Home / Archive / November 29, 1916
We entertained an angel unawares
The Bend Bulletin · November 29, 1916
In the story: 3. Wearing the promise, 1914–1916.
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The club's founder, asked for his impressions, dates the day the railroad builder walked in.
Robert E. Strahorn was the railroad promoter who built the Oregon, California & Eastern and was trying to open Central Oregon to rail. This archive has carried, from a later account, that Cheney was credited with interesting him in the area and that Strahorn “came to the club about 1914”. This page is the source, in Cheney's own dictated words, and it fixes the date at two years before November 1916.
It is also the second piece of Cheney's own prose this archive holds outside the club's 1913 book — the first being the poem the Bulletin reprinted in October 1918. Both are florid, both are promotional, and both show the same instinct: the man who wrote the club an oath about a hundred thousand people reaches for scripture to describe a railroad man visiting a dining room.
The rest of the page is Cheney describing panoramas taken under his direction to assist Strahorn in building the Oregon, California & Eastern and Surprise Valley railroads — photographic work, by the man who wrote and illustrated the Bend Park Company's books.
From the source
When visited by a representative of The Bulletin yesterday and asked for his impressions, Mr. Cheney dictated what follows:
When Robert E. Strahorn first came to the Emblem Club two years ago, we ‘entertained an angel unawares'; and Bend, Portland, and Central Oregon found the only man on earth who could solve the problems — one whose wonderful achievements and beautiful character made him loved and admired throughout the whole Northwest and his opinions respected, both here and in the money centers, from Portland, Oregon, to Boston, Massachusetts.