Another lodge, born in the room

Two months after it reopened, the Emblem Club's hall was where Bend's Elks lodge came into existence.

On the night of June 27, 1919, sixty Elks — men who already belonged to lodges elsewhere in the country — became charter members of a new Bend lodge. The institution was carried out at the Emblem club by Deputy District Grand Exalted Ruler Toney of McMinnville, who was expected to arrive by auto that afternoon with other prominent Willamette valley Elks. Officers were to be elected and the lodge's first business transacted the same night.

The distinction matters. The Emblem Club's building was Bend's general-purpose hall, and the paper names its users constantly — the Legion, the Episcopal Guild, the fire department, the high school, a bishop, a proposed airplane company. But the Elks did not merely meet there. Bend's lodge of the B.P.O.E. began there, on a borrowed evening, and went on to outlast the club that lent the room.

The report is written in advance of the evening and predicts it; it is not an account of what happened.