The banner on the back wall
Deschutes Historical Museum · Undated
This record carries no date and is not plotted along the story. The archive holds it.
A banquet hall, striped bunting, a row of flags, and the emblem the size of a table top above the heads of everyone eating.
The Bulletin's report of the first annual dinner, four days after it happened, lists the decorations: carnations by the several hundred, Hunter's orchestra, “specially designed candle shades, with translucent Bend emblems on them, ‘emblemized’ ice cream, and a generous decoration of emblem banners on the walls”. This is what one of those walls looks like, though the archive cannot say it is that wall or that night.
The photograph appears twice in the museum's 2013 video, at about twenty-five seconds and again at seventy from a second angle down the tables. A wooden hall, long tables laid with cloth and flowers, a hundred or more people seated, and on the back wall a circular BEND banner set in striped bunting with American flags fanned out either side of it.
It is undated, like the skiers, and for the same reasons. And it is the softest of the four objects the film carries: the disc is about forty pixels of letter in a 720-line frame, partly crossed by a flag, so the drawing is not read here at all beyond the plain fact that the word fills the circle and reads across.