The Chamber’s swan, three years before its roundel

Three years before the roundel, the Chamber’s website carried a swan.

The Bend Chamber descends from the Commercial Club that adopted the emblem as Bend’s in 1922, so what it puts on its own masthead is worth knowing. In May 1998 that was a red diamond with a white swan.

The Chamber adopted that bird by competition fourteen years before this capture. In July 1984 it ran a contest for a new logo, judged thirty entries, and gave the prize to a Bend artist named Ed Carson; the Bulletin printed the winner, and it is a black rectangle with BEND in knocked-out letters, a landscape inside them, and a swan standing in the B. This masthead is that bird, on its own. The bird itself is older than the contest: the Bend Water Pageant put a great white swan on Mirror Pond every July, and in 1964 the Chamber’s own manager was among the three men checking the float wiring. That is where the swan was already living, which is not the same as saying the winning design came from it.

So the swan is not a gap between roundels. It is a chosen identity with a date, a jury and a prize behind it, and it is still the Chamber’s own mark in August 2001 — on the same page where the Chamber’s Visitor and Convention Bureau is using a BEND roundel. What needs explaining is the roundel’s presence on the Bureau’s side, not the swan’s on the Chamber’s.

The caution this record was originally kept for still stands, and is worth more now than it was: a single capture of a single file was briefly made to carry a claim about a whole decade, the next capture overturned it, and a newspaper notice fourteen years earlier explained both.