Good Times at a Polish Parish Festival in the 1970s and 1980s
As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in Taymouth Township, which is a rural township in southern Saginaw County, Michigan. Native Americans were there first, then came Scottish immigrants in the early and mid 1800s. Then the Polish immigrants came in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including my mom’s paternal grandparents in 1919. Overall, it was a good place to grow up.
Much of our lives centered around Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Roman Catholic Church, which was built as a mission parish to take care of the spiritual needs of the largely Catholic Polish immigrants. The parish grounds were expansive, and included many baseball diamonds, a park, and the concession stand I’ve written about elsewhere.
We rode our bikes to the park, called Kennedy Park for obvious reasons, almost every day in the summer. We didn’t wear helmets, and we came out all right, but this is not one of those “kids were tougher in my day” things. Wear your helmet when you ride your bike. It’s the smart thing to do.
Every August around the Feast of the Assumption, the parish would hold a festival, which included a delicious homemade dinner served in the parish hall, a midway with food booths and games for the kids, and a beer tent near a polka band playing for your dancing and listening pleasure in the pavilion. My mom says that people would come to the festival for the homemade meal, which they knew would be good because the vegetables were grown mostly by the parishioners, and were the freshest and tastiest around.
The booths of the midway consisted of wooden frames that were bolted together then covered in heavy canvas. My two favorites were the kielbasa sandwich stand and the French fry stand. The kielbasa was smoked, and it came on good rye bread, and you could add sauerkraut, onions and mustard. Maybe there was ketchup available too, but who would put that on kielbasa? Even when I was a vegetarian, I would still enjoy the garlicky aroma, and eat a sandwich of sauerkraut, onion and mustard. Not the same.
The parish would use our hay wagon as the grandstand on the midway, and often I got to be on the mike. Some of my fondest memories are of sitting up on that grandstand, making announcements, and promoting the various aspects of the festival.
“Step right up to the grandstand…get your big raffle tickets, just a dollar each…win the grand prize…”
“There goes the wheelbarrow of joy…”
The wheelbarrow of joy was a wheelbarrow filled with liquor that got raffled off each year. Perhaps the equation of joy with alcohol wasn’t the healthiest idea, but that’s how things were then. This is not a “people were tougher in my day” argument. If you don’t want to drink, don’t drink.
The parish spent good money to bring in a quality out of town polka band, often Pan Franek and his band from way over in Muskegon. I remember they were great. The dance floor was always full, and people would hoot and holler and sing along. One of our priests, Father Cam, who was charismatic in a couple of ways, was an excellent dancer. All the ladies of the parish enjoyed a trip around the floor with Father Cam. I seem to recall he got caught up in a group of “charismatic Catholics” who started attending our church. My great-uncle Johnny, as I’ve mentioned before a cantankerous Polish American if there ever was one, called them, “those damned asthmatics,” which always gave us a chuckle.
Beer was served in plastic buckets with the name of the distributor printed on the side. They called them “pitchers” I think, but none of the beer drinkers thought of them in the way one usually thinks of a pitcher: something shared by a whole table. Guys would buy them for themselves and just pour the stuff down. I don’t recall any fights, despite the substantial consumption. Buckets would stack up on the tables, and people would take them home and use them around the house and garage. I wonder if there’s still one in my mom’s garage…
Sometimes the festival would end with a spectacular fireworks display. And I mean spectacular. They guy who did them was a national fireworks expert. He even did the display in Saginaw in 1982 to celebrate GM’s 75th anniversary. It just happened that he was a member of our parish.
The road we lived on and the road the church and grounds were located on is called Bell Road. We lived one house north of the corner of Bush and Bell (Uncle Johnny lived at the corner) and the church was located at the corner of Bell and Townline. Uncle Johnny was a committed Democrat of the Polish American, union-man variety. Kittycorner from the church grounds was a committed conservative Republican of the fundamentalist variety. I remember the township clerk joking once that the township had each political extreme just a mile apart. I also remember that the Republican gentlemen wasn’t too fond of the noise from the festival and might have called the cops. They didn’t do anything. I’m sure the parish had all the right permits.
On the Monday after the festival, the men and boys gathered to take down the “boots” as some of the older men pronounced “booths,” while the women gathered to clean up the kitchen. I recall that the gender division was complete. This is not a “men were men and women were women back in the good old days” argument. People should be allowed to help out wherever they feel like they can be most useful.
Putting up and taking down the booths was hard work. On clean up Monday, we’d remove the bolts, stack the two by four frames, and roll up and stack the heavy canvas. A particularly enthusiastic and handy young man brought his own ratchet, and would spin it constantly when he wasn’t removing nuts and bolts. Some of the cooler boys called him “ratchet boy,” and of course the rest of us followed along. Not very nice.
Once we were done with most of the cleanup, we got an awesome meal of the leftovers from the dinner: ham and beef and cucumbers and tomatoes and potatoes…The meal was especially tasty, because most of the vegetables were grown by the parishioners.
During the Monday clean up, I would often get into political arguments with the older men. A lot of them were World War II veterans, and I was a leftist teenager. We’d argue about whether it had been right for Truman to drop the bomb. My opinions haven’t changed, but I know now that I should have spent more time listening to those guys’ stories. Some of them were glad we dropped the bomb because it meant they would not have to invade Japan. Most of those men are gone now.
There was a big green outhouse near the pavilion. It got pretty messy during the festival. One year the older men assigned us young guys the unenviable task of cleaning it. They offered us buckets and mops. We revolted, because, well, the outhouse was revolting. So they cleaned it out themselves…by bringing in one of those water trucks that people use to fill up their pools and flooding the place.
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Roman Catholic Church and Kennedy Park are gone now. The diocese sold it all to the Pentecostal, and put aside some money to maintain the parish cemetery, which as I’ve written elsewhere, is full of people to whom I’m related.
