Lines in Leopold

LEOPOLD, Mo. -- The line for dinner at the Leopold picnic began forming about 2 p.m. Saturday, an hour before the dining hall doors opened. Inside on long tables awaited family-style bowls and platters of chicken and dumplings, fried chicken, kettle beef, corn, green beans, boiled potatoes, slaw, garden-grown tomatoes, homemade bread, chocolate cake -- German chocolate, of course -- and fruit salad, everything you might want except elbow room.

The eight tables seating 340 people remained occupied much of the day.

At least 2,500 people attended the annual picnic Saturday. The population of Leopold is 173.

The picnic is a central event in the lives of people who grew up in Leopold. They have attended every one, and when they reach the fourth grade they begin working at the stand their family probably has been running for decades.

Most all the 375 families in the parish have a mission at each picnic, whether to run a booth, help cook the meal or keep the grounds clean.

Veteran ice cream scoopers Dale Rose, left, and Marty Calvert churned out cone after cone Saturday at the Leopold Picnic. "I've eaten four bowls, and I'm not sick yet," Rose said, referring to whether one could eat too much ice cream. Rose has worked the ice cream booth for 10 years, Rose for five. It is the booth where the youngest children start working at the picnic to learn the ropes. (Kit Doyle)

"If you're the kid of someone who always has the soda stand, you're likely to inherit it," says Cindy Wolpers, the church secretary.

People who move away from Leopold come back for the picnic if possible. Geri Geringer and her husband, Bill, drove in from Bloomington, Ind., Friday night. Geri came to help her sister, Jenny Nenninger, serve the diners at Table 1. Jenny inherited Table 1 from their late mother, Bertha Beussink.

Stanley Thiele, who just turned 80, began working at the homemade ice cream stand in 1954 after getting out of the Army. When he retired as head of the stand last year, his son, Ernie, and son-in-law, Tim Wiseman, took over. But Stanley was around Friday when they spent seven hours turning out 85 gallons of vanilla.

Stanley, wearing the overalls of a former carpenter, says the picnic is a homecoming for many people who don't live the way they once did growing up in Leopold. "Not many people bake their own bread anymore," he said, shaking his head as if not understanding why.

His reaction to enthusiasm over the food in the dining hall is to say, "We eat that way all the time." His wife, Rose Ann, and two daughters run the carryout concession at the dining hall.

Although he stirred a cauldron of chicken and dumplings all Saturday, Marvin Surface thought that the hottest job of the day was probably frying chicken in the back of the kitchen during the Leopold Picnic.

The ladies of the parish rolled out the dumplings, 117 gallon bags of them, in the Knights of Columbus Hall Tuesday morning. Then Wayne Thiele fired up the kettles at 4:30 Saturday morning, and head cooks Tina Broshuis and Joan McWilliams arrived soon afterward.

The work is so well organized and ingrained in the families that Broshuis doubts the head cooks even need to show up. "You just know your job and just do it," she said.

Broshuis also is the head cook at the nearby public school but doesn't get to make chicken and dumplings for the students because the state is fussy about calories and fat content. Nobody at the Leopold Picnic seemed fussy. Friendly was more like it.

Broshuis says Leopold and the picnic represent a way of life that is harder and harder to find. One of her daughters told her she didn't realize how sheltered she'd been by the German Catholic community until she went away to college. One daughter has moved back to Leopold and the other is trying to get here.

The main course at the first Leopold Picnic in 1890 was chicken and dumplings, too. People came by horse and wagon from as far away as Marble Hill -- five miles -- to eat, cheer on the sack racers, listen to singers and instrumentalists and to dance. Saturday, many dozens of people rode horses and mule-drawn wagons to the picnic. One group from the Cape Cowboy Church in Fruitland hauled their horses to Crump and then rode six miles along a county road. John Van Gennip and his crew watched the horses and mules while the riders roamed the picnic, where anything that could be tossed -- washers, dimes, pingpong balls -- could be the object of a game.

Keith Brotherton adjusted the score to his washers game Saturday during the Leopold Picnic.

One mule team was particularly tired, Van Gennip said smiling. "They didn't vote for Hoover, but they could have."

The 2007 picnic was held on the same church grounds as the 1890 picnic. Some things have changed. The announcement for the first picnic promised "good order will be maintained." That meant intoxicating beverages were banned. At the modern picnic beer sales rank second only to food sales. Somehow good order was still maintained.

When the Rev. John van Luytelaar brought 12 families from Cincinnati to settle here in 1856, the community was christened Valmount. With the assignment of a postal address the community wanted to change the name to Leopolis in honor of the pope at the time, Leo XXIII. The postal service said no to Leopolis but yes to Leopold.

Leopold has no city government or industry. A few people still farm, but many drive to Cape Girardeau to work. The town revolves around the church and the public schools, which perennially rank the best among all the districts in the region. Teachers say the schools thrive because everyone in the community is deeply involved. The picnic works the same way.

Geri Geringer, the director of patient accounts at Bloomington Hospital in Indiana, and her husband plan to move back to Leopold when they retire in 2009. "It's a good feeling just to drive in here," she said.

Some of the buckets used to make 80 gallons of ice cream for the Leopold Picnic rested empty once their jobs were done Saturday.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137