 "Photo: Rob Strong")
 "Photo: Rob Strong")
Sarah Ridout and Amie Glover sat at a picnic table in the backyard of Scottish Rite Dormitory, finishing the dining hall pork tenderloin, green beans and applesauce.
"It's creepy when they all come here in their suits," said Ridout. "I mean, if it wasn't an all girl's dorm, and we didn't all know they were Masons."
Amie Glover, a curly-haired Plan II and English sophomore, nodded.
"Yeah, like when they bring out the big poobah chair and put it in the ballroom, and you just know that's where the head guy is going to sit," she said. She took a bite of her roll and reflected. "Actually, I take that back ... it's not a poobah chair - it's a throne!"
Several times a year, the Masons come to board meetings at the dorm. Glover said that her great uncle - "or something like that" - had been a Masonic master.
"Oh," said Ridout, a communication studies junior. "You are so in."
The girls discussed formal Christmas dinners, waiters who hang around, boys sneaking in and couples making out in hammocks nearby.
Glover said that the pros of being able to walk around in a towel and borrow shoes and purses definitely outweigh the cons of living in a private dormitory where boys are only allowed to visit for 10 hours a day on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
"Basically, it feels like a big, old grandma's house," said Ridout as she gently pushed a stray black cat the girls call Butch away from the table with her flip-flop.
Located on 27th Street and Whitis Avenue, Scottish Rite Dormitory - or SRD as residents call it - looks more a mansion than a dorm. Live oaks shade the winding paths that lead to the building's white pillars, pink brick and wide windows. Started in 1922 to create a wholesome "home away from home" for the daughters of Master Masons during a housing shortage at the University, Scottish Rite is the only dorm in the country to be run by Masons. Some traditions, such as the Christmas dinners and waiters, have remained the same, but the 84-year-old dorm has changed with the times.
Curfews don't exist - girls just have the maintenance men buzz them in - and it is rumored that the security cameras in the stairways are there to enforce the anti-boy curfews. Meals are now served buffet-style. And now, because of changes in the application process, about half the girls don't have Masons in their families.
Around the corner from the front desk where girls cash checks and the bureau where towels are set out when it rains, two pictures tell the story of the dorm's changes. The first one is wide and black and white. It shows girls wearing straight dresses with modest necklines. It is something of a tableau, with the girls scattered around the lawn. They sit, stand and sprawl below the trees, some smiling wanly, some pouting. A clump of the administrators stand in black dresses to the right. The picture was taken during the fall semester of 1922. Below it is last year's group photo. The girls are crowded together on and below the stage of the ballroom, wearing jeans, sweaters and miniskirts. In the bottom row, the waiters - about 20 male UT students who go through a rigorous screening process - kneel, roll their eyes and grin.
Masonic origins
"The dorm was designed to make darn good and sure our young women received the best care, attention and living conditions possible," said Gordon Kelso, as his pet Chihuahua, Beanie, skittered across his desk. Kelso is on the dorm's advisory board of local Masons.
Kelso has been a member of the Masons for more than 45 years and a member of the Scottish Rite for more than 35. He became a member of the Masons because his dad was one. The Masons are a fraternal organization with official roots going back as far as 1700s Europe. But many members think that their history goes back further.
"Hell, we don't even know when it started," said Kelso as he leaned back in his chair. Many of the founding fathers of the United States were Masons, and Kelso estimates that 80 percent of the founders of Texas were Masons. The Freemasonry has kept lodges in Texas since the 1830s.
The Masons impart moral lessons to their members through rituals. Those rituals generally include a short play that tells an old story about knights or kings in order to illustrate the duties of that Rite. To become a Master Mason, an initiate goes through three rituals after the lodge has checked into his character. The Scottish Rite and the York Rite have more degrees, lessons and ceremonies.
"It's sort of a graduate school for freemasonry," said Kelso.
He said that the philanthropy of the Masons grows out of Masonic ideals - brotherhood, fraternity, equality and chivalry. Some members really get into the rituals - the different costumes and roles - and some are more in for the charity.
In Austin, the Scottish Rite runs a children's theater and learning center for dyslexic children. In Dallas, it maintains a hospital. Kelso said the Scottish Rite Dormitory is an extension of the Masons' work for the community.
"We protect our ladyfolk," he said. "That may sound old-timey and idealistic, but what a wonderful thing it is."
Curfews, panty hose and radios
Between 1934 and 1937, when Margaret Berry lived in SRD, house mothers - often the widows of the Masons - planned pajama parties in the grand ballroom. The girls wore silk panty-hose, and no one left the dining room table until everyone was finished. Berry, a UT historian who is writing a book about the dorm, remembers boys splitting the cost of renting cars to go on double dates in a pasture where a local man named Dillingham let students, who brought radios and picnicked, park safely.
"They used to say it took 18 minutes to get from Dillingham's to SRD," Berry said.
The dormitory locked all its doors at 11 p.m. on weeknights. To warn students curfew was coming near, Dillingham shone a flashlight or rode a horse out to students.
If Berry came in past sundown without permission, she risked having a note sent to the dean of women. Three times a day, a bell rang, at which point the 300 girls rushed downstairs to sit at the table for meals served family-style. A senior would sit at the head of the table and act as hostess.
Berry remembers The Daily Texan criticizing SRD for mentioning Christ in the prayers the waiters - sons of Masons - said before dinner. At the time, the University didn't provide health services, and there was an infirmary at SRD.
Local Masons came over for dinner from time to time, and it was traditional to have a party on George Washington's birthday, because Washington was a Mason. Berry had a long line of Masons in her family - she remembers her grandfather repeating the creed to himself - and so did most of her friends.
"The Masons felt that if they had the daughters of Masons living in the same place, it'd be a good thing," said Berry. "And they were right - I made a lot of lifelong friends."
As the years rolled on, the rules stayed just about the same as they were in Berry's time. In a resident's handbook from the 1950s - "Your Guide to Gracious Living" - the rules are laid out next to ink drawings of pretty girls with crimped skirts: Rolled-up hair, blue jeans and shorts were not allowed in the dining room during the three seated meals of the day. If you had to stay out after 6 p.m., you were to call the counselor on duty so that she could check your parental permission form, take the escort's last name and sign you out. SRD girls who had taken 21 or more hours were allowed six overnight visits in Austin per semester, provided they put in a request early enough for the dorm to call the hostess and make sure she was expecting guests.
But as the University culture and dress code opened up in the '60s, the dorm slowly began to modernize. Berry said that the Masons who have always overseen the dorm often retained old-fashioned ideas. It was difficult for the older men to understand the lives of the teenage girls, Berry said.
A fairly modern SRD
In Berry's day, priority was given to daughters of Masons, then granddaughters, and so on. If an applicant didn't have a family tie to the Masons - and usually, the dorm filled up with those who did - applicants had to get recommendation letters from two Masons and one from a Masonic lodge.
But 15 years ago, the dorm was only half-full. Dorm administrators appealed to the Scottish Rite Masons on the board of directors. They agreed to change the policy. Now if you're not tied to the Masons, the dorm will secure sponsorship for you. Suzie Holt, administrator for the dorm, said that what matters now isn't Masonic sponsorship, but how quickly you turn in your application.
"I know the Masons probably wouldn't like to hear that, but that's just how it is," said Holt, smiling.
Since the dorm opened up its admission, there have been wait lists every year. The wait list for next fall is already filling up with girls putting down $250 deposits. Depending on the size of the room, board costs range from $8,085 to $10,435.
Holt said that the youngest applicant she's ever seen was in grade school.
"She must have been about 8 or 9," said Holt, of the picture attached to the application. "Her mom went to SRD."
Holt said that usually, girls' parents are discouraged from applying before high school.
Kelso praised Holt's leadership and said that the Masons - on the advisory committee locally and the board of directors statewide - trust her completely. Kelso mentioned doing things as simple as checking bank rates and negotiating contracts for work done on the dorm. Retired congressman and former Texas Supreme Court justice, "Judge" Jack Hightower, president of the dorm board and head of the Scottish Rite Masons in Texas, keeps his office in the basement.
"We're here to help Suzie out with whatever she needs," said Kelso.
But to some residents, the role Masons play in heading the dorm is mysterious.
Glover and Ridout noted that "some guy" who is a Mason has his offices in what, until last year, was the "ghost wing."
"I don't know how often he's there or anything," Ridout said as the sun set and couples squeezed into the hammocks nearby.
Ridout described getting a maintenance worker to unlock the "ghost wing" last year. Girls used to live in that wing, with a basement and windows that opened onto the lawn in the 1970s, when it was known as "the sketchy wing" because girls could sneak guys in easily.
But it was shut down. When they visited, they found the busts of men, paintings and Masonic hats in tissue paper. The girls' rooms were nearly unchanged; furniture was still in place, and there was still lipstick writing on the mirrors.
"It looked like they had left yesterday, you know?" said Ridout, shuddering.
Renovations last year took out the ghost wing. What's currently in the East Wing shows pretty well what SRD is like now: Across the hall from a door to Judge Hightower's office full of first-editions of books about everything from jurisprudence to the Masonry, girls punch in to the workout room and use weights, step machines and skiers, and watch MTV on plasma screen televisions.
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