MOOSE GOING EXTINCT
LAST CALGARY LODGE CLOSING ITS DOORS
The Moose is facing extinction in Calgary.
As membership dwindles and the club struggles to pay rent, Calgary’s only remaining Loyal Order of the Moose lodge is closing.
Founded in the 1880s and reinvented a century later, the Loyal Order of the Moose is a service organization that has chapters in every American state, four Canadian provinces, Great Britain and even Bermuda.
In the club’s heyday, Calgary’s Loyal Order of the Moose boasted three lodges and thousands of members, who raised money for charity and packed the three facilities for dances, bingo and social events.
But only one lodge remains in Calgary — the Forest Lawn Moose Lodge No. 1691 — and it will close this weekend.
“It got to the point where something had to be done because we just couldn’t afford it anymore,” said Les Picketts, a trustee with the Forest Lawn lodge.
While the club’s physical space will be closed effective Sunday, members want to continue to meet and the Moose chapter will work to survive.
“Right now we’ll operate out of someone’s house. We’ll still have our meetings and we’ll look at prospects of where we can go,” said 79-yearold Picketts.
Members are still working to determine what will happen to the lodge’s contents, which include merchandise, shuffle board equipment, pool tables and a taxidermied moose head.
The two-storey Forest Lawn lodge was built in the late 1970s. Two decades later, the club sold the lodge to an auction business and, since then, they’ve leased space in the building’s upstairs from its new owners, a church, Picketts said.
Selling off their own space in the 1990s was a move that allowed the Forest Lawn lodge to outlast Calgary’s other two Moose facilities, which closed more than five years ago amid struggles with decreasing membership and rising costs.
Picketts said renting the Forest Lawn space costs the chapter thousands of dollars a month, money the club can simply no longer afford as membership declines.
Calgary’s Moose Lodge No. 1691 had close to 1,000 members in 1980. In 2009, those numbers dwindled to 120 and, today, there are just 79 members — only a small fraction of whom regularly attend a decreasing number of meetings and events.
“We have pool, crib, that’s about it,” Picketts said. “We used to go bowling, curling, all those things, but we can’t get anybody interested anymore.”
The shuttering of buildings across the country that house service organizations — from Moose lodges to legions — is a big blow to club members and the community, said researcher and strategist Trina Isakson.
“For the senior community members, it can be pretty devastating,” she said.
“Social isolation is a huge problem … losing these groups is a loss, it’s a true loss,” she said.
Isakson is principal of 27 Shift, a Vancouver-based company that conducts research on the future of community engagement.
While there’s no lack of options for today’s young people to get involved in volunteer work, Isakson said when concrete meeting places such as the Moose close, casual intergenerational connections also risk vanishing.
“Opportunities for intergenerational interaction are positive, and when those are lost, its sad,” she said.
For Picketts, who joined the Moose nearly four decades ago and remembers a time when the Forest Lawn facility was jam-packed, the shuttering of the lodge is unfortunate.
“I’m very disappointed,” he said.