The Golden Age · 1930–1935
The mayor dances in the DeMolay ballroom
Dec 1932
From the source
MISS DUNLOP HONORED.
“Mr. and Mrs. John Dunlop entertained Tuesday night with a large dance at the DeMolay ballroom of the Heights Masonic temple, in compliment to their daughter, Miss June Dunlop.
“Festoons of smilax and boughs of spruce and pine lined the walls of the ballroom, and at one end, the orchestra dais was transformed into a wooded scene of holiday greenery. Refreshment courses were passed from a lace-laid table decked with brilliant poinsettia blossoms and scarlet tapers in silver candelabra. The ice punch bowl frozen around fruit and flower clusters was garlanded with smilax and holly.
“The hosts were assisted in entertaining by Mayor and Mrs. Walter E. Monteith, Mr. and Mrs. D. Barker, Mr. and Mrs. T. C. Sweeney, Mr. and Mrs. Percy F. Heard …”
Houston Post, December 29, 1932. Clip 1196046314, research archive.
The date matters. December 27, 1932 fell in the fourth winter of the Depression, and Walter E. Monteith was a lame duck: Houston’s 44th mayor had just lost his re-election fight to Oscar Holcombe and had weeks left in office. He spent one of those evenings receiving guests at a Heights debutante dance, under chandeliers wound with smilax, beside a punch bowl that someone had frozen around whole fruit and flowers.
The room itself tells a story: the temple’s dance floor was called the DeMolay ballroom, named for the boys’ order that met upstairs. And the papers treated the night as news three times over: an advance notice on December 15, a same-day portrait of Miss Dunlop on the 28th, and this full account in the Post on the 29th. Society coverage was the neighborhood’s public record, and the Heights corner was an address worth printing.
Seven months earlier the temple association had been fighting to pay down its mortgage, dinner by dinner. The mayor dancing in a forest-dressed ballroom while the debt clock ran is the golden age of this building in a single image. It had three years left.
The source
