At Saint Anthony’s annual fish fry, the line stretched from the cafeteria, all the way across the school, and up the stairs.
That’s where volunteer Anne Manning was working. She had a big pitcher of beer in each hand and a sleeve of cups under her arm as she wove her way through the crowd, offering drinks to the people in line.
“It’s the best job,” she said.
Manning had never heard of a fish fry before she moved to Dayton.
“I didn't grow up in this area, and I didn't grow up Catholic,” she said. “So, when I did get out here, it was a cultural awakening for me. My friends would say things like, ‘We're going to a fish fry! It's in a Catholic school!’ And I was like, ‘Why would I want to sit in a Catholic school?’”
But then her friends explained that it’s more than fish. There’s gambling, prizes, and beer, and all the money goes to charity.
“I didn't understand that during Lent, this is the place to be,” she said. “It is a social outing, and it’s really fun.”
Manning said it also gives her and her husband a chance to volunteer and give back to the community.
For the hundreds of people that braved the line, there was a feast at the end. The cooking at this fish fry, like many in Dayton, is put together by the Corpus Christi Fryers. They’re a small group of friends who have been helping Catholic parishes fundraise for decades now.
Chuck Szabo, whose nickname is King Fish, said it all started 34 years ago with a single event at their church.
“Now we do maybe eight big fish fries a year,” he said. “And then we also come to your backyard and cook for 30 people. That's a prize that we give out… We raffle it off. And the money that they make goes to the organization, and we pay for the fish fry. So, that's our gift to them.”
Szabo said, on average, they help raise about $10,000 at each fish fry and their success is largely because they make everything from scratch. They cut and bread the fish. They make their own mac and cheese and coleslaw and beans.
And while he hosts a lot of fish fries every year, Sazbo said one of them — the one at DECA Prep Activity Center — means the most to him.
“It’s for my wife's scholarship fund,” he said. “She died in 2021 of brain cancer. So we wanted to keep her name alive and have scholarships for kids at Chaminade Julienne High School. That's where she worked, and that’s in her name.”
Fish fries grew out of the Catholic tradition of eating fish on Fridays during Lent, the 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. It’s also a season when Catholics focus on almsgiving, and at fish fries, they have many ways of raising money for charity.
Upstairs in the gym at Saint Anthony, there are card games, dice games, and a roulette-style wheel.
Mary Harris sold raffle tickets at the event. Lots of raffle tickets.
“So, behind me on the stage are all our raffle items,” she said. “You can get almost anything you want. A dollar a ticket. Six for five. Fifteen for ten.”
When she says you can get almost anything, she’s not kidding: gift baskets, bottles of booze, gardening equipment, Wright brothers model planes, luggage sets, Airbnb trip certificates, all of which were donated, and all of which raise money.
“It’s awesome,” Harris said. “I was a student here. My kids were students here. I do this every year.”
Fish fries like the one at St. Anthony’s have been so successful that some non-profits that aren’t affiliated with the Catholic Church have started hosting them. Perhaps most notably, the Antioch Shriners throw a fish fry in downtown Dayton every Friday during Lent.
You might recognize Shriners as the guys in funny red hats riding small vehicles at parades, but Bryan Olgetree notes that their mission is to help kids in serious medical need.
“Our fraternity will take any child with a burn injury, cleft palate, facial-cranial injury, orthopedic injury... And we will take that child and treat them 100% for free, regardless of their ability to pay,” he said.
Some Shriners have been on both sides of the organization’s largess. Bill Stamm's family received help from the organization years after he joined, when he had a granddaughter who was unable to walk when she was young.
“We got a hold of a hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, and they evaluated her,” he said. “They had her down on the operating table for nine hours, and they put my daughter up down there, did her laundry and meals and so forth. And they didn’t charge us one red cent, and now she's walking.”
Like the church fish fries, the Shriners have raffles and cards and other games of chance to raise money, but in the end, it’s really Catholic charities and schools and hospitals that win at these Lenten fish fries.
