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A last bottle with an old friend
Deschutes Pioneers’ Gazette · 1969 letter · reprinted 1981
In the story: 6. The emblem outlives the club, 1930–2010.
J. Clark Rhodes carried the club's liquor home when Oregon went dry in 1915, saved a case of 1904 champagne, and opened one of the bottles with Jim Overturf fifty-four years later.
His 1969 letter to Phil Brogan recalls the January 4, 1913 dinner at George Palmer Putnam’s home and names those present. The Deschutes Pioneers’ Gazette reprinted it in January 1981, crediting the Phil Brogan Collection.
The bottle is not from that dinner, though this project said so until the letter was read against the page image. Rhodes removed the club’s stock of liquors to his own home when Oregon prohibition began on New Year’s Day 1915 — “where, by great effort, they were safely stored (for at least several weeks)” — and salvaged a case of Monopole, Heidsick, Reims, 1904.
Fifty-four years later he took one bottle to Hood River. The passage below is how that ended, and it is the last thing anyone who was in the room wrote about the club. It runs from page 2 to page 6 of the Gazette across its own “Continued from Page 2” break, which is one passage continuing rather than two joined; three characters eaten at the edge of the column are bracketed.
The phrase “in memory of absent companions”, which this site carried for a year and which reads like the letter, is not in the letter. It was this project’s paraphrase, quoted back as though it were the source — which is the reason the passage is set here in the paper’s own words rather than summarised again.
Rhodes wrote many years after the events. His recollection of the club’s beginnings sits alongside contemporary notices that already name it in 1912.
From the source
A few days ago I visited Jim Overturf in Hood River. For some time we have known and had mentioned the fact that we are the last survivors of the original Emblem Club group but I had never told him about the champagne. On impulse I took a bott[le] with me and he was amazed, cou[ld] hardly believe that I had saved it all these years. He looked at the 1904 on the label and remarked that that was the year he first arrived in Bend. We discussed opening it and while it seemed a pity to do so decided that as time is running out it might be more fitting to drink it together while we could, than to leave it for someone else or to wait for a sad and dismal ‘last man’ observance. And so, after 54 years, we broke the seal of the 65 year old bottle and with only a small bit of ceremony drew the cork, poured the contents into proper wine glasses and drank to ‘those who are no longer with us’.
It had lost its fizz but was clear and while fairly potent I doubt if it caused the tear that I think each of us furtively hid from the other.
