What the Emblem Club cup was for in 1933

Nine years after the club voted to disband, a committee was still deciding each August what its cup would be for.

The Emblem Club’s silver cup first appears in 1912, offered for the best all-round display of flowers. This notice, from a year the earlier newspaper sweep never read, shows the prize still in the show’s rotation twenty-one years later, under a category the committee had restated on page one two days before the show.

That reassignment is the point. The cup was not a memorial sitting in a case. It was a working prize in a slate alongside other civic and service-club trophies, and nobody had a reason to retire it.

The notice is a correction as much as an announcement: it exists because the previous day’s paper had printed the Garden club’s terms backwards, as “not less than 25 varieties” where the rule was not more than 25. The Emblem club’s line is restated in the same breath.