Danish Brotherhood Lodge 325 marks 100 years at Malverne celebration

Some Danes of Long Island gathered in Malverne Saturday to mark the centennial of Lodge 325 of the Danish Brotherhood in America.

"Anybody who wants aquavit, go to the bar and they'll pour you one. Enjoy each other's company," said Eddie Lang, 74, a retired painting contractor from Freeport who is the group's president.

The kitchen committee laid out a feast of herring prepared four ways, smoked salmon, pâté, potato salad, Asier pickles and dense pumpernickel bread.

Lodge 325 used to own a clubhouse and draw 300 people to annual dances; now its membership is smaller and older, shaped, like many community groups on the Island, by forces of American demography and culture.

"Our kids are too busy with their kids with sports," said Johnna Bedell, 83, a retired caterer from Oceanside who was laying out the spread. "We're desperate to keep it going."

About 30 guests gathered in a rented American Legion Hall, with about five times as many sisters as brothers.

In its heyday in the early 20th century, the Brotherhood had some 20,000 members in lodges nationwide. Many members were immigrants or their descendants, who joined for health benefits, the credit union and fellowship. Early meetings were conducted in Danish and open only to men.

There have never been many Danes on Long Island — they number a little over 1,100 now, according to the Census — and in 1963 the 325 opened its rolls to women. It started conducting meetings in English, though it maintained for many years the tradition of closing them with a Danish song.

"We were young," said Birgit Jacobsen, 94, one of the longest-tenured members, of the early days. She was an immigrant fluent in English, but nonetheless "I was happy to meet people who spoke my language," she said. In those days many members had young children; she remembers many children's parties.

As 325 has aged, it has shored up its numbers, in part by admitting members like Ana Marquez, 68, a retired school clerk from Freeport. Marquez is from Guatemala and does not speak Danish. But she is friends with Lang's wife and in four years of semi-monthly meetings, she said, she has come to find comfort: "We gather, share stories, everybody catches up," she said. "It's like being with family."

In a phone interview, Erik Andersen, executive director of the Museum of Danish America, in Elk Horn, Iowa, said that the Brotherhood grew after a wave of late 19th-century immigration. By the early 20th, Medicare and Social Security supplanted some of its practical functions; besides, after World War II, Danish immigration slowed to a trickle. The country grew prosperous and "there was no good reason, financially, to come to the U.S. Education and healthcare were paid for."

A history of 325, written in the early 1980s, describes how, during the Depression, membership suspended health benefit premiums for members who could not afford to pay; they signed promissory notes and made good on them "when times got better."

After World War II, when Europe was devastated and the U.S. was comparably flush, they sent Christmas crates of "clothes, coffee, rice and nuts." They did the same for American servicemen during the Korean war.

I'm forever grateful to Denmark for what they did.

— Eddie Lang, president

Years later, Lang said over his aquavit, when his first wife passed and he was the single father of three young children, 325 and the Brotherhood paid for his two oldest to go to summer camp in Minnesota. He went deeper into history: It was Danes, he said, who had welcomed his German-Jewish mother during World War II, where she met the Danish man who would become his father; and it was Danes, under Nazi occupation, who smuggled her to Sweden, where he was born.

"I'm forever grateful to Denmark for what they did," he said.