A farewell for T. A. McCann

Eleven months after he had signed the clubhouse over to them for a dollar, forty members of the Emblem Club sat down to say goodbye to T. A. McCann.

A stag party for a man going back to Minneapolis, and it is one of the most useful pages in this archive because of who is named in it.

The guest first. The paper gives him in full — T. A. McCann, vice president of The Shevlin-Hixon Lumber Company — which settles two other records. In September 1920 the week’s conveyances had carried the line “T A McCann to Emblem club, lot 2 and part lot 1, blk 4, Bend; $1”, and in June 1916 the Oregonian had listed “Manager McCann, of the Shevlin-Hixon Company” among the speakers at the Hoo-Hoo banquet. One man, one company, and he handed the club its building eleven months before they gave him this dinner.

Then the nine speakers, who are a cross-section of the town the club had become. Hugh O’Kane, whose building on Bond and Oregon had the emblem set in leaded glass over every window. Clyde M. McKay, one of the sixteen who rode to Portland with the club in 1913. H. E. Allen, who had been president that January and would be re-elected to the board at the meeting that voted to disband. Carl A. Johnson, who had auctioned a buck’s head for the Red Cross earlier the same year. C. S. Hudson in the chair, who had bought that head and given it to the Civic League.

By 1921 the Emblem Club is not a promotional body any more. It is forty men in a room, seeing off the vice president of the mill.