(See Cover)
Dr. Gordon G. Johnson hung up his dentist's drill, got a bite to eat and headed for Medinah Temple, Chicago headquarters of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Doc made a beeline for the third floor where the Temple's Oriental band was gathering.
Lanky Eddie Gall, traffic cop at Dearborn and Madison, rubbed his big bass drum with glass wax. Ed Roubik, warehouse foreman, licked the mouthpiece of his ebony musette pipe and squealed a few notes. Hefty Morton H. Petrie, salesman for a candy company, strapped on his whip drum and knocked off a couple of tiddybums, tiddybums. Shrieking pipes and throbbing drums in the hands of 60 middle-aged musicians swung informally into The Hootchy-Kootchy, Little Egypt's tune at the 1893 World's Fair.
For 40 Friday nights Doc Johnson had been rehearsing his boys. Tonight's session was for last-minute touching up and instructions. "Bleach those leggings out," Doc directed. "Be sure they are white. I'll check up sure as hell and if they aren't right you won't get in the parade."
Diamond Jubilee. All around Chicago last week, the scimitar-crescent-and-star flag of the Shrine flapped from hotel windows. Hotels as far away as Waukegan got braced for 75,000 fez-wearing nobles from the 160 Shrine temples in the U.S., plus wives and children. This week, in sweltering Chicago, they will celebrate the Shriners' Diamond Jubilee.
The first big event on the schedule was the parade down Michigan Avenue: Doc Johnson's boys and some 1,500 other temple bandsmen; the Medinah nobles in $42,500 worth of new uniforms; the country's leading citizens decked out like Zouaves and harem guards; Imperial Potentate Galloway Calhoun of Tyler, Tex., sitting in a car in a bower of 120,000 Texas roses; 1,000 chanters (glee clubs), drill teams, the mounted Pinto Patrol from Oklahoma City, the Black Horse Patrol from the Kansas City, Mo. Ararat Temple (whose most illustrious noble is Harry S. Truman).
New "Pote." After the parade, wealthy Medinah Temple, which values its building, equipment, robes, rugs, fezzes and investments at more than $2,000,000, becomes the center of formal activities. Noble high jinks on Chicago's street corners and in Chicago bars are left to individual enterprise. For the climax, on stage at Medinah Temple, a new Imperial Potentate (sometimes referred to as the "Pote") would be named. This year he was no less a person than Harold Clayton Lloyd, of Burchard, Neb. and Los Angeles, Calif., better known as the comedian hero of such Jazz Age films as The Freshman, Safety Last and Grandma's Boy.
Chanters from Lloyd's Al Malaikah Temple in Los Angeles had practiced Lloyd's favorite songs (Marcheta, The Donkey Serenade). Choice sequences from Lloyd films had been put together to be shown on a screen, finally dissolving into a shot of Mrs. Lloyd and her three children—Gloria, 23, Peggy, 22, and Harold Jr., 17—in the garden of their 16-acre Beverly Hills estate. Then there would be a bouquet of roses for Mrs. Lloyd, and a new Cadillac sedan for the new Pote, purchased with 10¢ contributions from 42,333 California nobles. Said Lloyd in pleased anticipation: "The whole thing is usually done in a very lovely style."