Thirty years ago, the PTO for the New Douglas Elementary School was trying to think of a way to raise money. "Let's have a sausage supper," suggested Ron Hemann.

That idea came easily to him. He had a hog farm. So he butchered three hogs, and the PTO had a sausage supper that raised $321.

The supper became an annual event in the small Illinois farming community about 50 miles north of St. Louis. It was a way to show support for the school and the community. It was also a social event. People from all over the area flocked to the supper in the school gynmasium. By 1991, it took 44 hogs to feed the crowd. The PTO made about $7,000. In 1999, the PTO made $13,000 as 64 hogs were butchered to serve 1,675 diners.

I was one of them. I felt as if I had stepped into a Norman Rockwell painting. The tables in the gymnasium were filled when I arrived, and I was ushered into a classroom to wait. The classroom was crowded. The people sat cheerfully in the grade school chairs that were several sizes too small for adults. When it was our turn, we filed into the gymnasium and sat at long tables. Volunteers brought us platters of sausage, mashed potatoes, green beans and sauerkraut.

This year's dinner was Saturday night. The field behind the school was being used as a parking lot, and it was jammed. Somebody told me they were figuring on serving about 2,000 dinners, which is remarkable when you figure that the population of New Douglas is under 400.

Hemann was at the township shed about a block away overseeing the sausage-cooking operation. Seven fellows were frying sausages in vats of lard. In years past, I have visited Hemann's hog farm. I asked how it was going these days.

We're just corn and soybeans now, he said.

What about Dean and Kathy Devries? They had a hog farm near Hemann's place.

Same thing. Corn and soybean. You can't make money in livestock unless you've got a huge operation, Hemann said.

Still, despite the fact that hog farming has pretty much left, New Douglas has not stopped the annual sausage supper. Hemann explained they now have a deal with a processing plant in Highland, where Hemann and his friends make the sausage with pork from Beardstown.

The rest of the operation is pretty much as it was 10 years ago. Suzie Eilers, Hemann's closest neighbor, is still among those making the green beans and sauerkraut at the senior center.

She has kids about the age of my kids, which means they are long gone from the grade school. Not surprisingly, both were working at the supper Saturday night. Mark is now an engineer at Pactiv in Jacksonville, Ill. He was working on drinks Saturday night — milk, coffee, tea and water. Shari is a teacher at St. Boniface in Edwardsville. She was working on takeout dinners.

Speaking of takeout dinners, there was almost no wait Saturday night. I couldn't figure that out. If they're serving more dinners than they served 10 years ago, how could there be less of a wait?

The school principal, Carla Grapperhaus, explained that to me. First, though, she told me how important the dinner is to the school. There is so much we do that we couldn't do without the proceeds from this annual dinner, she said. It's so great the community supports us like this, and I can't say enough about the volunteers, she said. It takes about 150 volunteers to put on the dinner, and many of them are people like Hemann and Eilers, whose kids are long gone from the school.

Grapperhaus also explained that the school has changed since I last visited. It used to be kindergarten through sixth grade, but several years ago, the Highland school district was faced with a situation in which some schools had too few kids and some too many, so they did something called grade-leveling. Now kindergarten through second grade is at Alhambra, third and fourth is at New Douglas, and fifth and sixth is at Grantfork. Middle school and high school are in Highland.

Actually, then, this dinner no longer just benefits the kids from New Douglas. It benefits kids from all over the district. In a way, that makes the community support even more remarkable.

But again, how come we didn't have much of a wait?

That's because October was very wet. The farmers couldn't get in the fields to harvest their crops. Right now the weather is dry. The farmers are running their combines day and night. They couldn't take time off to come to the school for dinner. So they sent their wives in for takeout orders.

In so doing, they not only helped keep alive a great tradition, they got a great dinner for 8 bucks.