It’s about time for the annual Cherry Pie Auction on KOXE and KBWD to be held Saturday, March 19 at the Adams Street Community Center. I was around for the first one back in ’77. Earlier that year, I had read an article about a fundraising event some radio station up East had done regarding auctioning off cherry pies. It gave me an idea and I got together with my boss, Bill Jamar, and he said, “Let’s go for it and see what we can do.”
I contacted Rodger Sweeney, who was then the Parks and Recreation Director in Brownwood. I talked to him about letting the money raised go to the summer youth programs. He was excited so we got excited and did it exactly the way this other radio station did theirs. We had people donate cherry pies, then we had people come by or call in and bid on them. That was the whole deal in 1977.
I do remember that the night before that first auction took place – and we didn’t know at that time how many cherry pies we were going to have, fact is we were trying to come up with a backup plan in case we didn’t get any cherry pies. We were worried to death.
That night, my wife said “You have to make a cherry pie because yours would probably make some good money.” I said, “But I don’t know how to make a cherry pie.” She replied, “Well I don’t make them too often but I know the ingredients.” So she get all ingredients all together late that night. But I said, “I’m too tired to mess with it tonight so just get a mason jar and dump those ingredients in there and I’ll take care of it later.”
By the way, she made sure I put the ingredients in so it would really be ‘my’ cherry pie. The jar had graham crackers on the bottom, cherry pie filling on top of that, and Cool Whip on top of that. It turned out that it looked so nice I decided not to mess it up by trying to cook it. And, people got a kick out of it.
They started laughing when I brought it in and, thankfully, we got a whole bunch of cherry pies donated as well. We started the auction and had raised a few hundred dollars for the Parks and Recreation Department. Then a guy named Tom Denison shows up and he got a kick out of the “pie in a jar.” He walks over to me and says, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll give a thousand dollars for the jar.” We almost fell down. I was about to give it to him, but on the air they said, “Of course, anybody who can top that bid can take it.”
So, a friend of mine named Bill Williams came walking in the door, and he said, “Well I think it’s worth eleven hundred (or something like that). All of a sudden, Bill and Tom start going back and forth trying to outbid each other for this jar of cherry pie. The bidding went far enough to where I couldn’t believe the money. It was in the thousands. Eventually, after about an hour of this, one of them stepped out of the bidding.
But, a little while later, the one who stepped out came back and said, “Whatever number I was bidding when I stepped out, I’ll go ahead and contribute that anyway.” Needless to say, Tom Denison and Bill Williams became two of my favorite people on that day because, believe it or not, with just some cherry pies, we raised close to $15,000 – about half through the auction and about half from Tom and Bill.
So, it was a great day and I always look back on it with fond memories and I’m so excited that the auction is still going. It’s not at the radio station anymore, but at the Adams Street Community Center, and now they’ve got a whole lot more than just cherry pies. The guys on the air still do a great job with it and they deserve your support. I have no doubt they will have fun but they could never have as much fun as I did that very first one.
Until next time, so long everybody.
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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].