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Election Day food and bake sales seek bipartisan support
By LINDA M. LINONIS
There’s one thing voters can elect to do today to show support without being partisan. They can take part in food and bake sales planned at some Valley churches.
People work up an appetite discussing politics, so everyone’s a winner at those polling places – the customers who get goodies and the churches who put the funds to good use.
Paul M. Orend is coordinating a bake sale at Bethel Lutheran Church, 425 Crestwood Drive, Boardman, to benefit the Mickey Schuster Scholarship Fund. Schuster, who was a member of Honterus Lutheran Church that merged with Bethel in 2000, left his estate to charities and Bethel Lutheran. The church decided to use some of the funds as seed money for a scholarship fund; recipients of scholarship are church members who are pursuing a post-secondary education.
“We only have the sale during a presidential election,” Orend said. “The traffic is a lot higher.”
On Monday night, some church members met to package and price bake sale donations, Orend said. The sale takes place out of the kitchen in fellowship hall; it’s in the same room but away from the voting area.
The church also will have Bethel Christmas cards for sale. There’s a choice of two images – Advent candles on the altar and the altar at Christmas. A box of 18 cards and envelopes is $14; checks payable to the Mickey Schuster Scholarship Fund.
Deb Flora and John Coudriet are volunteering at the bake and food sale in Maxwell Hall in St. Brendan Church, 2800 Oakwood Ave., Youngstown. “We’ll be there until we’re exhausted or the food is gone,” Flora said. “The sale is a collaboration of parish members.”
She said the 2012 bake sale was well worth the effort. “So we decided to expand,” she said.
That success and the changing West Side motivated the sale coordinators. The food sale provides easy access to prepared foods and that’s a bonus since there’s no grocery store in the area, Flora said.
The bake-sale goods will be donated by church members. There will be a variety of items, she said.
Coudriet said he’ll be overseeing the kitchen, where “John McMuffins” will be offered – breakfast sandwiches with sausage and egg.
He said also on the menu for lunch and after will be hot dogs, sloppy joes and cheeseburgers and french fries. “And whatever else I decide to make,” he said. “I’ll be there starting at 4 a.m. until the polls close. “I like doing this because it helps the church,” Coudriet said.
Bobbie Chalky, a member of Good Hope Lutheran Church, 98 Homestead Drive, Boardman, coordinates a bake and food sale there. “We’ll be there from 6:30 a.m. until we’re sold out, and we usually sell out,” she said.
Chalky emphasized the homemade sloppy joes that will be available. Other homemade choices are vegetable beef barley soup and wedding soup; soup is available by the quart for takeout and bowl to eat there. There also will be plain, sauerkraut and chili hot dogs.
Bake-sale offerings will be cookies, cakes, pies, muffins and fudge. Whether the popular cinnamon rolls will be among the variety of baked goods isn’t known until Election Day, kind of like the outcome of the election.
Chalky said different groups in the church sponsor the Election Day food sales; this year it is the women’s group. “Poll workers and voters like it ... it’s convenient,” she said. “Some people who don’t vote here just come for lunch.”