Bring him, dance him, take him home

The club's own voice, printed, and the first of its kind in the town.

That is the whole item and every word of the invitation is in it. The archive holds very little of the club's own voice — the 1913 book, four lines of a song, and now this: a card got up by the club's women, in the imperative, with the joke landed in four beats and a time in it.

It also moves a date. This project filed the leap year party of March 1920 as the club's leap year dance, and it was — but the paper of 1916 says the first in Bend was four years earlier, in this building, and by the same club. Leap years fall every four years; the club held one in 1916 and one in 1920, and the record now has both.

The 1920 party would draw more than sixty couples, be decorated in blue and gold, and be postponed once by a ban on public gatherings. This one is a card and a sentence. Between them is the whole distance the club travelled from 1916 to 1920.