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Emblem Club dinner success
The Bend Bulletin · June 10, 1918
In the story: 4. Emblematic measles, 1917–1922.
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Two hundred people, the club's own songs, and a dinner timed around a departing train.
This is the club doing the thing it was built to do. Cheney founded it in 1912 as a way of showing Bend to people who might invest in it or write about it, and six years on, with its founder in town and running the music, it put two hundred people in a room and sang at them until the train.
Two details are worth holding. The first is “the songs and nonsense rhymes of the club” — the club had a repertoire of its own, and this is the archive's plainest statement that it did. The second is the toastmaster, A. Whisnant, a name the club's records had not carried.
And the sentence about the train is the whole character of the thing in one line. The banquet was not an evening's entertainment that happened to end; it was scheduled backwards from a departure.
From the source
More than two hundred members of the state bankers' association and the Emblem club and the citizens of Bend attended the reception tendered by the Emblem club to the bankers on Saturday evening. All during the course of the banquet the songs and nonsense rhymes of the club were sung, interspersed with addresses by the visiting bankers, who responded to the call of A. Whisnant, toastmaster. Many were the eulogies tendered to the Emblem club and to Bend for her hospitality during the two days.
The dinner commenced at 5 o'clock and was finished in time to take the visitors, who were compelled to leave town that evening, to the train.