Olathe East High School student Jake Woten had one word to describe the steak he was eating Tuesday evening at Wilson Park: “Phenomenal.”
“It’s really good,” Todd Blanchard of Chanute commented. “Mmm, oh yeah,” added Dennis Devader of Holton.
The steaks were part of a picnic tradition developed by members of the Neosho Valley Shrine Club in honor of members of the East Squad that will play on Saturday in the 2009 Kansas Shrine Bowl in Wichita.
The East Squad has been here this week to practice at Emporia State University.
The meal this year featured the standard Shriner fare: ribeye steaks, baked beans, corn on the cob, potatoes, and buttered French bread, accompanied by water, tea, and other soft drinks, but no pop.
“The coaches don’t like them to have that sugar,” said Joe Lapping, who long has been a leader in organizing the picnic and is the Shrine Man of the Year for 2009.
“I have been in the past, but I’m trying to turn it over to the younger people,” he said.
Lapping furnishes steaks for the event, arranging far in advance to have them aged and held at the Tyson plant. IBP and, later, Tyson have always been the source for the meats. Lapping and a few other Shriner friends get together before the picnic to cut the slabs of steak into inch-thick servings.
“We’ll cook probably 145 to 150 steaks, and they’ll weigh 12 to 14 ounces,” Lapping said, while about 25 Shriners socialized and set up the grill, tables and serving line.
What could have been chaos Tuesday evening was a well-organized ritual, executed calmly and casually by men who have taken on the task for years. By 5:15 p.m., they had the shelter house decorated, the insulated food containers and coolers in place and were ready to grill the steaks in time for the team’s 5:30 arrival.
Shriner wives, JoAnn Lapping and Pat Howard, had cooked pots of baked beans and sent them to the park with their husbands, and Bernie Toso, Neosho Valley Shrine president, smoked about 150 baked potatoes and ears of corn in the husk.
Toso, Richard Herrman, Don Blaylock, Harry Groh, and Bill Douglass cooked the meat over 80 pounds of wood charcoal in a 12-foot-long iron grill that Lapping had made specially for such events.
Metal bowls of butter simmered on the edge of the grill until it melted, and Shriners clustered around a table to hand-brush it onto slices of French bread, while others pulled husks off the smoked corn on the cob and laid it in rows across a covered table.
After the meal, they planned to have a watermelon seed-spitting contest and a carp-catching game involving real fish and bare hands. Lapping said those events always added fun to the picnic.
The Neosho Valley Shriners were joined by 25 to 30 Shriners who came from the Topeka Arab Temple for the event.
“They don’t come down for the camaraderie,” Lapping said, smiling. “They come down here for the steaks.”
Shrine Potentate Pat Devlin of Topeka didn’t deny the remark, but he did congratulate the group for its successful effort.
“The people down here in Emporia are doing a fine job putting this one,” Devlin said. “For a town outside Topeka, there are probably more active Shriners and Masons in Emporia than anywhere else. Emporia should be very proud ...”
Neosho Valley Shriners have been involved with the East Squad picnic since the Shrine Bowl began more than 20 years ago.
The first get-together was for hamburgers grilled at the home of Jo and Scott Mouse at Mouse Lake; a few years later, it was moved to Wilson Park, adjacent to the ESU campus and more convenient to serve the football players. The East Squad practiced alternately at Emporia and Ottawa.
Once the menu turned from hamburgers to steaks, however, the squad settled on annual practices at ESU, Lapping said.
The event is something the men and the football players enjoy.
“It’s a lot of fun helping out the kids,” he said. “Not only in the hospitality, but the youth that participate, they’re not out on the streets getting in trouble.”
Lapping said the players had taken off one day of practice to fly to St. Louis, where they could meet the young patients hospitalized at the Shrine Hospital for orthopedics. The 22 Shrine hospitals nationwide, which include hospitals for children who have been burned severely.
Supporting those hospitals is the primary reason for the Shrine’s existence, he said. The group supports the annual practices by hosting a feast for players each year, but it raises funds for the hospitals when Emporia takes its turn as the site of the Kansas Shrine Bowl.
“The money we take in from the football game, our main objective is to support the hospitals with those funds,” Lapping said.
“We kind of believe in two things, and that’s having a good time and helping the kids. That’s our story, all in one. We enjoy what we do.”
He expected the football players would enjoy the picnic as much as the Shriners, and he didn’t expect to see much food left over.
“They weigh 250 pounds, and they’ve worked all day long,” Lapping said. “They’re hungry; they’ll inhale those steaks. We feed ’em ’til they’re full. ... In an hour, they’ll devour about everything we’ve cooked.”
Shortly before 6 p.m., Lapping’s prediction was on course to come true.
Topekan Keith Heumann, who was still tossing steaks to the grillers for people who wanted seconds or thirds, recalled a linebacker of years past who may be the record-holder for eating steak.
The young man left the buffet with 3 big steaks — “plate-lappers,” Heumann called them — plus a baked potato and a salad, only to return later.
“He told me he was still hungry,” Heumann said. “He had 5 steaks. That’s the most I’ve ever seen.”
Steve_Corbin (anonymous) says...
Hats or fezs off to Joe and all the Shriners who worked on this. It is good to see Bermie and the "younger ones" step up to the plate. Thanks to all of them.
Steve
July 22, 2009 at 7:04 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )