Bend's twelfth annual

The cup in a printed prize list, between the general display tables and the cucumbers.

The Civic League issued a premium list to govern Bend’s twelfth annual flower display, and printed it as classes down two columns. Single Entry, then Roses, then Gladioli on the left; on the right the tables. The Emblem Cup is the first prize in one of them. Under it comes “General Display Tables — First prize Commercial Club Cup”, and then the fruit and vegetables: cucumbers, tomatoes, head lettuce, potatoes, string beans, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, at fifty cents and twenty-five.

It is worth having precisely because it is so ordinary. By 1925 the Emblem Club had been gone for a year, and its cup sits in a printed list as a class heading, on the same page as the price of a first prize for raspberries. The terms are the 1920 rule again, unaltered.

The Civic League is the body running it here — the same organisation that in 1921 sold the club a buck's head and hide.

And the heading settles something. “Twelfth annual” in 1925 counts the series from 1914 — which is exactly what 1927's “14th annual” and 1933's “twentieth annual” also give. Three independent years agree on a 1914 start. The outliers are the 1939 account dating the first show to August 19, 1911, and the 1940 notice calling it the Bend Garden club's 19th, which counts from 1922. The likeliest reading is that the show was renumbered more than once as the body running it changed hands — Library Club, Civic League, Garden club.