Blooms featured at garden show

The Emblem Club cup as one of five, listed together, in a show dedicated to the army.

Then, under “Winners Selected”: “Judges for the show, Dr. J. F. Hosch, Mrs. E. W. Williamson, and Mrs. Clarence Elder, chose the following winners as recipients of special prize cups in addition to the blue ribbons: victory arrangements, Mrs. Weil, Elks club cup; miniature, Mrs. S. W. Thompson, Johnson trophy; modernistic arrangement, Mrs. E. Rasmussen, Emblem club cup; underwater, Mrs. B. A. Shellhart, chamber of commerce trophy; and flower-vegetable combination, Mrs. Thompson, garden club cup.”

This archive already holds Mrs. Rasmussen's 1943 win from three August pages — the announced terms, the winning entry described, and the award itself. What it did not have is the slate entire. Here are all five cups in one sentence, and they show exactly what the Emblem Club cup had become by 1943: one prize among five, for a category — “modernistic arrangement” — assigned to it by a committee that year, alongside an Elks cup, a Johnson trophy, a chamber of commerce trophy and the garden club's own.

The 1912 cup was the club's, offered on the club's terms, to be kept by anyone who won it three seasons running. Nineteen years after the club dissolved, the terms are set by the Bend garden club, the venue is the USO club, the show is dedicated to the army, and the categories are wartime: a victory arrangement, and vegetable displays from 4-H victory gardens in Tumalo, Richardson and the Merry Diggers club of Bend. The name on the cup is all that is left of the Emblem Club in it.

The show is also numbered. “Bend's 22nd annual garden show”, in 1943, counts back to 1922 — not to 1912, when the club first offered its cup at a flower show, and not to 1914, which the 1927 show's own numbering implies. The archive records the count and does not reconcile it.