The first annual banquet

Twenty men, seven courses, several hundred carnations shipped in — and the emblem on the candle shades, on the walls and in the ice cream.

The club’s own founding occasion, and the Bulletin gave it a headline, two decks and four paragraphs. Twenty men in a borrowed house on a Saturday night in January, with a seven-course dinner served by Corketts, Hunter’s orchestra playing, and speaking, singing and music that “kept the banqueters busy until far along in the ‘wee sma’ hours.’”

What the emblem is doing that night is the reason this page is here. It is on the candle shades, made translucent so the light comes through it. It is on banners round the walls. It is in the ice cream, which the paper calls “emblemized”. Six months after a land company bought a page to say the brand was copyrighted, twenty men are eating it.

The host paid for all of it. Cheney came down from Seattle, shipped in several hundred carnations, and “came down from Seattle to entertain the present enrollment of the Emblem Club” — a phrase that says the club already had a roll before its first annual banquet. His obituary in 1943 put the same arrangement plainly: no initiation fee, no dues, and the entire cost carried by him.

The songs were the ones sung at the Seattle Railroad Excursion banquet the previous September, “again heard, reinforced with others”. The speeches were about “Bend’s resources, possibilities and publicity enterprises”, and plans for the year were considered.

The paper calls it the first annual banquet, not a founding meeting. It reports 20 participants; the book prepared for the occasion says the club had 21 members.