“These guys have traveled the road I’m going down right now,’ said Brother Ryan Knopf, current Worshipful Master, at an unofficial gathering of the North Star Lodge, #241, of the Free and Accepted Masons.

There were no secret handshakes. There was no pledge to keep secrets.

“We don’t just sit around in our tuxedos and talk about… how great we look in our tuxedos,” Knopf said of the somewhat mysterious organization that fellow mason Brother Paul O. Walker, past District Deputy Grand Master of the 56th district (now the 24th), and the three other members in attendance agreed, needn’t be shrouded in any mystery at all.

Indeed, there were no tuxedos.

“It bothers me,” Walker said of the reputation the organization has for being a “secret society.”

“There’s a sign out front,” he said, and in fact there is, indicating the building as the North Star’s meeting place and, he added, “meeting times are right there. Big secret!”

Added Brother Ted Dorrion, another of North Star’s past Masters, “the real secret is that there are no secrets.”

Brother C. Donald Nelson, one of the increasingly unique Speculative and Operative masons in the organization, meaning that he both follows the ideals and teachings of the masons and also is a mason by trade, explained that when the organization started in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, it did begin as a secret society.

“You had to ask to join, and there were lots of rules about being a mason,” he explained. Knopf, Nelson’s grandson, possibly one of the youngest Worshipful Masters in the organization, adds, “I took a promise not to tell other people certain things until they join.”

Said Walker, “the idea of being a secret society isn’t working anymore,” of perhaps the only, small changes the organization is making to adjust to a rapidly dynamic world.

So the secrecy thing is generally myth, although the group concedes there are certain parts of membership, ideals and beliefs that can only be properly taught once one has been accepted as a member. But what about all the Grand Master and Worshipful business, one is bound to wonder next. According to Dorrion, “Freemasonry hasn’t changed, society has. The meanings of words have changed over time.” What’s meant by a term like “Worshipful Master, ” he explains, is simply that, in the beginning, it denoted an honor bestowed upon the holder of the title. “You’re showing respect” to that person, he said.

At 27, Knopf beat out Walker by a year in taking the title of the lodge’s potentially youngest Worshipful Master. Knopf, who was working at a lumber company when he took a serious interest in becoming a mason, said that the interest has been lifelong.

“My grandpa (Nelson) was a mason forever,” he said. “He’s been a mason since my mom can remember.” Knopf said he can recall as a kid asking his mother what the masons were, knowing that his grandfather was one, but never really feeling satisfied enough with the answers he was given to drop it. Later in life, working with Nelson on a building project where Nelson was, fittingly, the mason, Knopf said he remembers riding home with his grandpa and entering into a long, for the first time meaningful, discussion about the organization.

Knopf later went on to join the US Air Force and, after coming home from the service, petitioned the lodge and subsequently joined.

Aside from its reputation as a secret society, a myth Thursday evening’s discussion went far to dispel, the masons are also thought of as exclusively consisting of “gentlemen of a certain age,” one might say.

But as Knopf said, “it should never be thought of as an older person’s organization.”

The masons, he said, has “always been an organization for men from 21 (now 18) plus.”

Aside from the benefit he cited at the outset of the meeting, that of gaining the wisdom of men who’ve gone through the things in life he’s dealing with now, Knopf said that being a mason offers him an opportunity to meet an interesting and diverse group of men who, he said, he knows without having ever met that he will share a bond with.

“You know they’re good men,” Knopf said of the title “Brother” that comes with being a member of the organization. “It’s easy to sit down to dinner with someone without any other common bond.”

“You know you’ve traveled the same road,” Walker added.

And yet, as Brother Mike Keister said of the demographics of membership, “We don’t care who you are or what you do. We don’t care how important you are,” meaning that there’s no high society requirement to become a mason, although, as Walker said, the masons always seek to start a membership with “good men.”

“The purpose,” Knopf added to Walker’s thought, “is to take a good man and make him better.”

According to Walker, there are a few requirements for joining the masons that need to be checked right off the bat. A man with interest in the organization needs to be 18 years of age or older. He needs to have a belief in a “supreme being,” as Walker said, although he stressed that it doesn’t matter to the group which supreme being that may be. “We are not a religious or political organization,” Walker said, “although we are a spiritual one.”

The third requirement, Walker said, is that the man must be “of good standing in the community.”

The North Star Lodge was chartered December 3rd, 1849, the same year that the Carver House was completed, and it was Constituted June 5, 1850. The lodge met a few different places about town, including the Sons of Temperance Hall, the Odd Fellows Hall, the Tanner Block Building, and the 3rd floor of the Struthers Library building, which according to Knopf, was a floor built specifically as a meeting place for the masons. In September of 1911, however, the lodge held its first meeting at its new Masonic Temple at the YMCA building on Liberty Street, which had been previously damaged by fire.

The lodge stayed at this location well into the 20th century, with the 50’s and 60’s, according to Walker, being when the lodge enjoyed its best attendance. “There was a downtown then,” he said. The masonic temple at that time would have been atop J.C. Penney and N.K. Wendelboes, Liberty Street department stores that would have made up the heart of that downtown.

The women would leave their husbands at the lodge and go shopping, said Walker. “Sometimes you’d even see kids,” he added, “playing cards, watching television, just having conversations.” Added Nelson, the masons’ lodge meetings used to be referred to as “a night out for a fellow,” and wives were all too happy to approve that night out knowing that the masons neither served alcohol nor encouraged wild behavior like “chasing women.”

It would be 99 years before the lodge would move from their Liberty Street residence, transferring again to the Odd Fellows Hall in 2010. According to Walker, the lodge will be moving again in the near future, to the old Sucha Deal building in Starbrick. Prompted by the convenience of a ranch-style building, among other things, Knopf said that the move has been a goal of the group for some time.

“Oh, we’ve got goals,” Knopf said. Aside from obtaining a new building that they could renovate to their needs, he said, the lodge seeks this year to “start a new chapter.” Knopf said the group seeks, as it always has, to care for the members it has and to provide relief to the community as it is able. And, Knopf added, the lodge has been seeking to come out of the shadows they find themselves shrouded in.

“Last year was the first year in 52 years we marched in the 4th of July parade,” he said. North Star is also working on developing a fundraiser for a charity at this year’s Johnny Appleseed Festival.

The masons are, or at least wish to be, well known for their charity efforts, including the five masonic villages, retirement villages offering everything from skilled care to independent living in Elizabethtown, Sewickley, Dallas, Lafayette Hills and Warminster. The group also sponsors the Masonic Children’s Home in Elizabethtown, and the Masonic Youth Foundation, which “provides programs and resources for the young people of the Commonwealth,” according to the organization’s website, pamasons.org.

Knopf encourages anyone with interest in becoming a mason to explore www.pamasons.org, which is the only location online that the lodge endorses, adding that part of the reason for the cloak of mystery and incorrect lore surrounding the organization is the nature of erroneous information being published online.

He said that a lot of men come to the group thinking they know quite a bit about the masons only to find out that most of what they “know” is myth. Knopf said that if after learning more from the website a man has a continued interest in joining the organization, only then would he encourage someone to “ask someone you know who’s already a mason.”

“We’re thinking younger,” Nelson said of the organization that’s seeking to rehabilitate its reputation as an organization for exclusively older men.

It’s ironic that the youngest among them prizes, among many things about his involvement with the North Star Lodge and the masons in general, that he’s “doing something Ben Franklin did. This is the best organization I’ve ever belonged to,” Knopf went on to say. “These are some of the best men I’ve ever met in my life.”