Ten kittens and a tiger

The lumber trade ran the town, and its fraternity held its initiations in the Emblem Club's hall.

The Order of Hoo-Hoo is the lumbermen's fraternal society, founded in 1892, with a black cat for its emblem, nine officers, and a private vocabulary in which a meeting is a concatenation and a new member is a kitten. On the night of December 12, 1921, ten kittens were “expected to be sent through the mysterious rites attendant upon admission to the organization” at the Emblem club, announced by Frank R. Prince, head of the order in Bend. About forty members were expected to attend. The three visiting members named — D. Cale, H. Cale and R. J. McCormick — were sales agents for the Shevlin-Hixon Company, in from Minneapolis and Omaha.

This matters beyond its comedy. Bend in 1921 was a mill town — Shevlin-Hixon and Brooks-Scanlon between them employed much of it — and the Emblem Club's building is where the lumber trade's own fraternity met. The hall had already taken the Elks, the Knights of Pythias, the American Legion, the militia and the Commercial Club. Here it takes the industry that paid for the town.

The club had voted itself into a purely social body two years earlier. By 1921 its room was simply where Bend organised itself.