4. Emblematic measles

On the table at the 1913 dinner were small printing cuts of the emblem, to be handed to the Bulletin’s editor that night so that every member could put the mark in his advertisements, on his checks and on his stationery. Cheney hoped the next issue “will not only have the Emblem at the top of the Editorial Column, but that the whole paper will look as if it had the emblematic measles.”

It took a few years, and then the paper did. In February 1917 the Bend Park Company was running a small weekly box on page 3, selling real estate and insurance from 122 Oregon Street, with the emblem in the middle of it. The firm that had bought a whole page to claim the brand was now using it the way any business uses a mark. Twelve days after the first of those boxes a grocer named L. B. Lafollette announced Bend Emblem Butter and printed the emblem twice in his own advertisement. In one month the mark was on a land company’s letterhead and on a butter wrapper.

The clubhouse, meanwhile, was where Bend organized itself. In the first months of 1917 a university club and an athletic club were formed in its rooms, and a Knights of Columbus council held its first banquet there. Then the United States went to war. Within a fortnight fifty tables of cards were raising money at the club for the Red Cross. Within a month the hall was a barracks, and the Bend Rifles drilled there Monday and Friday nights. Then, some time that year, the clubhouse closed. Nobody wrote down when.

The next thing the paper says is dated December 29, 1917: an informal dance “as a means of bringing members together in order to reorganize the Emblem club,” arranged by five men. Six weeks later four of the five were officers, and there had never been officers before. Cheney’s club had one, the Taboo. The club that met in February 1918 elected a president, two vice-presidents, a treasurer and a secretary, the way any lodge did.

The founder still came. In June 1918 the state’s bankers met in Bend, and Cheney wired from Seattle that he would be there “to take charge of the evening’s program.” Two hundred people sat down, “the songs and nonsense rhymes of the club were sung,” and the dinner was timed to end at the train.

The money ran out in the spring of 1919. The club had a closed clubhouse it did not own and a debt of five thousand three hundred dollars. On April 24, at a dinner dance at the Pilot Butte Inn, T. A. McCann of the Shevlin-Hixon Company and C. S. Hudson of the First National bank each promised to find four other men, the ten of them to take up the debt between them. A week later the club bought its own grounds and building from the Bend Company, and Cheney gave it his equity in the property, gratis, on one condition: that the club exist. The new president, H. J. Overturf, said what it would now be for, “to make the Emblem club purely social.” A week after that, statements of dues went out to everyone on the membership list. The 1913 club had charged nothing.

It was a different institution with the same name and the same house, and the house was busier than ever. Bend’s Elks lodge was founded in it in June 1919. In March 1920 the club’s women gave a leap-year party for sixty couples with the hall in blue and gold and manzanita. That August a cigarette in a wooden cuspidor burned through the floor, and the fire chief said the town “could hardly afford to lose such a historic building as the Emblem club.” In November nearly a hundred members of the new Bend Commercial Club adopted their constitution in its hall. That body became the Chamber of Commerce.

The emblem, meanwhile, had a life of its own. In May 1921 a Redmond creamery was found shipping butter into Bend with wrappers “bearing the circular Bend emblem,” and the Bulletin was precise about whose it was: “The emblem which is being used is that of the Emblem club of this city.” Within a week the distributor said it would stop. Nobody had registered anything. The town objected, and that was enough. That July an editorial recalled the club’s songs and printed four lines of one, the only lyric that survives: “Mother’s old and cannot realize, but soon we hope she will / More than half the State of Oregon’s the other side the hill.”

In April 1922 Carl Johnson interrupted a Commercial Club luncheon, where the chairman was tapping a spoon on a water glass, to present it on behalf of the Bend Iron Works with a gavel and “a juniper block with a Bend emblem on it, for use in calling the club to order.” Ten weeks later the same Commercial Club reported on the question of a Bend emblem, and the answer was in the paper on June 15.

The committee to investigate the matter of a Bend emblem reported in favor of the one adopted several years ago by the Emblem club, which has given its permission for the club to use the emblem in any way it sees fit. The report states that the Bend Iron Works is already prepared to manufacture emblems for use on automobiles, of aluminum.

In any way it sees fit. A decade after a land company had printed it over the word copyrighted, the mark belonged to Bend.