Saint Bonaventure Thursday Barbeque

I attended Saint Bonaventure (St. Bonnies) Grade School 1952 – 1961, Kindergarten through eight grade.  It was quite a wonderful experience.  The Church, which was a grand structure, was built directly after the Civil War, unfortunately was demolished several years ago as well as a portion of the original grade school.

There were two lunch rooms, the cold lunch room for those who brought their lunch and the hot meal lunch room for those who would buy lunch in the cafeteria.  In the cold lunchroom you could purchase a ½ pint of white or chocolate milk for $0.03 and a baloney sandwich for $0.05.  A hot lunch which included milk, was $0.25 served in the cafeteria.  An extra barbeque sandwich was $0.05. Red octagonal chips were sold prior to lunch in the classrooms then would be presented to the cashier at the head of the serving line before you were given your food.    It was always a proud moment on the days when my mom volunteered for lunch room duty with other mothers. It was just so special to see her.   The “head cook” was named Mitzi.

The best meal was served on Thursday, which was hamburger barbeque served on a bakery bun from Mollenger’s Bakery located right across the street from the church.  The meal included one barbeque sandwich, cole slaw, potato chips, and milk.  The creative students would add potato chips and slaw on the barbeque sndwich.

Around 2012, one of my fellow classmates began organizing get-togethers at local restaurants for our grade school classmates.  At one of those get-togethers I offered to have the get-together at my home.  The date was set and I wanted to serve something special to them……….Barbeque Thursday!!!!   I looked at several hamburger barbeque recipes and started to experiment.  I finally came up with what I thought was really close to the original lunch barbeque.  Ron Ramer, who I beat up one day during a baseball game for filling up my baseball glove with dirt (he had a previous warning not to do it but did it anyway) was one of the first to arrive and as soon as he walked through the front door, he got a whiff of what was cooking and said, “I know what we are having -St. Bonnies barbeque!”  During dinner he said “you nailed it!”  Mission accomplished!

As a side note, I was fortunate to have gained possession of the Saint Bonaventure gym basketball electronic scoreboard. Ron Ramer who came to my house for that classmate dinner, and made the comment on the barbeque, during the evening saw the scoreboard which was fully restored and working in my garage. Ron had just built an addition onto his home which included a 1/2 court indoor basketball court. One look at it and Ron had to have it. I was about to sell my home and had no place to put the scoreboard, so a good home for the scoreboard was found with Ron. I was happy he ended up with it.

*As an interesting tidbit, the model scoreboard Ron ended up with is the same scoreboard used in the movie “Hoosier”.