August 11, 2002 St. Aloysius Church Shandon Ohio
My path took us down River Road to Cleves and North on Route 128. This is the way I normally go to get to I-74
West, mainly because there is little traffic, and it’s a pleasant drive. The
road follows the Great Miami River to Miamitown. After that, there are numerous
farm fields that take advantage of the rich bottomland.
If you know where to look, you will get a limited view of the old Fernald uranium processing plant, Stricker’s Grove, the Rumpke ball fields and several produce stands that also mark the way. We turned left at Ross onto the Cincinnati-Brookville Road, and we were at St. Aloysius in less than ten minutes.
The fields didn’t look as lush as they normally do during August. To my eye, the soybeans seemed to be suffering more from the drought that the corn. The grassy strips between the highway and the fields showed hardly any green. The temperature was well past 80 degrees at 10:30 a.m. and promised to go past 90.
We arrived at around 11, just about when the doors were opening, and heard the blessing for the festival workers and patrons. I paid $15 for two tickets at the small room by the side of the church and followed the walkway to the cafeteria entrance. I was happy to see that there was virtually no wait to get inside since it was a warm day and there is little shade in this area. When we encountered a long wait during other years, we shopped at the booths and came back later (the tickets are sequentially numbered and entry is controlled by ranges of numbers - this works pretty good.)
I was happy to finally make it to a church dinner this summer. I had gone a few times in the spring, but recuperation from minor surgery and a few vacations kept me away. I’m sorry that we'll have to miss St. John’s and St. Pius' festivals next week - they're both good ones (we'll be visiting our son in Madison Wisconsin.)
St. Aloysius has a very nice large, air-conditioned dining room, organized with tables that seat eight. I passed the boiler room where the ladies were carving up the deserts. Chuck Martin, the Cincinnati Enquirer food editor, mentioned this room in his column last year when he visited three church dinners. I saw in this morning’s Enquirer that he repeated the segment he had written about St. Paul’s festival and Millie Hoffbauer’s dressing (I also love her dressing and will try to make it there next year.)
Mashed potatoes, noodles, gravy, string beans, slaw, rolls, fresh corn cut from the cob, chicken and drinks were served country style. My favorite item is the fresh corn; our table finished two bowls of it. The servers and other workers are very friendly and refills were handled efficiently. I’m always impressed with the children, usually 7th and 8th graders.
The slaw was fresh and green with a light sweet dressing. It seems that their chicken is cooked in lard and was very tasty. It probably helped that we were at the first serving (it seems that later in the day, at the country-style dinners, certain “leftovers”, such as chicken, are consolidated with freshly-cooked food, and placed on tables.)
We sat with Cincinnati west-siders, one couple and one group of four. I went to St. Lawrence School through the second grade and then lived in Corryville - Clifton until returning to Covedale on the the west-side in my early twenties. It’s almost 60 years since I left St. Lawrence. I’m the guy who can barely remember his own name and, for some strange reason, I remembered the name of the man who sat across from me, Cliff Fluegemann, a classmate from the second grade. He thought I looked familiar (yeah, right, a skinny blond kid who is as far from skinny or blond as one could imagine.) Cliff had a great laugh and lots of interesting stories. When actively working, one of the things he did was to rent games to festivals. It turns out that I knew a fellow who worked for his competitor.
One of Cliff’s favorite church dinners is at St. Peter’s on Labor Day, and he goes there with a group of 14 people. He was a little upset last year because he didn’t get in at the first seating (he may have gotten there a little late.) Cliff said that you can make reservations ahead of time, and you must pick up your tickets at least 20 minutes before the seating starts. It seems that I have heard of this before, and I guess that it works. I remember that we arrived at St. Anthony’s on Labor Day at around 1-2 p.m. last year, and the line was much too long for us (we instead got a carry out and ate our chicken dinner under the tent.)
Millie is Cliff’s wife, a very nice lady who is active at Holy Name Church. She and Edith got talking about friends that they shared, like Jim and Pat Eby, Pat Schloemer and Darlene Stokes. It’s a west-side thing to know a lot of people from the area, and Edith is pretty darn good at it, especially for someone who grew up in Brooklyn. Edith mentioned that she’s leaving St. Williams after 18 years as a teacher and moving to St. Dominic as the technology coordinator. This prompted a lady in the other group to talk about people she knows from Dominic.
I had homemade cherry pie for dessert (and wish I had another piece with a little vanilla ice cream on the side as I sit behind my laptop writing these notes.)
Rather than going home the same way as I got there, I turned left out of the parking lot and proceeded to get lost. I had taken this route before but must have taken a wrong turn. It wasn’t that much of an adventure, but at this stage of my life, it doesn’t take too much to get me excited. There’s a lot of open land in the area and it seems like a number of large, new homes are being built, most with good size lots. There is a growing number of people who want a nice house on 5 acres or so of land. This seems like a place they can do it.
We normally don’t eat bacon but stopped at Krogers on the way home to get a one-pound package of Khan’s and a loaf of white bread. My tomatoes are growing pretty good this year and I have been thinking about BLT’s for a week or so. We cooked two strips of bacon for each of us in the microwave and assembled the sandwiches using the slices from a very large vine-ripened tomato. Mmm, mmm, good.
We had a lot of thunder around 5-6 p.m., one really loud one, and then some rain. I welcomed it and hope there is more to come. The summer sure is passing by quickly; some schools will be starting about two weeks from now.