By TOM ATWELL, Portland Press Herald Writer

Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

When Walter E. Webber of Yarmouth was elected to lead the Scottish Rite Masons in the Northern United States, he already had a pretty good career as an attorney.

He directed the Portland law firm Jensen Baird Gardner & Henry, and was named as one of the Best Lawyers in America for a dozen years.

But as sovereign grand commander of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Northern Jurisdiction - a post he assumed in 2003 - he leads the Scottish Rite Masons in 15 states north of the Mason-Dixon Line and west to Illinois.

The Scottish Rite Masons is a 300-year-old fraternal organization and a more modern branch of the Free Masons, which may date back to the Crusades.

George Washington was a Freemason. Other well-known Americans who were masonic members include Paul Revere, Louis Armstrong, Presidents Harry Truman and Gerald Ford, John Glenn and Gene Autry.

The all-seeing eye is a popular masonic symbol; just check out the back of a $1 bill - the eye is printed above a pyramid.

Today, the Scottish Rite Masons is largely a civic organization, although at the local level in their degrees they perform plays that provide moral lessons when they initiate new members.

The fraternity runs 53 learning centers - including one in Portland and one in Bangor - that provide free tutoring to students with dyslexia.

As part of Webber's position, he is president of 32nd Degree Masonic Learning Centers and president of the National Heritage Museum in Lexington, Mass., where he has a home provided by the Scottish Rite.

Webber still maintains his home in Yarmouth with his wife, Leslie.

Q: How long is your term? Were you elected for a specific number of years or does it go until you retire?

A: Pretty much the latter. It goes in three-year terms, and I am serving the second year of my predecessor's term and expect to be re-elected to a new three-year term in Grand Rapids (Mich.) in August.

Q: How far back does masonry go? The tradition says to King Solomon's Temple, but few think it really goes back that far.

A: There is evidence of masonic symbols that we use in masonry today that go back to the 1000s. Craftsmen's guilds became organized during the Renaissance encompassing entered apprentices, fellowcrafts and master masons. As we moved toward the 1600s, the fraternity adopted those degrees, as well as a lot of the symbols that those stone masons used. I couldn't lay a stone, but I and other masons allegorically use the square that the stone mason uses to square his work to square our actions with the rest of mankind, leading a moral and upright life and not being guilty of fraud. The stone mason uses the trowel to spread cement, and we use the trowel to spread the cement of brotherly love and affection.

After that shift we know the Grand Lodge of England was organized in the early 1700s and is the third oldest body in the world, and the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts was organized in the early 1700s in this country.

Q: How about Scottish Rite: When was that formed?

A: Historically, it traces its origins to France, where a group of Scottish Masons, who were perpetually at war with England, had moved, and they gathered around masonry what they called the higher degrees, varying from the 4th degree to higher.

These got transferred over to the Indies, and officially Scottish Rite Masonry was founded in 1802 in Charleston, S.C., a practicing rabbi among them.

There were four Jewish brethren and seven non-Jewish brethren, continuing the establishment of the universal theme that any person (man) who believes in God can be a Mason.

Our jurisdiction consolidated in the union of 1867, and the first sovereign grand commander was Josiah Hayden Drummond of Portland. So the first commander and 13th commander are both from the state of Maine.

Q: How does a person become a Mason?

A: You have to ask and you have to believe in a supreme being. It has to be a monotheistic god.

Q: Why don't the Masons admit women?

A: It is a fraternity much as a college fraternity is, and it is the oldest fraternity in the world. It precedes any fraternity you can come up with. We do have the Order of the Eastern Star, which is open to wives, mothers, daughters and sisters of Masons, although that is not a fraternity.

Q: Is the membership list secret?

A: We don't publicize who belongs and who does not. Any mason can obtain that information. If someone called up Grand Lodge and asked if I am a Mason, we would say yes, because I am a public figure. If they asked if you were a Mason, we would want to be circumspect and ask why they want to know.

During World War II, masons were persecuted in Germany. Masons then wore forget-me-not lapel pins to identify themselves to each other and still not be identified to the government.

Q: Do Masons wear uniforms?

A: The Commandery has uniforms. That is York Rite. In Scottish Rite we have costumes for our degrees, which are morality plays for lack of a better term. We have people dressed as everything from a king or potentate, knights in armor, pageantry and blaring trumpets, all to make a point in a morality play.

Q: Tell me about the apron in the regular lodges.

A: Every new member is presented with a white leather apron, which is a symbol of innocence. It goes back to the days when stone masons would wear it to protect clothing because they were rubbing up against rough stones all day long.

Q: Masonry isn't a secret organization because there are masonic lodges prominently in most towns. But there are secrets. What can you tell me about those?

A: The only secrets are in methods of recognition, in the way that one person can tell that another is a Mason, but other than that there are really no secrets in masonry. Certain signs, symbols and words are one way one would recognize another person as a Mason.

Q: Masonry has received quite a bit of attention recently with the Dan Brown books ("The DaVinci Code" and "Angels and Demons"), and the movie "National Treasure" have mentioned masonry prominently. How has that affected masonry?

A: I think it is creating interest. We have all received a lot more inquiries, people asking what is it all about, as a result of "The DaVinci Code" and "National Treasure."

Masonry has never done a lot to call attention to itself. In the 1820s there was an anti-Masonic Party, and people denounced masonry. As a consequence masonry paid attention only to itself and did its charitable works quite quietly. Traditionally masonic charity was taking care of other members, widows of deceased Masons, and their children.

With the advent of Social Security, the need for a lot of the safety nets of caring for each other lessened from a monetary point of view, moving into things like mowing lawns and shingling roofs.

As the need for charity within our membership lessened, we created other charities. Masons spend in excess of $2 million a day on charitable organizations: We have our learning centers, hospitals, some are working with Alzheimer's. There are child identification programs, where we do videotapes, fingerprints and dental charts on children in case they are kidnapped or missing, (so) the parents will be able to identify them.

Q: Scottish has its own specific charities, doesn't it?

A: There are four basic charities that we do. One is schizophrenic research, and we have 15 $15,000 fellowships in schizophrenic research, looking for causes, cures or palliatives to help people with schizophrenia.

We originally started a scholarship program primarily for journalists. Leon Abbott was a journalist and Mason, and thought it was important to have people trained in that area.

That changed and expanded to $500,000, generally in $1,000 grants to Masonically related youth or graduates of Learning Center.

We give out $13,000 a year in Maine, but that is about to rise. Arnold Veague, a partner in Eaton Peabody (a Bangor law firm) left $1.43 million in his will to help Maine students through the Abbott scholarship program, and $90,000 will be available from that source to help with post-secondary education.

For all that we do in the field of education, every male educator in the country should be a Mason.

And in 1976 we formed the National Heritage Museum in Lexington, Mass., one of the largest masonic museums in the world. We have masonic jewels handcrafted by Paul Revere . . . a master's chair from Alexandria, Va., given to that lodge by George Washington when he was its master. It came from his study in Mount Vernon and it is still used by the master of that lodge.

In 1994, we started the 32nd Degree Masonic Learning Centers, and we have 53 of them open, tutoring to 1,300 dyslexic students in 15 states, and we have 300 tutors who teach those 1,300 students, all provided free of charge. . . . The average child is in our program a little more than two years, and almost always they read at least at grade level when they leave us.

Q: How many Scottish Rite Masons are there?

A: There are 7,200 in Maine, 247,000 in the 15 states of the Northern Jurisdiction and another 300,000 in the Southern jurisdiction.

Q: Membership in both masonry as a whole and Scottish Rite are declining. Are they going to survive?

A: Numbers have been declining since the 1960s, but we are seeing a leveling off of the decline.

Since 9/11 we are seeing younger people who are looking for moral touchstones, looking for a moral system that is lacking in society.

There is an increasing awareness on college campuses that there are greater things in life than drugs and money, that there is more to work for than ourselves.

This younger generation is looking to join organizations that give them moral touchstones, and they seem to be looking to masonry.

Staff Writer Tom Atwell, who has been a Mason since 1998, can be contacted at 791-6362 or at: tatwell@pressherald.com