The telephone calls started early in the new year.

Grundsow Lodsch Nummer Dreizeh Haaptmann Barry Miller began fielding calls in early January for tickets for the lodge’s annual family style banquet at the East Greenville Fire Company social hall, an event traditionally held the last Monday in March.

Miller gave callers disappointing news.

“We are no more.”

On Jan. 12, Emmaus Groundhog Lodge #13 closed its doors.

In a letter to The Press, lodge board member Neil Moyer outlined the road to the decision to close the lodge including increased costs for the banquet; the failing health of three members; the deaths of three board members in the past year and the difficulty in finding replacements fluent in the Pennsylvania German dialect to fill those seats.

Such factors “prompted Haaptmann (President) Barry Miller to reluctantly recommend the lodge close. The six Roaadsmenner (board members) in attendance reluctantly agreed,” Moyer wrote in his letter.

“I got my ticket from my cousin who was on the board,” Earl Kleinsmith said of the first banquet held by Lodge #13 at what was then the Owl’s Home in downtown Emmaus, the current home of the South Mountain Cycle bicycle shop.

It was 1963.

“I got drafted that year and missed the next two (banquets),” Kleinsmith recalled in an interview at the Emmaus Public Library Feb. 5.

The Emmaus lodge joined others in the Lehigh Valley including Gundsau Lodsch Nummer Ains on da Lechaw (Groundhog Lodge #1 in Allentown on the Lehigh).

A list of 18 lodges is included in the 2025 banquet program for Lodge #13. Nearby lodges include #14 in Coopersbarrick (Coopersburg), #9 in Dublin, Bucks Kounti and #7 in East Greenville, Montgomery Kounti.

The lodges preserve and promote the retention of the Pennsylvania German culture and dialect, a dialect in which current Lodge #13 board members are fluent, speaking the dialect with family since childhood, they explained.

The annual banquet hosted by Lodge #13 featured a menu of traditional Pennsylvania German foods served family style with gfrore raahn (ice cream) often for dessert, entertainment including German songs and skits and a guest speaker. Newest lodge members received red or blue kerchiefs to mark the occasion. Over the years, banquet favors for attendees to take home included flashlights, pens, wooden coins, letter openers, combs, caps, rulers, magnets and homemade cookies shaped like groundhogs.

In 2025 banquet guests received trivets crafted in the Emmaus Foundry.

The banquet also featured a procession showcasing Grundy, Lodge #13’s groundhog mascot.

Board member Don Ritter, the archivist of Lodge #13 memorabilia, owns Grundy.

“My wife told me I was crazy but I got one,” Ritter said of Grundy. A friend who was a taxidermist did the honors in the mid-20th century.

The banquet also served as a fundraiser.

Past recipients of donations from Lodge #13 include the Emmaus Public Library, the Zionsville Area Food Pantry and Emmaus Ambulance.

Final donations from the lodge will go to Citizen’s Fire Company (Vera Cruz) and Upper Milford Western District Fire Company #1, both in Upper Milford Township.