The clankety noise an oven door makes while opening up joins the sounds of apples being sliced in Olinda White’s kitchen and dining room. She’s checking on two pies in the oven – a lemon and pumpkin.
She asks, “That’s not done, is it?”
She’s baking nine pies for tomorrow, which is the Fourth of July. She’s one of a few pie makers who donate pies for a teddy bear fundraiser for people who are in need of some plush hugs. The fundraiser happens every year on the Fourth of July.
“That’s a different lemon pie,” she said pointing to the pie in the oven. “That one right there. You put a lemon in a blender, with the peel and everything. You put the whole lemon in the blender.”
This is not her first rodeo though, that is, making a bunch of pies in a day – they’re part of dozens that will soon be sold. White is a Beta Sigma Phi member. It’s an international sorority whose Wrangell chapter took over the pie fundraiser 43 years ago from the town’s Civic Club. White said Beta decided to combine the pie fundraiser with raising money for teddy bears to give to people in need.
“We try to get nice bears that are soft and cuddly,” she said. “And they are. They’re very, very nice.”
Today, White said she’s already pre-sold one to someone who requested a nectarine pie.
Her friend is here to help and cuts up apples and nectarines from a pile in front of me on the large wooden dinner table. Slicing the apples is much louder than the nectarines, but she cuts them up quickly. White said this work takes the whole day, and she’s not sure how much longer she can do this – the group is getting older.
“There’s only six (of us) left, and we’re all old,” she said. “It’s very difficult to get it done because everyone can’t do it anymore because of faulty legs or being sick or not being able to stand to make the pies.”
The baking pies give off the unmistakable aroma that fills her kitchen.
“It just smells good to me. You know, it smells fruity,” White said. “I try not to put as much sugar in them as they ask for, because you don’t need that much sugar.”
The aroma is more than one flavor of pie though. She’s making a different kind of pie for each of the nine. No repeats.
“All kinds: pumpkin, apple, cherry, key lime, lemon, rhubarb, rhubarb, apple raisin,” White said.
As White threw flour, sugar and cinnamon into a bowl, she admitted she doesn’t measure the ingredients.
“I pretty much always go off of a recipe,” she said. “I might not do the actual measuring, but it gives the flavor.”
With the pie proceeds, White said they usually buy 12 dozen teddy bears at a time. The group drops off the stuffies at the police department, dentist, the fire department and the emergency room.
“We’ve given them to kids. We’ve given them to adults,” she said. “Our friend, who’s in Beta, one year fell the third of July and broke both her arms. She was in the emergency room. I said, ‘Marlene, you need a teddy bear.’ And she said, ‘I don’t need a teddy bear. I can’t even hold it.’”
White said there are people in town who laugh because their kids have gotten two or three bears since they’ve been to the emergency room that many times.
“When something has happened to you and it’s traumatic, something to hang on to like that calms you down, and that’s why we do it,” she said.
Back in White’s kitchen a timer ticks away, keeping score of how long the pies have been baking. She said the most extraordinary pie they made in previous years was a mincemeat pie someone requested.
White said, “Golly, who would want mincemeat pie?”
She said they usually end up with more rhubarb than any other kind of pie though. I had to see for myself.
So the next day I walked over to the pie booth. It’s a little after eight o’clock in the morning and some customers were trickling in. It’s true, there were multiple rhubarb pies, but also apple – and strawberry rhubarb and apple rhubarb.
John Seines was one of the first to arrive.
“I get here early where I can get a pie before they’re all gone,” he said with a blueberry pie in his hand.
Marisa Fulgham also showed up. She recalled buying a lemon icebox pie the previous year, like the one White described earlier.
She told her friend Edna Nore, who bought a pecan pie, that the ladies selling the pies are pie fairies.
“You guys should change your name to pie fairies,” Nore said. “Oh, that one. He got the sweet potato one.”
Fulgham responded, “That’s not sweet potato, that’s just pumpkin, right?”
“It’s just pumpkin,” he said.
“You kind of do look like a pumpkin,” Nore said.
The pie fairies asked me if I want to join Beta Sigma Phi. They added that they want people without grey hair in the group. I inform them I have a few greys myself. Later, Olinda White gave me an update on the sale and said they sold out of all 61 pies and made $2244. That included a few donations too.
