Pastime: Band Banquet Fried Chicken

By Maylon Rice

This Pastime always surfaces in early November each year and harkens me back a crisp, golden fired memory of band banquets and fried chicken.

How can you have a memory of two things like the Marching Lumberjack Band Banquets and fried chicken?

The two seemingly unrelated items were – well staples – and both always on the menu for that event.

In the days before the Arkansas Activities Association expanded prep football into playoffs at the district, regional and even state level, football ended  when the regular season ended. The Lumberjacks were often 7-2-1 or 7-3 and usually somewhere in the rankings for a conference title.

In the late 1960s or 1970s,  when the final whistle blew on a regular season schedule football  was over until next year.

And it was the same with the marching band.  After football season (which ran concurrent with marching band competition season) the marching band season was over.

Often the Marching Lumberjacks made three contests each year. We were often aware of and invited to more than three such contests – but by Martin’s Law and the financial limits of the taxpayers of Warren School District No. 1 – three out of town marching contests were the maximum.

At the end of the Marching Band season, there was always a Band Banquet – which was to signal an end to the marching season and the start of the holiday season with concert band practices and performances commencing.

I have in my files, three tiny band banquet programs from 1969, 1970 and 1972. Somehow, the 1971 program and its contents escapes me, but connecting the dots I can fill in the year with no problem.

The 1969 and 1970 programs (as was 1971) were held in the Warren High School Cafeteria. The 1972 program was moved to the new Fellowship Hall at the United Methodist Church.

As a kid, I never really thought much about the format or the menu – now it is so funny to me – the menu – never changed.

It was always printed on the inside cover of the band banquet program.  It consisted of: Tossed salad (iceberg lettuce, a few mealy sliced tomatoes, possibly some celery and maybe a little chopped onion), Lima Beans  were served three out of the four years, with a 1972 addition of green beans; a baked potato (always) and then this description: “Southern Fried Chicken.”

Why fried chicken every year?  

Well, fried chicken, was Curry Martin’s favorite.

So it was not just “fried chicken,” but “Southern Fried Chicken.” While most cookbooks will make a distinction, I’ll give you my take on this fine delicacy served up to the band members, their parents, and guests at the event.

It was buttermilk coated, deep fried, golden brown chicken with the skin as crispy and dark but oh, so good.

Hot rolls and those often found tiny “pats” of butter swimming in a dish of an ice cube or two on the tables, completed the meal. There was never, I repeat, never enough butter at the tables for me.

For dessert there were individually cut slices of chocolate cake, usually a German chocolate cake. Sometimes there was an attempt at a carrot cake – usually heavy on the mix and light on the carrots and even once there was an attempt at a red velvet cake as a near riot broke out across each table for the two or three slices at a setting of 10 diners.

But always, and I mean always, there was Southern Fried Chicken.

I am searching my memory banks as to the source of the chicken when memories of standing in the serving line flashed in front of my brain.  It was Ms. Ruby Carraway’s Southern Fried Chicken.

The Carraway boys, the elder Pat and the younger (and now sadly deceased Tommy), Ms. Ruby’s grandsons were in the  band.

I can see Ms. Ruby and her son Julian Carraway and other family members or staffers at their Southern Fried Chicken Restaurant out on the Fordyce Highway – near the old skating rink and across from Burgess Williams Massey-Ferguson tractor dealership – serving up mountains of Southern Fried Chicken at the band banquets.

That is all gone now. 

The restaurant, the accompanying business and the principles in that once thriving business. (For the younger set this was long before that Kentucky Colonel Harlan B. Sanders, showed up on South Main, in the former home of the Rose Oil Service Station). It was the best chicken served anywhere. On most Sundays, after church, you could not get an immediate seating in that restaurant, it was always busy.

But let’s head back to the band banquet.

Mr. Martin and the band boosters always paid for a color film of one of the marching band contest routines.  One year it was in Crump Stadium in Memphis, another at the brand new McClellan High School in Little Rock and once I can recall at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia.

After the film, the entertainment was usually “The Singing Majorette,” under the tutelage of Mrs. Mary Lou Martin playing an upright piano lugged into the cafeteria by a collection of band guys the afternoon before.

Always a speaker, such as Homer Brown, the legendary band director at State College of Arkansas (now UCA), or Russell Langston, President of the Arkansas School Band and Orchestra Association or Don Mix, director of bands at the Arkansas State University, spoke in the echoing chamber of the cafeteria  on the value of a good music program in Arkansas’s public schools.

The senior band members were recognized, and then the best announcement of the evening was given.

“There is some left over chicken at the back table, help us eat it all,” Mr. Martin would say, as Mary Lou hurried over to fill him a plate of chicken for later consumption. 

I could always use another piece of Miss Ruby’s chicken.

That is a golden, crispy Pastime that is so much more delicious than that pressured friend finger licking imitation, I assure you.