Twenty young kittens at the Emblem Club

A lumbermen's fraternity advertises an initiation at the clubhouse, and prints two cats to do it.

The Order of Hoo-Hoo was the lumber trade's fraternity, founded in Arkansas in 1892, and every part of its language is a joke about cats: nine officers for a cat's nine lives, a Snark of the Universe at their head, a meeting called a concatenation, a new member a kitten whose eyes are opened at initiation. The advertisement plays it straight through. At the head is the order's own device — a black cat inside a circular rule, its tail curled into a 9 — and at the foot a cartoon of a man in a bowler hauling a string of kittens along behind him.

For this archive the value is where it happened. The Emblem Club's building is named as the venue for another body's ritual, three days before the Bulletin would describe the club's week as a Monday dinner, this Wednesday banquet for forty-eight men, and the ladies' Thursday bridge. Hoo-Hoo men had been entertained at the club as far back as June 1916, when Addison Bennett wrote up a banquet and a bazoo band for visiting members.

One thing to resist. The Hoo-Hoo device and the Bend emblem share a construction — a figure inside a heavy circular rule — and this page prints one of them in a building named for the other. That is a coincidence of period taste, not a connection. Circular badges were what fraternal and civic organisations used in 1921, and nothing here links the two drawings.