Ethnic social clubs.

In "The Story of Immigration in America" (February 20 issue), author Michael E. Telzrow referenced the social clubs formed by the legal immigrants in America's past. As a second-generation American-born member of a German immigrant family, I have vivid memories of my experiences in such a club.

It was an inexpensive place where a blue-collar working man could bring his wife and three children and have a restaurant meal at a reasonable price. The food was authentic, too. It was frequently prepared by a man who had served as a cook in the army of the Emperor Franz Josef. A great number of the mothers in the club had been motivated by a great desire to know as much as they could about the families of the members, hoping that their children would choose their husbands and wives from amongst the children of other members, and they wanted to help their children make intelligent choices. Virtually all the members professed a Christian faith. Traditional Christian family values were strong, too. Marriage was unquestionably a union between a man and a woman with the children coming afterward.

I can recall as a youngster seeing an "Honor Roll" of names posted on a wall and, not seeing a school name, asking what "Honor Roll" meant. I learned that it was the list of the members of that club who had served with the U.S. military during World War I. Also as a youngster, I noticed our family name was unusually short when compared to the multi-syllable German names. I later learned that our family name, Hyde, was an Americanization of Heidenbrand.

When I reached the age of 21, I was eligible to join the club, and I did. I began to understand why the prices were so low. The club conducted fund-raising activities via musical performances of traditional European songs and dances. This benefited all the members by using those funds to keep the prices low. Membership in the club made one eligible to purchase sick benefit insurance at a group rate, a financial benefit that had been popular in the past, but was seeing diminishing participation as most club members by that time had jobs with paid sick days and healthcare benefits. Nevertheless, it was an example of Americanism at work, as it was privately funded rather than socialized financial assistance. When hurricanes did damage, we cleaned up our own backyards afterward, with "governmental" cleanup done predominantly at the local level. We never would have even considered asking the federal government to do the cleanup. Anyone insane enough to demand that the federal government do the cleanup would have been laughed out of the club.

The legal immigrants of yesterday, who assimilated, stand in stark contrast to the illegal aliens of today. The legal immigrants of those days came here to become Americans. They obeyed America's immigration laws as they entered just as they were predominantly law-abiding citizens once here. Their loyalty was to America. As school children, it would have been unthinkable to have staged a classroom walkout followed by desecrating the American flag by flying it under a German flag with our marching around the flagpole chanting, "The Aryan race united." Our teachers would not have allowed it, and the news media wouldn't have condoned it either. The punishment we would have received at school would have been a mere down payment on what our parents would have added with close encounters of the painful kind with a wooden board of education at home.

KURT HYDE

Corinth, Texas