A band concert, Emblem Club lawn

An advertisement inviting the whole town onto the club's grass.

The Bulletin had set the scene a fortnight earlier. The visiting potentate would bring “the band of the Mystic Shrine, which contains about forty pieces, also the Chanters, consisting of twenty voices, and the Arab patrol, consisting of thirty members”. The band would play on the club's lawn, the Chanters would take part, and afterwards the Shriners would go on to the Pilot Butte Inn for dinner, then parade the candidates to the Athletic club building for their journey over the hot sands.

What the archive gets from this is the lawn. The Emblem Club's building has been in the record as a dining room, a hall, a venue for other bodies' banquets and, three weeks earlier, a place where two hundred people sat down to sing at visiting bankers. Here the ground outside it is the town's concert pitch, with a forty-piece band on it and “Everybody Invited” set in italic at the foot of a paid advertisement.

The advertisement was placed by the United Warehouse Company — wholesale distributors of oil, gasolene, flour, salt, meats, ham, bacon and lard, fertilizers for lawns and farm lands, general commission merchants, we buy hides — A. M. Pringle, manager. A company that sold lawn fertilizer paid to invite the town onto a lawn, which is either a coincidence or the neatest piece of placement in the file.