Spirit of thankfulness alive at upcoming Ronan community dinner
Hey savvy news reader! Thanks for choosing local.
You are now reading
1 of 3 free articles.
RONAN — It has been 392 years since the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock and 150 years since President Lincoln unified disjointed iterations of harvest dinners into an official national celebration of communal gratitude, and while the history of a neighborhood Thanksgiving in Ronan is much shorter, the event has become a cherished community tradition.
In the past 16 years, a core group of dedicated people have been joined by hundreds of volunteers to embody the qualities of kindness, charity, togetherness, and thankfulness in a community Thanksgiving dinner.
This year, organizer Cheri Houle expects at least 300 people will eat, dance, and be merry at the event, held at the community center. Getting the meal of 50 pies, 35 turkeys, and more than 200 pounds of potatoes ready for the 11 a.m. dinner bell is no small feat.
“I look at it like a great big giant pie, and people do pieces of it,” Houle said. “One lady does the decorating, somebody else is in charge of all of the volunteers, somebody else makes sure there’s a host to greet people. I just look at it like one great big pumpkin pie with little pieces.”
Usually more than 100 people to break off a piece of the pie and are put to work serving, greeting, or cleaning during the dinner. Parents are encouraged to bring their children so they can learn about volunteerism.
“It’s never too early to learn about volunteering,” Houle said.
Houle cooks many donated turkeys at her restaurant prior to the event, but some also arrive with trimmings, pies and other goods when the kitchen starts accepting food items at 5 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day.
“At about nine o’clock we have a group that comes in and they are called carvers and that’s all they do,” Houle said. “They bring their own knives, their own aprons, and they stand there for about two hours and carve turkeys.”
One side dish that is never in short supply is potatoes. Dana Grant is not exactly sure what year he first decided to canvass local potato farms for a contribution to the dinner, but he’s been in charge of spuds ever since.
“Between the Starkels, the Lakes, and the Flemings there are always some potatoes to be found for a good cause,” Grant said. “They share their wealth of potatoes graciously.”
The farm sends a truckload of the potatoes to the community center the night before the dinner, where Grant has an army of peelers waiting.
“I gather the minions of the potatoes who are my friends and family,” Grant said. “It takes many hands to get that many potatoes peeled.”
Some people are skilled at peeling, while others are brand new. Over the years, Grant has worked with school basketball teams, church groups and children in the government’s care to help introduce youth to volunteerism.
The potatoes are peeled, and then put into an industrial pot where they are squashed with two large mashers the next day. Butter and milk are added to provide flavor.
“It’s a fun time visiting and we’re all just hanging out,” Grant said. “It doesn’t even seem like work. It’s really about the community coming together in an authentic and appreciative way. It reminds us again that there’s a beauty when you have a small community.”
Ten years ago the Ronan Area Chamber of Commerce decided to host the dinner because it wanted the feeling of community to prevail during the giving season. The event was revived after the death of three young boys shook the town, Houle said.
The dinner had been out of practice for a couple of years. It was started in 1997 by Marie Cowen, who had just opened a restaurant on Main Street.
“I thought there must be 30 or 50 people who have absolutely no place to go so I decided I was going to have a free dinner,” Cowen said. “I cooked for 75, maybe where we could stretch it for 80. We were swamped. We ran out of food and I just went to the back and cooked hamburgers for the rest of the afternoon.”
In the next few years, the dinner grew to 250 people. Cowen cooked all 17 hams and 19 turkeys herself. Some years, she would have Christmas dinner instead of Thanksgiving. Seven years after that first fateful meal, she decided to throw in the towel. She estimates she cooked for more than 900 people over that time frame.
Cowen attends the Thanksgiving dinner every year, and much like the nation remembers that first meal at Plymouth, the Ronan regulars remember those days in the old café.
One of Cowen’s favorite memories is of a family that stopped in the cafe search of a bite to eat on their way to Kalispell to see a dying relative. No place was open, but Cowen offered the family toast and cereal. The parents, and two young children decided to stay and help out when they saw Marie was doing a dinner. The family had always avoided small towns on their journeys before, but loved the atmosphere of the dinner. They enjoyed the day and stopped back by the café later to tell Cowen that because they volunteered at the dinner, the two young children had a happy memory of the holiday instead of sadness about their grandmother, who passed away that day. The family told Cowen they make a point to stop in small towns ever since.
“There are so many, really good memories of things that you didn’t set out to do, it just comes,” Cowen said. “To us, it’s just little nothings, but to other people it just made their whole year.”
