Mike Klotzbach and Mike Corona showed up at the Batavia Elks Lodge #950 today, they said, for a sense of closure.
Klotzbach had been involved with the lodge for more than a decade and Corona for nearly 15 years.
They had a lot of good times in the lodge building, they said, and they enjoyed serving the community through Elks.
In February, the Grand Lodge shut down Batavia's 105-year-old lodge for reasons that have never been fully explained.
Today, the Bontrager auction service took bids on many of the items left in the lodge building at the corner of East Main Street and Wiard. Both Klotezback and Corona said they wanted some memento of their dedication to the lodge. For Klotzbach, he walked out of the back door with an American flag. Corona successfully bid on a set of red velvet chairs.
"It's just a keepsake," Klotzbach said, "just something to remember the club by, the time and effort."
Klotzbach said there were 200 members in the lodge, 35 or so who were active and essentially kept the lodge running, and among those, he said he would count himself as the top three most active. As a trustee and board member, he said, he was deeply involved in the issues surrounding the Grand Lodge's decision to pull the local charter.
He said it came as a total shock when it happened.
"I felt let down," he said.
As Corona loaded the last of his dozen or so chairs in the back of his black pickup truck, he said he would miss his time at the lodge. For him, it wasn't just a place to hang out, it was a place that enabled community involvement.
"I'll remember the time we gave to the community," he said.
The local Elks were involved in fund raising for local youths, including scholarships for deserving high school students.
Klotzbach added that everybody involved in the lodge misses the camaraderie.
"People just don’t know what to do now," Klotzbach. "Where do you go? It was more than just a neighborhood bar.
"With the closer of something you’re intimately involved with there is a hole," Klotzbach added. "The schedule of our lives revolved around this place. We’re doers. We’re leaders. We weren’t followers."
Both Klotzbach and Corona expressed concern about some items not being put up for auction (which resumes at 9 a.m., Wednesday) and those are the plaques upstairs that list the names of deceased members. They said auctioneer Todd Jantzi only told them the plaques weren't being put up for auction, but he doesn't know what will happen to them.
"The last thing I want to see," Corona said, "is for them to wind up in the basement of some other lodge."
The Batavian attempted to contact Kenneth Perry, one of the trustees appointed to the closure of the Batavia lodge by the Grand Lodge, but he was not available when we called.
"We knew a lot of the people on those plaques," Corona said.
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