Many thanks to Root Simple reader JE for identifying that strange Bernard Maybeck building that I posted about last week. It turns out to have been a temporary Panama-Pacific Fair building constructed in 1915 for the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo, a sort of goofy fraternal order for the lumber industry. Here’s what the membership of the order looked like:

The order’s origin can be traced to a group of lumber salesman amusing themselves during a seven hour train delay on January 21, 1892, in Gurdon, Arkansas. From the Hoo-Hoo website:

Full of this idea, the group set about to mold the initial tenets of the new order; it was to be a war on conventionality; there would be no lodge rooms with forced attendance; no marching in the streets in protest; no “bothering” anybody; no uniforms or flashy regalia. There would be one single aim: to foster the health, happiness, and long life of its members . . . The word “Hoo-Hoo” had been coined by Johnson himself only one month earlier at Kansas City in describing a most peculiar tuft of hair, greased and twisted to a point, atop the otherwise bald head of Charles McCarer, of Chicago. The name Hoo-Hoo became a catch phrase among the lumbermen in various areas to describe anything unusual or out of the ordinary. A good poker hand was a “Hoo-Hoo hand.” A strange hat was a “Hoo-Hoo hat”. The breakfast which was prepared by the old lady mentioned above was a “Hoo-Hoo breakfast” because the lady’s fingerprints remained on both sides of the pones even after they were cooked. Thus, Hoo-Hoo well described this new order, and since the word “concatenate” means “to unite,” it was decided the two words made a perfect marriage.

Here they are in the mid-twentieth century promoting wooden toilet seats, something I just can’t get behind (so to speak):

After the fair the Maybeck Hoo-Hoo building was put on a barge and shipped to Cupertino where it burned down in 1926.

A digression–the log columns on Maybeck’s building remind me of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s charming goose hut:

For those of you with evenings to fill and ties to the forestry industry, it appears that the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo is still around and still rocking the same fantastic black cat logo. They also went co-ed. Just don’t tell Alex Jones about the order and those wooden toilet seats or the fun will be over.

More info on the order and the fate of the Maybeck building here.