My friend and co-grandmother, Judy, and I comprise a committee of two to work on church history. We both are members of the Plainfield United Methodist Church, and we both volunteered to do a video-taped history of some events of the church. WE aren't the subjects of the video; instead, we are seeking the remembrances of some of the oldest church members, to grab their memories while they are still with us. We settled on the Fish Fry as our first focus.
PUMC has put on a fish fry every summer since about 1945. It has grown and grown through the years. Judy and I decided that it was a good place to start in asking our older members to dredge up their memories. Today, we went to the Plainfield Public Library to find whatever we could about the earliest fish fries in order to launch conversations about them. The librarian had already pulled a file for us with things from the church, plus big bound books of local newsblabs with gossip and ads. We had to search the pages for what we were looking for.
Journalism now just isn't the same as it used to be. My daughter and I have discovered, for example, that old-time obituaries gave the graphic details of why/how a person died and how the community received the news. Not so now. Old news articles were replete with gossip and conjecture. It can be quite entertaining! Today, for example, I saw a short news blurb with the title, "Indiana Penal Heads Entertained Here". I read it out loud. Judy's face got red as she giggled. The librarian came over to see it. Hey...I didn't write it! Not my fault!
In our research, we discovered that what we thought was a fish fry connected to a Saddle Club event wasn't part of the Methodist Church's offerings. It probably took us 30 minutes or more to figure out that the Christian Church had a fish fry...and so did the Methodist Church. Once we determined that there were TWO, it was easier to sort things out. A couple of the news articles listed things like how much food was sold--so many sandwiches, so many pounds of potatoes, etc...and it was interesting to read.
But there was one story that caught my eye. A fellow who had worked a Methodist fish fry in the early years commented that his wife was to donate dessert cakes. The first one she baked fell apart when she tried to "ice it down". The second one had a "sink hole" in the middle. In disgust, she called the church and told the woman on the other end of the phone that she would not be donating anything. After a short pause, the woman on the other end said, "Would you like to try a pie, dear?" What tickled me about it was that it apparently became a stock answer in his family every time there was a failure of some sort. "Would you like to try a pie, dear?" It would have been the same in my family. I could relate!
When Judy and I first went into the Genealogy and Local History Room at the library, we were the only ones there besides the gal at the desk. A bit later, another woman came in who was waiting for a student to arrive so she could administer a test. We tried to be quiet, but the gal confessed that she was enjoying hearing us talk about stuff. We came up with about 12 pages to have copied at 10-cents apiece, but the gal at the desk called it even because, as she copied stuff for us, she made a second copy for the file and considered it research in her behalf. Judy also found an article that contained the birth announcement for her baby brother and her cousin, born just hours apart, in one of the books. She had that copied for her family, for free!
With all of our talk about the fish fry, I got hungry for fish. When I left the library, I drove to McD's and got a fish filet sandwich, then went on to do a little shopping. Everything I did today, however, only reminded me of how bad off I am, physically. Here in my little house-on-a-slab, I am protected. Everything is on one level and I don't have to travel far to get what I need. I stand awhile and sit awhile and lie down awhile when I am alone, but out in public it becomes obvious that I'm not in a good way at all. Scary.
I'll be heading up to Meg's on Saturday. Wish me luck!
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