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New Berlin ready for today’s sausage festival
Published September 6, 2009
NEW BERLIN — Imagine this shopping list:
• 2,500 pounds of sausage.
• 1,000 pounds of potato salad.
• 300 pounds of green beans.
• 120 gallons of sauerkraut.
• 60 gallons of applesauce.
If it sounds like a lot to go pick up at the grocery store, imagine instead rolling up your sleeves and making it all yourself.
Because that’s what was happening at the New Berlin Community Center Saturday as about 80 volunteers were getting ready for the 58th Annual Sausage Festival that benefits the center and the New Berlin Volunteer Fire Department located across FM 775.
The Festival begins at 11 a.m. today.
It includes the $7 sausage plate with homemade fixings, bingo, an auction, a raffle and music — wrapped up with a community country and western dance from 7:30 to 11:30 p.m.
The undertaking that raises about a quarter of the NBVFD’s annual budget each year is a major one, said Fire Chief Kurt Strey.
“We started about two weeks ago, and last night we cut the beef and the pork,” Strey said, taking a moment to point to various firefighters, friends, neighbors, relatives, in-laws and even a few “outlaws” on loan from the county jail to help prepare a community event.
“It’s a lot like a family affair,” Strey said. After volunteers finished up Saturday, they were to be on-hand right after church Sunday to get ready for lunch service, which continues until all the food is gone.
“Tomorrow, this becomes more of a cooking area and not so much a preparing area,” Strey said.
The New Berlin Community Club was organized in 1951 to help raise money to maintain the New Berlin School. After the school closed in 1959, the New Berlin Community Club purchased the property, which has remained a focal point for the rural community.
When the NBVFD was organized in the early 1970s, what was then an annual sausage supper became an all-day affair shared by the Community Club and the fire department.
Over the years, the festival has grown into an event where friends of the community or its former school return year after year to catch up with old friends and neighbors they see at no other time of year.
The proceeds have been dedicated to a number of projects over the years that benefit not only the community club and fire department, but also the community as a whole and its citizens.
Since the late 1970s, the club has donated to scholarship funds that help Marion and La Vernia graduates each year.
And the NBVFD has grown from one truck to eight and operates out of two fire stations.
And, once a year, turns its hand to sausage-making, which Strey’s father, Melvin Strey, was overseeing on Saturday.
He didn’t divulge the sausage recipe. But he said it’s popular in the community — it would have to be in order to sell 2,500 plates — and the Sausage Festival is the one time a year everybody gets to try it.
“It’s a secret!” the elder Strey said. “We’re not telling anybody the recipe.”
“That’s the trick,” his son agreed. “Only three people know the recipe, and you’re talking to two of them.”
The third is Melvin Strey’s wife, Joy, who unlike her husband and her son was a little too busy to talk to a reporter.
“I told you, it’s kind of a family affair,” the fire chief said.
Dawn Young contributed to this story.
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