Each year, the Three Rivers Lions Club (TRLC) hosts an ox roast at the Water Festival, but this year, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented it. Still wanting to stage the popular feature, organizers decided to innovate. This past Saturday, at the Lions Club building on Sixth Avenue, volunteers conducted the ox roast as a drive-through event.

Sheree Sorensen, TRLC’s Vision Chair, is responsible for a charitable eyeglasses donation and distribution program, but she is also co-chair of the event along with Alice Kielau. “We’re more than pleased. This is our first attempt at doing this from our location,” Sorensen said. “We had several inquiries about, ‘are you going to do an ox roast?’ and then we decided, let’s try a day, and just see how it goes. People have been really thrilled.”

To make the ox roast happen, Sorensen said volunteers stepped forward from the Lions Club’s own network as well as the National Honor Society at Three Rivers High School and the Twin County Probation Center. “We made pies Thursday. We made the ox roast yesterday and set everything up, and then cooked soup this morning. Now we’re serving.”

The main challenge for the new format, Sorensen said, was determining “how are we going to set this up?” Greeters were stationed at the TRLC driveway entrance to help customers fill out order blanks. Trisha Highlund wore the TRLC’s lion costume. “Everybody loves a friendly lion,” she said. “They’re all getting out and taking selfies with me. Just interacting with the people in the community is great.”

Just outside the TRLC building, volunteers cooked in large kettles. In early planning, Sorensen said, “we were going to do it on the burners. Traditionally, we do it in the soup kettles, and the guys were willing to do that, so that was fun, because then people driving up can see what’s going on.”

Then, using the TRLC building’s garage bays, volunteers set up two stations. The first was a pay station, collecting all forms of payment, and the second was a service bay where customers received their orders.

TRLC District Governor Julie Mayieurs said customers were “lined up early this morning before we opened.” By the mid-afternoon, service was going strong. Sorensen said, “we have already run out of soup, that was about two o’clock. So, we feel that we’re doing very well.” Visitors came from the Three Rivers area and St. Joseph County, but Sorensen said there were also customers from Bangor and Kalamazoo. 

Volunteers present on Saturday said they typically serve between 600 and 800 people a day at the Water Festival and planned for 400 at the drive-through event. In the mid-afternoon Saturday, volunteers had not yet tabulated totals for the day, but said they possibly served as many as 500. Pay station volunteer Barb Penny said there were at least 250 cars, and “most cars have had at least two people in them.”

New for this year’s pay table was a tablet payment system, which eased credit card payments and will also allow volunteers to easily calculate totals. “It’s been a real lifesaver,” Penny said.

For Sorensen, a rewarding highlight of the day was getting together to work alongside fellow TRLC members. “You know what’s really been nice? Since the whole COVID thing we haven’t met, other than we had a picnic in the summer. And our motto is ‘we serve,’ but we haven’t been able to do that. So, this has been fantastic for us. It feels good to be with everybody again. And you should know that all of our proceeds stay right in the community. Everything. So, we feel like we’re back at it again,” Sorensen said.

Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.

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