| |
Who?
Hoo Hoo. That’s Who.by
Bob Bowman | |
Separated
by more than 200 miles, Gurdon, Arkansas, and Lufkin,
Texas, share a unique legacy: the Concatenated Order of the Hoo Hoo, an international
fraternity of lumbermen.
In 1892, five lumbermen waiting for a train at
Gurdon decided to walk around the town and finally stopped to rest on a stack
of lumber beside the railroad.
Armed with frequent libations to ward off
the chill of the night, they decided that lumbermen needed a fraternity and came
up with the Order of the Hoo Hoo, using Egyptian lore for the order’s titles,
customs and rituals.
Concatenated, said newspaperman Bolling Arthur Johnson,
meant chained or linked, symbolizing the closeness of members of the order. As
their symbol, they adopted a black cat with his tail curled to form the figure
nine, indicating it had nine lives.
The club would have nine officers,
nine directors, meet at nine minutes past 9 p.m. on the ninth day of the ninth
month. The order limited its membership to 999 with monthly dues of 99 cents and,
as the organization grew into an international fraternity, the limitation was
increased to 9,999.
The words Hoo Hoo came from Johnson’s description
of a tuft of hair on the otherwise bald head of Charles H. McCarer, a fellow newspaperman.
Instead of having a president, the Hoo Hoo order elected a Snark, a name
taken from Lewis Carroll’s book, “The Hunting of the Snark.”
Johnson said
in 1912 that the “whole scheme of annual meetings of lumbermen was a bore.” The
Hoo Hoo order, he said, would be “a war on conventionality.”
But, ironically,
it wasn’t a lumbermen who brought the Hoo Hoo order to Lufkin
in East Texas, although the town was
heavily dependent on lumbering.
In the 1890s, Lufkin
had a community band sponsored by the Lufkin Weekly Tribune. The “Trib Band” often
performed on Lufkin’s downtown
Cotton Square.
Around 1903, Johnny Bonner, a Lufkin
native living in Houston, contacted
Tom Humason, a member of the Trib Band, and invited the band to accompany the
Texas Hoo Hoo delegation to an international meeting in Milwaukee.
The
band’s performances, featuring ragtime music, were greeted with such wild enthusiasm
by the Hoo Hoo members that the Trib Band was named the official band of the order.
“After that, everywhere we went, we were known as the famous Hoo Hoo
Band of Lufkin, Texas,” recalled
Sam H. Kerr in a 1953 interview with the Dallas Morning News.
Today, the
Hoo Hoo Band is no more, but is remembered by a mural on Cotton Square and a nearby
Texas Historical Marker.
Gurdon, Arkansas, however remains the home of
the International Hoo Hoo Order and occupies a building near the one-time stack
of lumber where the Order’s beginning was conceived in 1892. |
|
|
