Record Pies, Record Crowd at Annual Auction
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| Kathy Keeser wins the first pie of the auction.View Slide Show |
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The bidders' eyes were locked, dollar amounts slipping quickly from their lips as auctioneer Roy Burdick's head bobbed back and forth between them.
He swung around to Mary Ann Maroni, pointing straight at her: "Forty-eight? Forty-eight?" "Fifty," said Maroni, daring Jay Barry with a glance.
Barry squinted at her as Burdick bobbed back to him, finger pointing. "Fifty-one?" asked Burdick. "Fifty-one," said the superintendent of the North Berkshire School Union, upping the ante.
But alas, it was in vain.
After several minutes of intense bidding, Maroni walked away with the prize: an apple bourbon pie made by Clarksburg School Principal Karen Gallese. The price? A cool $57. Madness? Possibly.
But for those who had taken a taste of their perfect pie, perhaps no price was too high. In fact, it was hard to find a pie going for less than $15 at the Oh Be Thankful Pie Contest and Auction on Monday night at the American Legion.
Maybe it was because so many of the pies had been made by the children at Clarksburg, Savoy and Gabriel Abbott Memorial elementary schools. Maybe because so many of the bidders were family and faculty.
"I think we'll have a lot of money this year," said Maroni, a Clarksburg teacher and one of the organizers, before the bidding began.
The auction benefits the Community Action Elf Program, the Louison House and the Berkshire Food Project, and pays for supplies for the students to bake 40 more pies — half apple, half pumpkin — for the American Legion's annual Christmas dinner.
Participants had to make two pies — one for sampling and one for auctioning. The entrance fee was a canned good for the food pantry. Now in its eighth year, the auction boasted a record 84 pies — likely because founder Heidi Dugal had recently left off teaching at Abbott Memorial to become principal of Savoy School. That brought a selection of pies from Savoy for the first time. Monica Wissman of the town of Florida had already tasted five pies and had made her way through the packed room to one end of the four tables groaning with pie samples.
"I'm working my way around," she said, taking a bite from an appealing pie. Wissman's son and older daughter had each baked a pie and she and her 9-year-old daughter Miranda had worked on one together, an apple pecan butterscotch swirl.
"It was the first I made it. If it's good, I'll make another one for home," she said. To the side, some 16 judges were working their way through about 10 samples a piece, trying to determine winners based on crust, presentation and filling, which were ranked on a scale from 0 to 4.
"It's good being a judge," said Mary Giron, the secretary at Clarksburg School as Gallese, sitting next to her, nodded in agreement. Each judge got to hand out three ribbons for first, second and third. Six-year-old Jacob Field was clasping the blue ribbon his seconde-grade class at Gabriel Abbott won for an apple crumb pie.
"I mixed the sugar and the flour and put the butter in," said Jacob. Back at the auction, Gallese, Abbott Memorial Principal Greg Betti and Kathy Keeser of Florida kept up a spirited bidding — especially against each other. Keeser (a notorious bidder-upper according to several sources) walked away with the first win of the night, a tiramisu made by Dugal, and the pies were piling up in front of the three as the night wore on.
"This is the highest number of pies we've had in eight years," said Dugal. "It's such a great turn out."
The schools had already raised $521 just in a raffle at the event. The auction had raised nearly $2,000 last year and Dugal hoped, from the size of the crowd, that they would make much more this year. And it wasn't just the numbers impressing the organizers, which also included Elizabeth Jackson, a teacher at Gabriel Abbott, it was the variety of the desserts. There was chocolate peanut butter, Mexican shepherd, rasberry cheesecake, and a lot of cranberry mixes.
"There was not one plain pecan pie," said Dugal.
