Officers and thrift stamps

Five officers elected at the regular monthly meeting, and three young women selling war stamps with the refreshments.

Four words in this notice answer a question the archive had left open: “the regular monthly meeting”. The 1913 book describes a club with a single officer called the Taboo; the 1922 slate has a president, a vice president, a secretary-treasurer and four directors. When the one became the other was not documented here. It had happened by February 1918 — by then the club met monthly and elected a president, two vice presidents, a treasurer and a secretary.

Three of the five had ridden to Portland with the club in May 1913: C. M. McKay, R. B. Gould and H. W. Skuse. Carl Johnson would be first lieutenant of the Bend Rifles drilling in this building within two months, auction a buck’s head for the Red Cross in 1921, and speak at T. A. McCann’s farewell.

And the last paragraph is the war in a club room. Three young women serving refreshments sold twenty-five dollars of thrift stamps during the evening — small-denomination government savings stamps, sold to finance the war. The club was a place where that could be done between the election and the coffee.