The size of a dollar

The moment somebody in Bend first proposed a device for the town's club — and it has a name on it.

This archive already held the prize notice — the Bend Commercial Club offering $10 for the best idea for “a medallion or sort of trade mark”, sketches to A. M. Lara by January 31. That is January 17. This is January 10, a week earlier, and it is the meeting the notice came out of.

What it adds is the authorship of the idea and the shape of the brief. Lara did not merely chair the committee and hold the sketches: he proposed the thing. And he proposed it with particulars — about the size of a dollar, for letterheads and envelopes, with a legend beneath it that reads like an invitation to write to Bend and ask.

The legend is the part worth sitting with. “All Inquiries Cheerfully Answered.” Four and a half years later the Emblem Club would exist to answer inquiries about Bend, its founder would print forty thousand booklets to attract them, and its members would swear an oath to keep it up until a hundred thousand people lived here. In January 1908 a general merchant at a club meeting asked for a mark the size of a dollar with that sentence under it.

None of which makes it the emblem's ancestor. The searching has been done and the answer is a negative: no winner, no adopted design and no follow-up is reported anywhere in this paper between January 1908 and the emblem's publication in July 1912, on a vocabulary widened beyond the word emblem — which the 1908 notices never use — to medallion, trade mark, best design and design contest, across every cached page of 1908 to 1912.