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Dinner at the Drake house
The Bend Bulletin · February 11, 1914
In the story: 3. Wearing the promise, 1914–1916.
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The Bend Park Company had announced the Drake house sold to a Chicago man. The Bulletin says plainly that this was a hoax, and why.
The second annual dinner, and the paper uses the word hoax about the company that owned the paper’s biggest advertiser. The Bend Park Company had put it about that Alexander Drake’s house on the Deschutes — the house the man who platted Bend had built at the turn of the century — was sold to a Chicago buyer who meant to live in it. There was no Chicago buyer. The story was cover for the repairs, and the members found out at dinner.
Who Cheney brought is the other half of it. Three men of the O.-W. R. & N. Co. — the railroad — a man from the Pacific Telegraph & Telephone Company in Portland, and a doctor. A club that had existed for thirteen months was feeding the railroad and the telephone company in a house it had just secretly fitted out.
The building would be the Emblem Club’s for a decade, take an addition the following summer for two hundred diners, hold the town’s library through the war, and end as the Masonic temple. Cheney had bought the Drake property; in 1919 he gave the club his equity in it.
From the source
EMBLEM CLUB DINNER
Annual Meeting Held Saturday Night in Drake House.
The annual dinner of the Emblem Club was held Saturday evening, W. D. Cheney coming in from Seattle for the occasion on Friday. Mr. Cheney brought with him to be his guests at the dinner William McMurray, H. C. Oliver and W. J. Leonard of the O.-W. R. & N. Co., C. H. Moore of the Pacific Telegraph & Telephone Co, Portland, and Dr. E. A. Pierce. L. M. Foss of Bend was also a guest.
The dinner was held in the Drake house which has been fitted up as a club house for the Emblem Club. The announcement some time ago by officials of the Bend Park Company that the house had been bought by a Chicago man who would make his home here was a hoax for the purpose of keeping secret the true reason for the extensive changes and repairs that have been made in the house to fit it for a club house.