Photo by David White
by JONATHAN YORK
J.P. “Pete” Krug, a retired airport policeman, walked with his cane across a gravel alley to the building at 107 W. Center St.
Slowly, he unlocked a door with a small sign: “Live Oak Lodge.” There was a narrow staircase lit by a dim blue light. It was hard to see what was at the top of the stairs, but that was the place where members of an exclusive society were known to practice secret rituals.
Just off the side of the stairs there was a room – clearly a small room – that could serve any frightening purpose. Maybe if you opened that door a small pile of skulls would spill out.
Krug, 73, grinned and pointed. “There’s the restroom,” he said.
He was leading reporters on a tour of Live Oak Masonic Lodge No. 304, where he is a past master.
Freemasons in popular literature are the backroom plotters behind world events, deciding who will win elections and who will win wars. Freemasons in real life are conscientious men, many of them retirees and veterans, who meet in buildings like this one in downtown Kyle to eat together and talk about doing good for other people.
“We’re not that secretive,” Krug said. “We believe in breaking bread with our brothers. And we are all brothers.” He asked to join the masons, he said, because of “what they did, helping families, helping people. The fraternity.”
And as of last weekend, his lodge has been meeting in this building for 100 years. Lodge members have been giving tours of the building to mark the occasion.
Stopping in front of a wooden pillar with a large initial G at its base, Krug said, “Aren’t you going to ask me what the G is for?” Thus prompted, he said: “Geometry is one of the sciences. The other is God. To be a mason you have to profess a belief in God.”
The masonic conception of God is individual. Some ceremonies require a holy book, and in different lodges that book might be the Qu’ran, the Torah or the Bible. One friend of Krug’s went to a lodge in Israel and found that all the ceremonies were in Yiddish.
“It drives people crazy,” Krug said, “because the Baptists don’t like us, the Catholics don’t like us, there was a papal bull written about us that tried to stop us. Hitler tried to do away with us.”
All of that is true, but no one comes after the freemasons on Center Street. Krug himself was mayor of Kyle in the early ’70s, and one wall of the meeting room is filled with portraits of past masters, many of whom were prominent men in town law enforcement, government and business. It was enough of a show of power that for a moment the popular legends felt substantial. Did the freemasons really control the world?
“When you’ve got 10 guys in a room,” Krug said, “and they can’t decide where to hold a fish fry, we ain’t got a chance.”
Still, you could almost sense these powerful men inhabiting the faded thrones that faced the visitor from different sides of the room. The blue aprons that masonic officers wear were spread in front of the thrones, and in the center of the floor a little altar held a sword, a bible, a compass and a square.
By one window there were two pillars, each with a globe at the top, and an object that looked like a wooden dagger. When asked their significance, Krug said, “Those are things that we use in our rituals.”
Rituals, symbols and allegories are the secret component to masonry. An initiate must receive an immense amount of knowledge through oral instruction and be able to keep it to himself.
“The way they do it, it took me a while because I had to remember everything,” Krug said, “Because it goes from your mouth to my ear.”
Behind the pillars, the globes and the strange wooden instrument there was a tiny dark room. Inside, a pale object rested on a table. A skull!
But it was just a replica.
