At Saint Anthony’s annual fish fry, the line stretches from the cafeteria, through the entire school, and up the stairs.
Volunteer Anne Manning works there. He had a large pitcher of beer in each hand and a sleeve of cups under his arm as he swept through the crowd, offering drinks to people in line.
“It’s the best job,” he said.
Manning had never heard of a fish fry before he moved to Dayton.
“I didn’t grow up in this place, and I didn’t grow up Catholic,” he said. “So, when I got out of 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 go to a Catholic school?’”
But then his friends explained that it was more than just fish. There’s gambling, prizes, and beer, and all the money goes to charity.
“I didn’t understand that during Lent, this was the place to be,” he said. “It’s a social outing, and it’s really fun.”
Manning said it also gives her and her husband an opportunity to volunteer and give back to the community.
For the hundreds of people who braved the line, there was a feast at the end. The cooking at this fish fry, like many in Dayton, is put together by Corpus Christi Fryers. They are a small group of friends who have helped raise funds for Catholic parishes 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 make eight large fish fries a year,” he said. “And then we also go to your backyard and cook for 30 people. That’s a prize we’re giving away… We’re going to raffle it off. And the money 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 per fish fry and their success is largely because they make everything from scratch. They cut and breaded the fish. They make their own mac and cheese and coleslaw and beans.
And while he hosts many fish fries each year, Sazbo said one of them — the one at the DECA Prep Activity Center — is the most important to him.
“This is for my husband’s scholarship fund,” he said. “He passed away in 2021 from brain cancer. So we want to keep his name alive and have scholarships for kids at Chaminade Julienne High School. That’s where he worked, and that’s in his name.”
Fish fries grew out of the Catholic tradition of eating fish every Friday during Lent, the 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. It is also a time when Catholics focus on giving alms, and with fish fries, they have many ways to raise 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, all our raffle items are behind me on stage,” she said. “You can get almost anything you want. One dollar a ticket. Six for five. Fifteen for ten.”
When he says you can get just about anything, he’s not kidding: gift baskets, bottles of booze, gardening tools, Wright brothers model airplanes, luggage sets, Airbnb trip certificates, all donated, and everyone raised money.
“It’s great,” Harris said. “I study here. My children are students here. I do it every year.”
Fish fries like St. Anthony became so successful that several non-profits not affiliated with the Catholic Church began hosting them. Perhaps most notably, the Antioch Shriners throw a fish fry in downtown Dayton every Friday during Lent.
You may know the Shriners as the guys in funny red hats who ride in little cars in parades, but Bryan Olgetree says their mission is to help children with serious medical needs.
“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 are on both sides of the great organization. Bill Stamm’s family received help from the organization a few years after he joined, when he had a grandson who could not walk when he was a child.
“We got a hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, and they examined him,” he said. “They put him on the operating table for nine hours, and they put my son there, washed and ate and so on. And they didn’t charge us a red cent, and now he’s walking.”
Like fish fries at church, Shriners have raffles and cards and other games of chance to raise money, but in the end, Catholic charities and schools and hospitals really win these Lenten fish fries .
