When Franciscan nuns decided to close St. Joseph’s parochial school here in 1969, patrons kicked into action and found a way to keep the school open. Today, they’re still providing the support needed to ensure elementary school-aged children get the faith-based educations their parents want them to have.
Next month, a dedicated group of Olpe residents will hold their 40th annual barbecue and dance to benefit the school, which already has raised more than $450,000 over the years.
A handful of the original organizers — Mary and Norbert “Nub” Hoelting, Joe Wendling, Pat and Francis “Shorty” Kehres, Fred Windle and Anne Markowitz — met Tuesday afternoon at the Hoelting home to reminisce about how far they’d come since St. Joseph’s stood on the brink of closing.
The Franciscan nuns since the 1880s had provided teachers for St. Joseph’s and for Sacred Heart Parochial School in Emporia, as well as providing nurses for St. Mary’s Hospital in Emporia. They were part of an order whose European Mother House was in Olpe, Germany, committee members said.
As the nuns aged and retired or died, and the numbers of them coming into the convent decreased, staffing schools and hospitals became near-impossible.
Pleading the cause
That did not keep a contingent of Olpe residents from making a visit to the order’s U.S. headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Nub Hoelting, George Markowitz and Junior Martin got a ride to Colorado on the Didde-Glaser company plane and tried to sway the Mother Superior toward their cause.
“I said, ‘Let us have just one more year,’” Hoelting recalled the conversation.
She finally acquiesced and gave them a year to find a way to put funding in place. The Franciscan nuns would no longer be teachers on staff, and the townspeople would have to find a way to finance a different type of teaching staff and all that went with running a school. Still, the Olpe residents had used their words convincingly enough to buy a little time for the school.
“We flew back home and thought we’d won,” Hoelting said.
They would need to hire all lay teachers, which did not please all of the parishioners, but it was better than closing the school.
A group of parishioners met to exchange ideas to solve their funding problem.
Joe Wendling, then single and childless, was in charge of summer dances that had been popular among the parish’s youths; he also was chairman of the materiality committee for the St. Joseph Catholic Church.
“He got in there and worked so hard for the barbecue, and he didn’t even have his own family,” Anne Markowitz said earlier this week.
As Wendling and others tossed around ideas for fundraising, they recalled a successful dinner that Leonard and Theresa Coble had put on as a token of appreciation for their customers at The Chicken House.
Coble for two consecutive years had purchased grand champion steers at the Lyon County Free Fair; he had the animals butchered and barbecued each year and fed them to his customers, at no charge, at a get-together at the Leonard Chamberlain Dairy.
By combining the appeal of the meal and the dance, the parishioners decided they’d try a fundraiser at Hoeltings’ Grove, east of Nub and Mary Hoelting’s house, that would be a perfect site to host the event.
“And it just fell into place,” Hoelting said.
Putting the pieces together
Norman Brinkman had pallets that could be used as the base for a dance floor, and Clarence Schmidt, who owned the lumber yard, donated plywood to use for a smooth covering.
George Markowitz, who had headed up the crew that cooked the champion steers, had the experience and the equipment to do the job for the school fundraiser, Wendling said in an “as I recall it” history of the barbecue’s beginnings.
The Lyon County Rural Electric Cooperative ran a line to the grove, and Leonard Chamberlain did the electrical work needed to light the area well into the night.
The Church Council approved the project and council member Pat Kehres volunteered to help sell tickets. She also volunteered her husband, Shorty, to help her serve beverages at the barbecue.
Leo Wecker volunteered to sell tickets and to help Markowitz and Cliff Lane prepare the meat.
Church Council member Mary Hoelting took charge of food preparation, and another Council member, Anne Markowitz, who was in charge of ticket sales, pitched in on the food preparation, too.
Wendling was responsible for securing beverages and cups, with help from Paul DeBauge, and for getting a live band to play for the dance.
For $60 and a free meal apiece, Chuck Cowan and his band, made up of Skip Swisher, Roger Cowan and Jerry Dyke, agreed to provide the music.
Olma Peak of Emporia Livestock Sales, Herschel Shepherd of S&S Propane and Admire State Bank, stockman Buster Wheat and Ray Schreiner of Murphy Oil Co., agreed to furnish the meat, Wendling said.
That first year, 206 people attended and countless others bought tickets or donated money without going to the barbecue. No profit figures are available for the first two years, though it was successful enough to warrant continuing the event and building on it. Hoelting poured a concrete pad the following year to make a better dance floor and the year after that, he doubled its size because attendance had grown considerably.
Steady growth
In recent years, actual attendance has reached more than 600 people, not counting the people who bought tickets and did not come.
The barbecue routinely clears more than $20,000, and sometimes significantly more than that; the total profit should reach a half-million dollars before the decade is over.
Only a few minor changes have been made since the barbecue and dance began in 1970.
The four women’s circles at the church took over from the Church Council and rotate responsibility for selling tickets and getting the food ready.
The menu is a standard one: barbecued beef rounds, green beans, cole slaw, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and creamed potatoes. At one time, the women baked homemade bread for the crowd, but that option is not available anymore.
Anne Markowitz said that the committee once tried tweaking the menu, substituting potato salad for the creamed potatoes. It was something they tried only once, quickly returning the immensely popular creamed potatoes to their proper place.
Desserts are not part of the meal.
“Dessert was thirds on potatoes,” said her son, Dan Markowitz, who brought his mother to the meeting this week.
Windle donates 350 to 400 pounds of charcoal each year to cook the meat — about 580 pounds of beef rounds, weighing 25 to 27 pounds each, that spin on a rotisserie over the coals.
George Markowitz for many years had made his secret barbecue sauce and donated it to enhance the meat’s flavor, without anyone else knowing the sauce’s ingredients and their proportions. Anne Markowitz coaxed her husband into measuring as he made it and writing down the recipe in the late 1980s, so the flavor wouldn’t be lost when he was no longer able to cook. He died within months of the incident, but his sauce is still a mainstay of the barbecue.
“We make seven gallons of barbecue sauce using his recipe,” Dan Markowitz said.
The Kehreses take care of the 900 pounds of ice needed, and Mussatto Brothers brings in the supply of beer that comes as part of the purchase price for tickets.
The event will be on Sept. 6 at Hoeltings’ Grove, about a mile east of Olpe on the Olpe-Hartford Road. The Powder River Band will play for the dance.
Tickets must be purchased in advance and are $60 for couples and $30 for singles for the adults-only event.
“There’s absolutely no tickets sold at the door,” Wendling said.
Adults only
Anne Markowitz said that those who attend need to provide identification to prove they are 21 before they’ll be allowed into the Grove.
“We’ve walked a few out of them out,” Wendling said of the under-21s who attempted to slip into the gathering.
Patrons are welcome to all the food and beer they can hold.
“There’s always plenty of food. ... We want them to have everything they want, but they have to behave,” Nub Hoelting said. “We will not put up with trouble.”
To help hold problems at bay, food also will be available later in the evening.
“We always serve what we call a ‘night lunch’ at 10:30,” said Linda Dieker, a member of the committee.
“Then we sell leftovers real cheap,” Nub Hoelting added.
Businesses that want to advertise on a wall set up at the barbecue can purchase ad space at two rates: $120 for a large ad, which includes two tickets, or $60 for a small ad, which includes one ticket.
No one — including the parish priest — gets a free meal at the fundraiser, Anne Markowitz said, smiling at the memory; that is a policy recommended by Father Clem, who was parish priest when the event began.
In case of rain, the meal will be served at St. Joseph’s School and the dance will be held at the Knights of Columbus Hall.
Rain-outs, however, have been rare — and sometimes even fun.
The veterans on the committee laughed as they described a downpour that caused a flurry of packing-up and hurriedly evacuating Hoelting’s Grove.
One supporter helped them take down the tables and chairs and load up the food before catching a ride on a nearby truck. It was raining so hard, he didn’t realize he’d hopped into the back of the beer truck; soon, he looked around and saw where he’d landed.
“He thought he’d died and gone to Heaven,” Nub Hoelting said.
Committee members this year are: Wendling, the Kehreses, Dwayne Coble, Donna and Les Farr, Danny and Sheila Broyles, Doug and Laurie Schmidt, Rob and Emily Dieker, Steve and Kim Redeker, John and Linda Dieker, Danny Joe and Megan Broyles, and Marybeth and Russ Bonitatibus.
Tickets can be purchased from any committee member.