First Posted: 2/16/2015
PITTSTON — Last Sunday was a chance for old friends to get together in the parish hall at St. Joseph Marello Church in Pittston.
Nominally, it was the parish’s annual Italian Festival.
For Sandra Ostrowski, of Pittston, and Donna Timko, of Shavertown, it was a reunion of old friends. The women had been high school classmates in Pittston. Timko lived right by the church — Our Lady of Mt. Carmel — when she was a girl.
The women hugged and spent a few minutes catching up on old times.
“We haven’t seen each other in about 40 years,” Ostrowski said. “Well, actually, we did see each other at the high school reunion last July, but before that it was just too long a time.”
They didn’t go to the Italian Festival for the reunion, however. Instead, it was the food.
“The polenta reminds me of my mother,” Timko said.
She wasn’t alone.
There was a steady stream of diners coming from the packed parking lot and into the hall all afternoon.
Some left with brown paper bags full of take-out dinners. Others claimed seats at the round tables covered with red or green tablecloths. Students from this year’s confirmation class made sure there was a salad at each place, then delivered the entrees, generous helpings of pasta or polenta and meatballs. Another crew from the class cleared the empty plates so the diners could socialize over dessert.
At a table along the wall, the eight members of the pizza frita crew kept the treat coming for anyone who wanted a little fried dough covered with cinnamon sugar. They assured all comers that it was “calorie-free and fits into everyone’s diet.”
In the kitchen, chief cook, John Bingham, and his crew from the Holy Name Society and the St. Joseph Marello Knights of Columbus boiled the pasta and polenta, ladled out the sauce and passed the plates to the servers. By the end of the afternoon, they had served more than 400 dinners, a number that did not include the sausage-and-pepper sandwiches people could order as well. And the Holy Name men also baked cakes for dessert.
The kitchen crew had help from assistant pastor Fr. John Shearer, decked out in his “summer apron.”
He and the pastor, Fr. Carlos Esquevel, are recent transplants from the California branch of St. Joseph Oblates assigned to the Northeast Pennsylvania parish. Both circulated around the room, sometimes enjoying the food, more often the conversation with their parishioners.
The February pre-Lenten festival has been going on “for about ever,” Esquevel said. No one in the room could remember when the event started, but the prevailing belief is that the first pasta dish was served “back in the ’70s.”
“It’s one of three fundraisers,” he said. “There’s this and there’s the summer picnic. And this past year, there was a dinner in the fall.”
Parish organizers tried out a new event, hosting a pork dinner before Thanksgiving as an additional fundraiser.
In addition, the Altar and Rosary Society had bake sale tables in the hallway just outside the dinner.
“We have some fantastic bakers in the church,” said Marie Rovinski, of Jenkins Township, who watched over the table and sold cookies, cakes, truffles and a variety of, again, no-calorie pre-Lenten treats.
By Sunday afternoon, there was only one table piled high with goodies. The sale originally needed four tables to hold all the donations, she said.
“Every little bit helps,” said parish secretary Mary Ann Perks, from Harding. She supervised the basket raffle table.
“Every one of these baskets was donated by a parishioner,” she said. “We have good and faithful parishioners here. You put the word out, and they come through.”
Depending on the weather, the church can net between $12,000 and $20,000 at the Italian Festival, Perks said.
Right now, the priority is to re-do the church’s air-conditioning system that broke down last year, she added.
“We really need to get it up and running,” she said. “We have a lot of elderly parishioners who don’t handle the summer heat that well. We have weddings coming in the spring and summer.”
Parish members are not just from Pittston, either, Perks said, but they come from Harding, Bear Creek, Plains, Duryea, Suscon, Shavertown, Exeter and a half dozen other towns. Most grew up in the church and have a long family history there. Often, in conversation, people still referred to it as “Mt. Carmel,” the name the church carried before the diocesan-mandated wave of parish mergers in the last decade.
They continue to be connected with the church building that held their own baptisms, First Communions and weddings, as well as those of their parents and grandparents, whose funerals were conducted there, as well.
They continue to support the parish.
“There’s a sense of peace here, a sense of where you belong,” said Timko’s sister, Gail Lussi, of Exeter. “It’s a welcoming place. Both the priests and the people make you feel at home. And we grew up here. It’s our church.”
