A word before I begin. I have been the Society's historian since 1991, which means I keep the minute books, the photographs, the old ledgers in Arabic that only three of us can still read, and a shoebox of programs from every hafla since the war. What follows is what those papers say, and what the old people told me when I was young, and what I saw myself. Where I am not sure, I say so. Where I am sure, I am usually right. My wife used to say that about me also, but with a different tone.

Our people came from what was then Ottoman Syria, most of them from the villages of Mount Lebanon, and some from Damascus, Homs and the towns around them. The great emigration began in the 1880s and ran until the First World War. Families were poor, the silk trade that had fed the mountain villages was failing, and letters were coming back from cousins in New York, Boston, Detroit and Toledo, and from Brazil, Argentina and Mexico too, saying there was work.

In the American records of those years, all of them were called "Syrians," because there was no country called Lebanon yet. That came after the First World War, when the French drew the map. So in our minute books from the 1930s you will see "Syrian" and "Lebanese" used for the same families, sometimes in the same sentence, and nobody minded.

Many of the first men in America were peddlers. They walked the country roads and city streets with a case of notions on their backs: needles, thread, lace, ribbons, holy pictures, tablecloths. They saved, they sent for their wives and brothers, they opened dry goods stores and groceries, and their children went to school. In 1924 the United States passed a law that nearly closed the door to new immigrants from our part of the world. That is one reason so many of our people went to Latin America instead, and it is how a Lebanese boy came to be born in Monterrey. My father liked to say that he went to Mexico because America was full, and came to America because Mexico was too hot. Both were half true.

By 1931 there were perhaps a hundred and fifty Lebanese and Syrian families in Toledo, most of them on the east side and downtown, and the Depression had come down on all of them. Stores were giving credit they would never collect. Men were out of work. When a family lost somebody, there was sometimes no money for a funeral, and the others took up a collection at the door.

On a Sunday afternoon in March of 1931, fourteen men met in the back room of Jim Abraham's dry goods store to do something about it. My father was one of them. I was eleven and I was sent to the front to watch the store, which I did by eating Mr. Abraham's licorice. They agreed to form a society, to pay dues of twenty-five cents a month, and to use the money to help with burials, to look after widows and orphans, and to buy coal for families who could not. They named it for the cedars of Lebanon, the old trees on the mountain that are in the Bible and on the flag, because the cedar lasts.

William Saliba was elected the first president. Charles Corey, who had been a schoolteacher in the old country, wrote the constitution in Arabic and English, in a beautiful hand, and the original is framed in the hall today. John Habib, Philip Hage and Arthur Farris were the first committee. That first winter the Society bought coal for nineteen families and paid for four funerals, and it did not miss a month.

In 1934 the women, who had been doing the cooking for every meeting and noticed that they had no vote, founded the Ladies' Society. Jessie Salem was its first president and Ida Corey its treasurer. The Ladies' Society raised money with dinners, bake sales and a yearly bazaar, and within five years it had more in the bank than the men did. This has been true ever since. I was told never to put that in writing. I am seventy-nine, and I have decided I can.

During the Second World War, forty-one sons of the Society's families served in the armed forces, and I was one of them. Two of our boys did not come home. Their names are on the bronze plaque by the door of the hall, and we read them aloud every Memorial Day.

For seventeen years the Society met wherever it could: in the back of a store, in a church basement, in rented rooms over a bakery where the floor shook when we danced. After the war the young men came home with steady jobs and the G.I. Bill, and the Society finally had the money and the hands to have a home of its own.

In the spring of 1948, under President Philip Hage, the Society bought an old two-story brick lodge hall for $14,000, with a down payment that came mostly from the Ladies' Society, as I was told never to put in writing either. It needed everything. For a year the men worked on it every weeknight and every Saturday. Howard Nassar, who was a carpenter, laid the new dance floor upstairs, and you are still dancing on it. Patrick Aziz did the wiring, so we are still dancing on that too. The ladies insisted that the kitchen be finished before anything else, and they were right, because they fed the workers out of it every night. I hung doors and painted and carried things, and I was proud to do it.

The hall was blessed in the spring of 1949 by the priests of three parishes, because our families belonged to three different churches and nobody wanted to choose. There was a dinner afterward for four hundred people, and the dabke went until two in the morning.

We paid off the mortgage in seven years, and in 1956, at the Society's twenty-fifth anniversary dinner, Arthur Farris, who was president then, burned it in a big brass tray in the middle of the dance floor while the band played. That August the Society held its first mahrajan, and we have held one every summer since.

These are the names I have from the minute books of the founding and the building of the hall. Many of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are members today. If your family belongs on this list and I have missed it, please write and tell me, and tell me gently.

Raymond Habib served six years and then agreed to be treasurer, which he says is a promotion. I have known every one of these men and women but the first two, and those I knew as a boy, when they seemed to me as tall as the cedars. I am grateful to have been one small branch.