A year the archive lost

Historic Oregon Newspapers holds no 1926 Bend Bulletin. This is how one day of it survives anyway.

Twelve years of the Bend Bulletin are missing from the digitised run — 1923, 1924, 1926, 1928 to 1932, and 1934 to 1937. For those years the paper's own retrospective column is the only instrument that reaches back at all.

On August 17, 1951 it reached back twenty-five years, and the heading is set apart below with the item because the heading is what makes the item checkable. That is a cup year recovered from a year with no surviving run, and a winner’s name that exists nowhere else in the record.

The column also dates itself in a way that can be tested. Its heading reads “August 17, 1926 (It Was Tuesday)”, and August 17, 1926 was a Tuesday. A wrong year would almost always produce a wrong weekday, so where the parenthetical appears it is a genuine check — one this column passes, as does its companion of July 20 that year.