the missouri freemason
©
vol. 58 no. 1
Official Publication of the Grand Lodge of Missouri Published and copyrighted under the direction of the Committee on Masonic Publications
contents 4 David L. Ramsey Elected Grand Master for 2012‑2013 4 LeRoy Salmon Joins Advancing Line as Senior Grand Marshall 4 Did You Know … 5 Untempered Mortar 6 Rudyard Kipling 7 If I'm In Trouble, I Go There 8 Bates County Museum Hosts Masonic Civil War Program 8 Polar Star — Rose Hill Assists Firefighters' Fund Drive 9 Missouri Lodge of Research Dedicates Masonic Library 9 Missouri Freemason Deadlines 10 Clifton Truman Daniel Relates Stories of Harry Truman at the Lodge of Research Breakfast 11 The Lost Word 13 Man's Best Friend 13 Brother Vest's Closing Arguments … 14 Missouri Lodge of Research Releases Annual Book 15 Widows Sons Continues to Grow and Aid Charities 15 Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation 16 Missouri DeMolay: Building Freemasonry Through DeMolay 17 Rainbow for Girls: Every Day is a Celebration! 18 Job's Daughters 19 The Masonic Home of Missouri: John T. Litzau Named Masonic Home of Missouri Representative of the Year 19 Masonic Home of Missouri Representative Luncheon 20 Spotlight on Decatur Lodge 20 Seventh Annual Truman Club Dinner 21 The Work of our Craft 25 Masonic Service Awards the missouri freemason
Winter 2012
From The Editor’s Keyboard I love technology, math, science and all that "geeky" stuff. I want the latest gadget. I want every document I write to be in electronic format. I built my own "cloud" storage because "amateurs" like Google, Microsoft and Dropbox weren't good enough for me.* I love it, embrace it and the last thing I want to be labeled as is a Luddite. So, with some reservation, I have a message for the world: Don't abandon paper. In fact, along with that, don't abandon any of the "old time" analog archiving techniques. I mean it. Everything today should be digital… but not exclusively. Why? There are lots of reasons, but there are a couple of really good ones. First, you've got to have the technology to use the technology. I have a boatload of old "floppy disks" around the house; not just the "modern" 3½ inch ones, not just the older 5¼ inch floppies, but the ancient 8 inchers. Try to find a way to read those bad boys today. They're obsolete. They don't even make good Frisbees. Think that's going back a bit far? You think your CDs are safe? Studies have shown the average life of a CD is about 25-years. Uh-oh! You'd better run and check that Dire Straits CD you bought back in '85. Actually, the professional CDs have a life up to 100 years, but the ones you made... not so much. Besides, who knows if 100 years from now there will be a machine that can read a CD? A thousand years? The solution? A good old fashioned record player. Really. As you read this, the little Voyager spacecraft is at the very edge of our solar system ready to enter interstellar space. Know what's on board in case it encounters any extraterrestrials? Not a CD, not floppies, not tape, but a record and record player with instructions on how to use it. ET probably doesn't have CDs, but he'll be able to operate that simple gadget. "Yes," you may agree, "but that's a really special case. There are no ETs around here." Well... probably. So guess what: the official sound recording media your very own Library of Congress uses is 78 RPM records! Space age vinyl 78 RPM records to be sure but, still, Thomas Edison would be proud of us. And, naturally, original documents and books are the official hard copy storage media. That brings us to the second reason. Even if we do have the technology to read all this material, a single coronal mass ejection from the sun or, God forbid, a nuclear war could wipe it all out in an instant. Granted, if we ever have a disaster of that magnitude, our biggest problem wouldn't be whether or not we had last year's copies of the Missouri Freemason. Still, if we could survive such a disaster in the long run it would be nice to have our historical documents. Hence, paper, vinyl and analog copies would be mighty handy. That's why the Library of Congress is making sure we keep them around. We all should — our personal and public treasures. We're now in the process of establishing the Missouri Lodge of Research Library. It's a vision of Harry Truman that is finally coming into fruition. It's going to be something to be proud of. It will be as modern as can be, with as much as we can put online for Masonic researchers to use. They won't even have to come to the library. At the same time though, we can't be duped into putting everything we produce exclusively in electronic format. That's exactly what Encyclopedia Britannica has decided to do. There will be no more hard copies of that iconic research tool (founded, by the way, by Brother Andrew Bell) — a huge tactical error in my estimation. Let's be optimistic and assume there won't be a nuclear war. Doesn't matter: that coronal mass ejection is right around the corner. So let's keep pumping out the paper copies. Luddites of the world unite! *OK, so that was kind of lame. It was easy. Your cat could do it. Provided, of course, that your cat has a longer attention span than my cat.
Steve Harrison, Editor Winter 2012 3