This month I want to tell you about the spaghetti dinner, If you weren’t there in person you certainly missed a unique experience. Every month we hold a
spaghetti dinner fund raiser. This month during at the spaghetti dinner the evening of August 14th, I went
through a myriad of emotions. Not unlike my first 5 months as ER. There were incredible highs and shocking lows and in between tremendous amounts of
confusion. Sometimes, believe it or not, the same set of events were responsible for both. First let me tell you about the highs. We had nineteen, that's right nineteen volunteers show up to help out that night. If that weren't cool enough there wasn’t only the same old
group, 2 of them; Jana Blount and Lee Sumpter have just recently joined the lodge. We had a great crowd, at times there were 8 or 10 people in line. A lot of these people are repeat customers. So we went thorough our first pan of spaghetti and started on our 2nd of three, that is when it got interesting. As soon as we delivered that pan to the dining room about another 20 people showed up and we began to wonder if we would have enough food. The first thing we ran low on
was salad so I need to jump in the car and head over to Wal-Mart to buy more salad. Even before I got out the
door they were calling for our last pan of sauce in the dining room. It wasn’t even 5:30 yet and we had gone
through as much as we had last month. The Wal-Mart run was now more complicated. So, I jumped in the car and headed to Wal-Mart. Let’s see I need sauce, 4 large jars, spaghetti 5 lbs., hamburger 5 lbs. sausage 1 lb., salad, tomatoes, onions, and extra bread. I get to the store and there are many types of Ragu sauce, Pull the cell phone out and call the wife. “What kind of sauce do you want? “ Now I have the sauce, over to the meat counter, there are 4 kinds of ground beef. Back to the cell phone, “Do you want 30, 20, 15 or 10 % fat ?” We settle on 20%.
Now grab the salad, 4 3 lb. bags, 16 tomatoes, 4 large Bermuda onions. Is that it? No, forgot the bread and
the spaghetti. Now I finally have everything, off to the check out counter. All the lines are pretty long. The cell phone rings, “ Where are you we are out of everything, people are waiting.” I’ll be there soon , hang up the cell phone. Drive back to the lodge. Pull up to the back door, and unload all the stuff. Ginger
Davis is ripping open salad bags and slicing tomatoes and onions. Theresa Glass starts cooking hamburger, I’m dumping all the sauce in a big pot and
start to heat it. John Miller is dumping packages of spaghetti in the water and starting to cook it.
Meanwhile in the dining room the salad goes out and my wife is assuring the customers that we have more food and it will be there shortly. The hamburger gets done it is added to the hot sauce. The spaghetti goes out. Hungry customers start eating and everything is OK. More people show up, we are running out again, I glance at the clock, 6:30 we decide to hope we can
make it, 6:45 we are completely out of food again. Most of the volunteers have eaten. I go out to sit in
front of the door and personally apologize to anybody who shows up before the scheduled closing time of
7:00 PM. We are lucky nobody else shows up. We count the money and find we have collected over 800 dollars a 35% increase over last month and a 65%
increase over my very first spaghetti dinner as ER. I make a mental note for planning purposes next month, close the door and go back to help cleanup.