The swan was already Bend’s

Twenty years before the Chamber of Commerce took a swan as its mark, its manager was helping wire one up on Mirror Pond.

The Bend Water Pageant filled Mirror Pond for a weekend every July. In 1964 it opened on Friday the 24th under an arch spanning the Deschutes, built that year with a broad surface so it could be floodlit, and the Bulletin of the Thursday before ran the preparations on its front page.

The photograph shows three men crouched over an electrical installation. The caption names them: the Chamber of Commerce manager, a Jaycee, and the pageant electrician. The item beside it describes the pageant’s central figure, a great white swan, waiting to be moved into the river when the skies darkened, with the queen due to mount her royal swan barge at about half past nine and her princesses to take their places on cygnets. The theme that year was “Sounds of a Nation”.

The reason this is here is the bird. The Chamber’s own mark on its website in May 1998, and still in August 2001, was a white swan on a red diamond; the logo it chose by competition in July 1984 was a black rectangle with BEND in knocked-out letters and a swan standing in the B. Until this page was read, the archive’s account of that swan began in 1984 with the contest.

It began earlier, and the archive should say only what it can show. This page does not say that the winning design took its swan from the pageant, and this project’s standing rule is that resemblance is not descent. What it shows is that the swan was already Bend’s, on the town’s own pond in the town’s own festival, and that the Chamber was already close enough to that festival for its manager to be checking the wiring.

The emblem is not on this page, and it is not anywhere else in the issue: all twenty-four frames were read at a size where a display advertisement is legible. The archive it comes from serves a 1964 page at about 670 pixels, which is the limit of what any of this can show. That is one more bounded negative inside the long gap between the Chamber printing the emblem in 1953 and the Visitor and Convention Bureau using it again in 2001.