Breaking Bread: Social Glue in Small Towns

Many community newspapers are gone, home schoolers have diminished shared schools, and one, two, and no-child families have reduced the connections between neighbors. We no longer gather around the newspaper at the post office to discuss the obituaries, letters to the editors, and the latest high school sports results.

Attendance at sporting events seems, in my mind, to be more limited to parents, grandparents, and a few old timers hanging on. Not like the days when Joseph, Oregon girls won three state championships in a row and you had to get to the gym early to avoid the nosebleed seats in the balcony. Or when one or more of our schools made it to the state tournament in Pendleton and businesses shut doors early so people could make the games.

What we have left to bring us together, and I mean Republicans and Democrats, Presbyterians, Catholics, and agnostics, young and old, is food. And eating together. I thought about this as I sat with 150 others at the recent fundraising dinner for Wallowa Resources, a local non-profit aimed at building sustainability. We paid $50 for our tickets, and more money was raised with an auction and the flat-out money appeal known as “paddling.”

But it was apparent that many of the attendees came for a good meal, a good beer, to be with friends, and to show general support for the organization. I’ll wager that most ticket-holders didn’t spend anything beyond the $50 and the price of a beer.

And there are the Monday night community “free” dinners organized by the Joseph Methodist Church averaging over 200 diners over three months in this, their third year. That event is now replicated in Wallowa. I attended the last session there this past winter, and over 100 hearty souls braved a blizzard to get together to break bread and visit with neighbors. These community dinners are intergenerational, welcoming busy parents with children and retired folks who just want company with their food.

The Sunday Friendship Feast at Tamkaliks, the annual powwow at the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland, regularly feeds over 500 people from the local county who bring dishes to supplement the salmon, buffalo, and elk provided by the Homeland, and guests from across the country. You might sit next to a Nez Perce elder, or to a visitor from Germany or San Francisco.

It is food knitting a much larger community. Rotary had 75 for an international dinner this spring, and 50 for a scholarship dinner. Other groups, churches, families, granges, clubs have their affairs. I could go on. These dinners extend and improve the communal eating opportunities we have, as in the past

The annual cattlemen’s ball goes on, but I doubt the attendance is as strong as it was when I attended regularly in the 1970s. Then, the bank hosted an open bar, and Oregon State University president Robert McVicker would work the food line of pit-barbecued beef, greeting ranchers, business owners, and the rest of us by name, and guessing whether our kids went to 4-H Summer School in Corvallis and were ready to enroll at OSU.

Granges are great gathering places, and I’ve had some great meals at Hurricane Creek. In my days at Fishtrap Writers’ Festival, we one year read Grapes of Wrath as our community “Big Read” book. We ended it all with a dinner at the Grange. Tickets were $10 each, and you picked a number out of a hat as you came in the door. Most of the crowd, about 75 percent, got beans. A few got a normal meat and potatoes dinner, and some small percentage ate steaks. In all, a visual and tasteful reminder of the realities of the Great Depression.

The Hurricane Creek Grange was always famous for pies, but now has a more pedestrian second Saturday breakfast each month. For ten bucks you get all the eggs, bacon, hot cakes, biscuits and gravy you can eat, and the chance to catch up on history with a few old-timers or current events with an eclectic crowd.

We can’t forget the late Gail Swart’s Christmas dinners with music at Wallowa Lake Lodge, which continue to be held in Gail’s honor. Due to increased demand, there are now two sessions each December. And the annual hospital auction dinner, with tickets closer to $100, is as popular as Christmas at the Lodge and the annual Wallowa Resources affair!

I am looking for opportunities to grow food gatherings, and maybe to incorporate some of the news sharing and community building that we have lost with loss of newspaper and scattered and diminished school enrollment. A good cause will do it.

This week the Rails and Trails program hosted a free spaghetti dinner at the Wallowa Senior Center and about 150 showed up to discuss the Trail and to eat together. Keep your eyes and ears open, and even if you have to pay for a meal at MCrow in Lostine or
the Blythe Cricket in Joseph, make sure you stop by someone else’s table to say hello! and to ask about health, the weather and what they think about the new pharmacies in Wallowa and Enterprise.