Sixteen men, named

The club kept no roll that survives. On one morning in 1913 the paper printed the names of everyone who went to Portland.

In its first year the Emblem Club went down to Portland as guests of the Portland Ad Club, in a private car lent by the Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation Company — the same parlor-buffet-baggage car the Royal Rosarians used on their goodwill trips. More than three hundred sat down to the luncheon at the Portland Hotel. The Bend men, the paper said, “figured in other stunts, some of them advertising Bend and others simply indulged in for a good time.”

Sixteen went, and the paper names every one of them. The club was capped at forty members, so this is not the whole of it — but it is the longest list of Emblem Club members anywhere in the record, and no roll of the club survives to check it against.

The names tie the club to the rest of its own story. D. E. Hunter would sell the club its clubhouse six years later. A. M. Lara had chaired the committee that ran Bend’s 1908 medallion competition, four years before the emblem. J. C. Rhodes was the founder’s stepson, and G. P. Putnam published the paper this notice appeared in. Gould, Skuse and McKay would be officers by 1918.

The previous autumn the club had been on the other side of the same arrangement, hosting a Seattle Ad Club luncheon through the Bend Park Company. A publicity club, doing publicity, inside the booster network of the Pacific Northwest.