Three skiers wearing the promise

The oath said members would wear the emblem every day and on every occasion. Here are three people doing it, on skis, in snow.

The certificate of membership six men signed on 4 January 1913 opens: “I agree to wear this emblem constantly, every day and upon every occasion, until Bend has a population of one hundred thousand.” This archive has had the sentence since the beginning and, until now, almost nothing that shows it being kept.

The photograph is museum-held and appears for about four seconds in the museum's 2013 video. Three people stand in snow on wooden skis with a snow-covered rail fence behind them, and each wears a circular BEND emblem, the size of a saucer, on the chest of a sweater or a shirt. Two of the sweaters are light and carry the disc dark; the third is dark and the letters read light against it.

Nothing dates it. The narration does not, the frame carries no caption, and the museum's holdings are not publicly catalogued. The club ran from January 1913 to May 1924, so a photograph of its emblem worn on clothing is very likely from inside that span — but “very likely” is not a date, and the record says undated.

The drawing cannot be fully read either. The letters are about seventy pixels tall in a video frame of a photographic print: broad, filling the disc, running into a thin ring, with a three-armed E, a notched B and an ordinary capital N. What does not resolve is how the strokes turn and how the last letter ends — and those two are exactly the characters that would separate the 1912 cut from the 1917 rounding. So the drawing is read as far as it goes and placed in no family.