A governor at the Emblem Club

The highest office the clubhouse is known to have entertained, reported by two country correspondents who were not reporting it.

In June 1915 the Emblem Club gave a banquet in Bend for Oregon’s governor and the state officials travelling with him. The club was three years old.

The page that carries it is the Bulletin’s Neighborhood News — a whole broadsheet of country correspondence, who visited whom, whose motorcycle blew up, whose cow was lost — and the banquet reaches it sideways, in two settlements’ columns, neither of them reporting the evening. Tumalo’s correspondent notes it because four Tumalo men went; Alfalfa’s because A. O. Walker did. Both are set apart below.

The two notes disagree in a small way worth keeping. Tumalo puts the banquet “at the Emblem Club”, Alfalfa says it was “given by the Bend Emblem Club”. Host or address, the page does not settle it — and both are printed within four columns of each other on the same sheet.

What the same page does settle is who was at the table. Tumalo’s lead item describes the lunch earlier that day, for “the party of state officials who inspected the Tumalo irrigation project” — “Governor Withycombe, Secretary of State Olcott, Attorney General Brown, State Engineer Lewis, G. P. Putnam and three members of the fish and game commission were the honor guests from Salem.” Railroad officials came with them, over two hundred sat down to the Tumalo lunch, and that evening the party went on to the Emblem Club.

One of those names was a founder of the club they were dining in. The Emblem Club’s first dinner, in January 1913, was at George Palmer Putnam’s house, and he is among the sixteen the 1913 account lists.

Tumalo’s column is dated Monday, 28 June and says “last Friday”, which puts the banquet on 25 June 1915. The account of the evening itself is on page one of this same issue, which this archive holds as its own record: a long table for the speakers, a second down the centre for the members, guests from five towns at small tables round the room, and the whole thing over by eleven because some of the party had a night train.