Mr. Cheney arrives

A three-line local item, and the answer to a question this archive had left open for a fortnight.

Two weeks earlier the Bulletin had reported that Cheney “has already wired the committee that he will be here to take charge of the evening's program”. This archive filed that notice with the obvious limitation attached: a plan made in advance is not an attendance record, and whether he came was not established. He came.

It matters because of who he was and when this is. Cheney founded the Emblem Club in 1912 from Seattle, was its only officer — the Taboo — bought the Drake property and carried the building's whole cost himself, charging neither dues nor an initiation fee. By 1918 he had been a Seattle businessman for years and was about a year from moving to Oklahoma. This is the last dated occasion in the archive on which he is physically in Bend running one of the club's evenings.

The item also contains an error that dates itself. It says “Saturday evening, June 9th”. June 9, 1918 was a Sunday; the Saturday was June 8, which is the day the convention programme put the club's song service, and the day the report of the dinner four days later calls “Saturday evening”. The paper has the weekday right and the date wrong.