The thirty-second story
What happened
In 1912 a group of Bend men took a mark for their town, and at a dinner the following January they made an extraordinary wager on it. They agreed to wear it every day, in their coat lapels, on their doors and on their windshields, until Bend had a hundred thousand people. Their founder called the town “a town of two thousand.”
The club lasted twelve years. The mark outlasted it. In 1922 the town was told it could use the emblem in any way it saw fit, and when the club wound up two years later the paper wrote that the mark had been “given to the town for the use of all.” A century on, Bend reached the number.
The original club is gone. The Emblem remains.