{
  "id": "news-1920-08-18-1",
  "title": "\"Such a historic building\" — the fire chief on the Emblem Club, August 1920",
  "publisher": "The Bend Bulletin, 1920-08-18, image 1; Historic Oregon Newspapers",
  "sourceClass": "primary",
  "url": "https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn90051770/1920-08-18/ed-1/seq-1/",
  "accessedOn": "2026-09-12",
  "notes": "The daily's page-one report of the cuspidor fire in the Emblem club hall, carrying Fire Chief Carlon's statement that Bend \"could hardly afford to lose such a historic building as the Emblem club\". The weekly's shorter version, filed as news-1920-08-19-4, omits the quotation and prints a different hour.",
  "record": "https://bendemblem.com/archive/news-1920-08-18-1/",
  "evidence": {
    "id": "news-1920-08-18-1",
    "kind": "history",
    "date": "1920-08-18",
    "summary": "The daily's report of a small 1920 fire carries the only sentence in thirty years of the Bulletin that calls the Emblem Club's building historic.",
    "findings": [
      "A cigarette dropped in a wooden cuspidor in the Emblem club hall burned through the container and the floor overnight; steward J. R. Jones found it at 5:30 the next morning and turned in the alarm.",
      "Fire Chief Carlon is quoted: \"The fire might very well have been a serious one, and Bend could hardly afford to lose such a historic building as the Emblem club.\"",
      "Across 18,618 cached Bulletin pages from 1903 to 1932, this is the only page on which \"historic\" and \"Emblem\" appear within ninety characters of each other.",
      "The weekly's version of the same story, filed as news-1920-08-19-4, omits the chief's statement, prints the hour as 6:30, and says \"the Emblem club\" where the daily says \"the Emblem club hall\"."
    ],
    "limitations": [
      "The quotation is the newspaper's rendering of what the fire chief said; no other record of his statement has been located.",
      "\"Historic\" is the chief's word about the building, which the archive elsewhere identifies as A. M. Drake's 1900 house. He does not say what he means by it, and the sentence is not evidence about the club's own standing.",
      "The corpus count covers pages the harvest has cached from the two Bulletin titles; 14 pages in that range were never retrieved, and the search depends on the provider's OCR, which is imperfect. It is a measured floor, not proof of a unique occurrence.",
      "The reported cause is the newspaper's account; no fire investigation file has been located.",
      "Which paper has the hour right is not established here. The daily reports the same morning and the weekly a day later, but that is an argument, not evidence."
    ],
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        "title": "“Bend could hardly afford to lose such a historic building as the Emblem club”, August 18, 1920.",
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  "exhibit": {
    "id": "news-1920-08-18-1",
    "title": "Such a historic building",
    "intro": "A small fire, and the only sentence in thirty years of the paper that calls the clubhouse historic.",
    "body": [
      "Then the fire chief spoke, and the paper printed him. “It should be a lesson to people to use only fireproof containers for any burning substance,” Fire Chief Carlon declared this morning. “The fire might very well have been a serious one, and Bend could hardly afford to lose such a historic building as the Emblem club.”",
      "The archive already has the building's other life: it was A. M. Drake's house, put up in 1900 by the man who founded Bend, and quietly fitted out as a clubhouse in 1914 with Emblem hall added on. What it did not have was anyone in the period saying so. A search of every cached page of the Bulletin from 1903 to 1932 — 18,618 of 18,632 — finds the words “historic” and “Emblem” within ninety characters of each other on exactly one page, and this is it.",
      "So the earliest surviving statement that the Emblem Club's building mattered to Bend as a piece of its own past is not a club minute, a subscription list or a newspaper's retrospective. It is a fire chief, on a Wednesday morning, explaining why people should stop putting cigarettes in wooden spittoons. Thirty-six years later the Bulletin would use the same word over the demolition: “Historic A. M. Drake House Being Razed.”",
      "The weekly Bulletin ran a shortened version the next day and cut the chief out of it. It also prints the hour as 6:30 rather than 5:30, and says the cuspidor was “in the Emblem club” where the daily says “in the Emblem club hall”. Both readings were confirmed on each paper's own native-resolution scan. The archive records the disagreement rather than choosing."
    ],
    "related": [
      "news-1920-08-19-4",
      "news-1914-02-11-3",
      "news-1920-07-29-7"
    ],
    "date": "1920-08-18",
    "collection": "club-life",
    "publication": "The Bend Bulletin",
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        "caption": "“Bend could hardly afford to lose such a historic building as the Emblem club”, August 18, 1920.",
        "alt": "A newspaper column headed “Cigarette Stub Cause of Blaze”, reporting a fire in the Emblem club hall and quoting Fire Chief Carlon calling the club a historic building.",
        "credit": "The Bend Bulletin · Historic Oregon Newspapers, University of Oregon",
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    "quote": "A lighted cigarette dropped in one of the wooden cuspidors in the Emblem club hall last night gradually burned its way through the container and then through the floor. J. R. Jones, steward of the club, discovered the fire at 5:30 o'clock this morning and the Bend volunteer department responded immediately to the alarm which he turned in. The fire was easily controlled, and the damage was reported to be slight."
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