This Shriner Is Real Thing

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Transcribed from the clipping

MIAMI (AP)—One of the nobles clad in the colorful garb of a Shriner during the Southeastern Shrine convention here is the real thing—an Arabian. He is Abraham Audi, a native of Ramallah, Arabia, and now a resident of Miami. Now 66, he once was titular head of a tribe of 5,000 horsemen.

During the current Shrine convention he is acting as an aide to illustrious potentate Henry E. Kopplow of Miami’s Mahi Temple, of which both are members. Audi, then bearing the title of sheik, first came to the United States when 14 to appear in an exhibit of Jerusalem at the St. Louis World’s Fair.

Back home, he was drafted into the Turkish army but fled and joined the French. He returned to the United States in 1907, served in the First World War as an intelligence officer, and finally settled in Miami. He married a Chicagoan, Madge Mallory. He became active in the fraternal order known as the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine—the Shrine.

How this transcription was made

NOTHING ON THIS CLIPPING IS DATED. There is no masthead, no folio and no page number, and the dateline is “MIAMI (AP)” with no date at all, so the date of 3 September 1954 rests on the hand-typed slide label alone, as does the newspaper: this is Associated Press copy out of Miami that could have run anywhere in Florida. The story’s own arithmetic does not quite close either. Mr. Audi is “now 66” and “first came to the United States when 14” for the St. Louis World’s Fair, which was held in 1904; that puts his birth about 1890 and his sixty-sixth year about 1956, two years after the label’s date. A rounded age in an agency brief is the likeliest explanation and it cannot be proved from the page, so the tension is recorded rather than resolved. “A native of Ramallah, Arabia” is what the paper printed, read twice at 4.8x and not repaired. Ramallah is not in Arabia and never was; the whole item turns on the joke that a man in Shriner costume is “the real thing—an Arabian”, and to make the joke work the paper moved his home town. Read at 4.8x throughout; the browning of the newsprint did not affect legibility.

Cite this clipping

"This Shriner Is Real Thing," Fort Pierce Tribune, 3 September 1954. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1954-019. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1954-019