Blue and gold, the club colors

Sixty couples, a jazz orchestra, and the club's colours on its own walls eight years after it recorded them.

Blue and gold. The club recorded those as its colours in July 1912, when the Bend booth at the Seattle Potlatch was “decorated throughout with blue and gold, the colors of the Emblem Club”, and the 1913 book gives them among the club's own particulars. After that the archive had nothing until a Chamber of Commerce bureau's website in 2002 and the museum's artwork in 2012 — a gap of eighty-nine years across which the colours could only be assumed to have held.

This page closes part of it. In March 1920 the colours are not a recorded fact about the club; they are on the walls of its own building, on a Saturday night, in front of a hundred and twenty people, and the paper calls them “the club colors” without explanation because its readers did not need one.

The rest of the evening is worth keeping too. The hostesses called for the men and took the initiative in securing dances — the leap year convention played straight, and a further sign of what the notice a week earlier had said outright, that the women were members. Manzanita with the blue and gold is a Central Oregon detail no imported decorator would have chosen. And Wilson George, whose jazz orchestra played, had sung solos at the club's St Patrick's dance the year before.