Leas

1990–97: Roy J. Henville, past grand master

1998–2001: Stanley M. Cazneaux, past grand master

2002: Frederick L. Sorsabal, past grand master

2003–08: Allen B. Gresham, past grand master

2009–14: David R. Doan, past grand master

2015–18: John F. Lowe, past grand master

2019–present: Larry L. Adamson, past grand master

Clockwise from top left: The “two Charlies” of the Masonic Homes: Charles Albert Adams, who served on the board of trustees from 1916 to 1958 and from then until his death in 1961 as an emeritus member; and Charles Wollenberg, who served as president of the board for 40 years. Both were grand masters of the fraternity; Ralph Head (bottom right) served on the board of trustees for 25 years; Covina superintendent James Blaine (bottom left) and a young resident in 1973 at the dedication of the new Masonic Home for Children.

Special thanks to

Laura Benys

Clark Miller

Ian A. Stewart

Emily Limón

Joseph Evans

Sean Cooper

Kimberly Hegg

Gary Charland

Union City photos by Kevin Maynelle

Covina photos by Tom Story

Archival images courtesy of the Henry Wilson Coil Library and Museum of Freemasonry and the Grand Lodge of California

p. 4-9: Courtesy of Bennett Hall, Business Image Group

p. 10: Louis Roesch, lithographer, couresty of Bancroft Library, University of California

p. 20 (bottom left): Jim Paden

p. 32: Bruton O. Burt, Works Progress Administration Collection, courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library

p. 35 (top): Frasher’s Foto, Pomona CA

p. 74: Ronan Hubert

p. 98–99: Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects

p. 126: Joy Liu, courtesy of Alameda County Sheriffs’ Association

p. 145: Enstrum & Nourse-Stoltze, San Francisco CA

p. 149: Courtesy of Prop + Guerin photo credits