The Chamber picks a logo, and it is not the emblem

Thirty entries, a hundred-dollar prize, and a winning mark with a swan standing in the B.

At the foot of the Community section front on Tuesday 17 July 1984, under the heading “Logo winner named”, the Bulletin reported that a Bend artist had won a contest to choose a new logo for the Bend Chamber of Commerce. Jon Rhoads, the chamber president, said it would go on membership wall plaques, stationary, brochures and other promotion material. The design was picked from thirty entries. “Stationary” is the paper’s spelling.

The winning logo is printed beside the notice, which is what makes this a record rather than a note. It is a black rectangle with BEND in tall knocked-out letters, a landscape of mountains and water inside them, a swan standing in the B, and “Chamber of Commerce” beneath. It is not the emblem, and it is not a roundel of any kind.

That matters because of what the Chamber was doing on either side of it. The Chamber is the body that adopted the emblem as Bend’s own in June 1922, and printed it an inch across at the top of a full page in 1953. In May 1998 the Chamber’s own website masthead was a red diamond with a white swan — this logo’s bird, on its own. In August 2001 that swan was still the Chamber’s mark, on the same page where its Visitor and Convention Bureau was using a BEND roundel.

So the Chamber did not drift away from the emblem and back. In 1984 it ran a competition, judged thirty entries, gave a prize and adopted something else on purpose. Whatever returned the roundel to that building by 2001 was a separate decision, and nothing on file says what it was.

The contest itself is unexamined. Thirty entries existed; some may have been roundels. Ed Carson of Design of the Times and Jon Rhoads are named here and nowhere else in this archive.

It is filed with club life rather than with the emblem in use, and the distinction is the point: this is not an appearance of the emblem. The collection that holds appearances is counted as appearances in four places on this site, and a record of the Chamber choosing something else does not belong in that number. The precedent is bb-1912-07-17, the Bend Park Company advertising without the emblem two weeks after claiming it, filed the same way for the same reason.