Egg roasts, potlucks, good old days remembered

Yesterday evening we attended an egg roast social, a gathering of mostly people involved in the Pea Ridge Historical Society. For several years now, an egg roast social has been an annual event for our group, usually held at one of our member's houses, an outdoors, cook-over-an-open fire event, with food provided by all comers on a potluck basis, and featuring opportunities for fun, story-telling, conversations, joking around, and in general, enjoyable socializing. Egg roast socials are old-time get-togethers intended to bring people together for food and good clean enjoyable fun. The Historical Society specifically plans the egg roast socialto celebrate some of the good things which derive from old-time social customs.

The egg roasts that I remember as being held at our farm home when I was a boy were Sunday School class fellowship events. We boiled eggs in a big black pot over an open fire, and everybody brought various food dishes, much as we would for a church potluck dinner. Sometimes we roasted wieners over the coals left from cooking eggs, and we might also roast marshmallows as "dessert" in addition to the cake or pie that someone brought. I'm not sure that s'mores had been invented in those days. If they had, we didn't know about using our roasted marshmallows to make them. Actually in those days we had the makings of s'mores, the Hershey's chocolate bars, the graham crackers, and the roasted marshmallows; we just didn't have the idea to put them all together. Back then, our egg roasts usually involved outdoor games for the kids, and the kids would also come up with their own games. I recall that on one such gathering, we kids were running around and around outside our house, making noise and carrying on. I even got out my lariat and was trying to lasso some of the girls. But that didn't work out at all well. One of the girls didn't realize that Otter Creek ran very near the back of our house, and in the dark she ran right off the edge, sliding down the steep creek bank and into the water below. It took me weeks to live that one down when my schoolmates learned about it.

We often talk about the good ole days. Usually we don't identify exactly which years we think were the good ole days. People identify and explain the good ole days in several different ways. Sometimes the point is made that the good ole days were not that good, but that people tend to forget the tough parts and deprivations, and remember mostly the enjoyable parts, especially the parts where people got together for fellowship, or work, sharing food, sometimes music, story-telling, and group games. Some also make the point that often we look at our growing up days as the good ole days, possibly because we were young and immature, and were innocently unaware of the crises that were going on around us at the time. I tend to critique that idea, especially as I recall very well when people were just surviving times of economic depression, when people didn't have money to buy things, or when war-time meant rationing of sugar and gasoline and rubber tires, and we often had to do without.

Here's my take on the good ole days. I think the hard times are not necessarily separated from the good experiences and memories that people form as they work together, eat together, socialize together, sing and play together, and worship together. The memories of the good old days don't have to forget or ignore the struggles and stresses, or the shortages and the sufferings of any particular time in our past. The good ole things happen right along with the tough and trying things. Quite often the tough times may even motivate people to do more of the kind of mutual help and support and cooperation which produces those memories of good ole days. Many times even in difficult times we discover that we are much blessed in the life we work through together with family, friends and neighbors in the community.

I have always enjoyed meals together where people all bring food items to contribute the the whole. This may be a church dinner, or neighbor ladies coming together to feed a threshing crew, or feeding a group of men who are putting up a barn for their neighbor. We speak of many of those dinners as potluck meals. Not all of them are pure potluck of course. Even when we get together for an egg roast social, some of the people will be talking, I'll bring thus and so if you bring your special pie, and so on. If it was a pure potluck meal, nobody would know what anybody else would be bringing; the tables would hold a pure random variety of dishes. I recall that several years ago when I was pastor of a church in Atkins, Ark., we had a quilting club, a group of ladies who always spent Wednesday mornings making quilts, stitched by hand. They always each brought a dish to share for lunch. One Wednesday morning every single one of the ladies brought a bean dish. However, interestingly, no dish was just like any other dish; we had green beans, brown beans, white beans, bean salad, bean casserole, 10 or so bean dishes, all different and some unique.

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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history, member of the Pea Ridge Alumni Association and vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by email at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Editorial on 09/27/2017