Five cups in a shop window

The trophies went on public display for four days before the show, and one of them was the Emblem Club’s.

The five: the Theodora S. Johnson cup for the best still-life exhibit; the Lions club trophy for the most outstanding arrangement in the show; the Bend Garden club cup for the best bowl of perennials or annuals for colour harmony; “the Emblem club trophy, for the best modernistic entry”; and the Elks club prize for the most points won by one exhibitor.

Two things follow. 1940 was a blank year in the cup's record and is now filled — and modernistic becomes a run rather than a one-off, since it was also the Emblem cup's class in 1939 and in 1943. Modernistic arrangement was a real competitive style then: spare, asymmetric, Japanese-influenced, set against the massed Victorian bowl.

And the cup was a public object. Twenty-eight years after the club gave it, and sixteen after the club ended, it spent four days in a shop window on Wall street with the town's other trophies — the same habit as 1920, when the Emblem and Commercial club cups were shown at Larson & Co., jewellers.