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Over the hill
The Bend Bulletin · July 28, 1921
In the story: 4. Emblematic measles, 1917–1922.
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The club sang. This archive had known that for years and had not one word of it. Here are four.
The 1913 book gives the club's oath, its creed, its motto, its colours and its uniform. The paper of June 1918 says that at the bankers' banquet “the songs and nonsense rhymes of the club were sung” all through the evening. Between them they establish beyond doubt that the Emblem Club had a repertoire, and until now this project had not recovered a single line of it.
This is one verse of one song, and it is entirely in character. The club existed to make Bend known; the song walks down the coast naming the cities that already were; and when it reaches Portland it stops to tell the state capital's older sister that more than half of Oregon lies on the far side of the Cascades and she has not noticed. That is the Emblem Club's whole argument, set to a tune, and aimed at exactly the audience it was built to reach.
The Bulletin thought so too. It reprinted this editorial in the weekly a week later, and in August 1922 quoted the same four lines again — “the fact stated in the Emblem club song that we have quoted here so often” — which both names the song as the club's and tells us the paper had made a habit of it. The rest of the song has not been found.
From the source
OVER THE HILL. In the days when the Emblem club existed for the purpose of extending hospitality to visitors to Bend and to help to make Bend known to the outside world there was included in its song repertoire one telling of the leading cities of the Pacific coast, including San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. In the Portland verse the city was called ‘the mother of them all' and the verse proceeded thus:
Mother's old and cannot realize, but soon we hope she will — More than half the State of Oregon's the other side the hill.
The reference was, of course, to the wide expanse of the state east of the Cascades and to the profound ignorance concerning the greater portion of the territory that existed in the minds of a great number of the people of Portland. We think that we have spoken of this before using this same verse as a text.
