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A snowball burst from the ceiling
The Bend Bulletin · January 21, 1922
In the story: 4. Emblematic measles, 1917–1922.
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The fullest description this archive holds of what an evening at the Emblem Club was actually like.
The archive has a great many notices that the club entertained. It has very few that say what happened. This one does, in enough detail to reconstruct the shape of the evening: a grand march to open, a cotillion in which the leaders set each figure and the dancers alternated the choosing, favours handed out as they went, supper at eleven, more dancing, and then the whole room brought to a stop under a paper snowball rigged to the ceiling.
Two of the names are already in the file. Mrs. J. C. Rhodes's husband, J. C. Rhodes, had been elected vice-president of the club a week earlier. C. A. Hayden's name recurs through Bend's social columns of the period. That a member's wife co-led the evening's principal figure sits alongside the March 1920 notice that called the women lady-members.
The date is Monday, January 16, 1922 — a mid-January party in a club that would vote itself out of existence twenty-eight months later.
From the source
The Emblem club entertained on Monday evening with a dancing party at which a revival of the cotillion formed a delightful innovation. The leaders in the French quadrille were Mrs. J. C. Rhodes and Mr. C. A. Hayden who introduced the figures by leading a grand march following which ladies and gentlemen alternately chose partners for each of the fanciful dances that made up the remaining figures in the cotillion, at the same time presenting small favors provided by the leaders. Luncheon was served at 11 o'clock and the dancing again resumed.
As the final figure a serpentine march was carried out and at the final position an unusual surprise feature was staged in the bursting of a huge snowball suspended in the middle of the ceiling and the subsequent showering of myriads of tiny snowballs.