6. The emblem outlives the club

For eighty years the emblem is hard to see. The newspaper that carried it is missing for twelve of those years outright and half-missing for ten more, so a silence means nothing. What survives is a trophy, a building, a pane of glass, and a run of printed impressions nobody had gone looking for.

The trophy kept the club’s name in print. Every August a flower-show committee decided what the Emblem Club cup would be for that year: a luncheon table arrangement in 1933, a miniature on a mirror in 1938, the modernistic class in 1939, and in the second summer of the war, the most points in the vegetable display. In 1941 the paper said out loud what the record had only implied: among the trophies was “the Emblem club cup, first awarded in 1912, and still given, though the Emblem club no longer exists.” The last award on record is 1947. Thirty-five years.

The building outlived the club by thirty-two years. The Masons held the Drake house from 1924, and in 1955 the Bulletin photographed it from the lawn under the caption “What of its future?”, calling it Bend’s oldest building. The answer came in June 1956: “Historic A. M. Drake House Being Razed,” torn down as a fire hazard, two stone fireplaces inside, little else worth saving. It had faced the Deschutes from 584 Broadway. It does not stand today.

The same spring a hardware store on Wall Street advertised license-plate Bend emblems at forty-nine cents, marked down from ninety-eight. The advertisement carried no picture, so nobody can say what was on them. But somebody was making Bend emblems in 1956 and selling them beside the hood ornaments.

The glass held. O’Kane’s building turned forty in 1956 and the paper photographed it. In 1986 a preservation nomination counted six original emblem windows on Oregon Avenue and recorded the ones a Bend stained-glass maker had reproduced the year before. They are still there.

And the emblem was in the newspaper the whole time. In February 1939 the Bulletin started a business directory called Who’s Who in Bend and put the emblem at both ends of its banner. It stayed there for twelve years, through the thin papers of the war, until May 1951: more than fifteen hundred issues, and the closest match to the 1912 drawing that anything printed in that half century has produced. In February 1950 the printer changed blocks. The evidence is the N: in the Wednesday paper its diagonal runs one way, in the Saturday paper the other. Nobody wrote down why.

That reversed N settles something else. In June 1953 the Chamber of Commerce bought a full page in the Bulletin’s fiftieth-anniversary edition and put the emblem in the top corner, a solid disc with BEND filling it edge to edge. At a glance it is the 1912 cut. Its N runs backwards. It was printed from the 1950 block.

The Chamber is the body that had adopted the emblem as Bend’s in 1922. In 2001 the same Chamber was using a BEND roundel on its website, and in 2002 its successor, Visit Bend, carried it in blue and gold. In 2005, the city’s centennial year, the City’s own website carried the emblem at the foot of its banner, the earliest dated City use anyone has found, and the centennial store sold it on a shirt.

In between, the Chamber chose something else. In July 1984 it ran a competition for a new logo, judged thirty entries, and gave a Bend artist named Ed Carson a hundred dollars and two nights at Kah-Nee-Ta for the winner: a black rectangle with BEND in knocked-out letters, a landscape inside them, and a swan standing in the B. The Chamber’s website carried that bird on its own in 1998, and in 2001 it was still the Chamber’s mark, on the same page where its visitor bureau was using the roundel. The organization at both ends of the longest silence held a contest in the middle of it and picked a bird.