Verboort’s 74th sausagefest connects diners to home
Chase Allgood / News-Times
Sausage lovers line up for a chance to buy the much-loved delicacy in bulk.
Co-workers asked Dave Dunham why he would drive to Oregon for sausage.
“It’s a spiritual thing,” the San Francisco film producer told them. Indeed, though Dunham grew up in John Day on the other side of the Cascades, he can trace his roots to the very beginning of Verboort, home of the annual sausage and kraut dinner, a fund-raiser for Verboort’s Visitation Catholic School.
On Saturday, volunteers served 7,400 dinners to folks assembled in the town’s parish center.
Dunham, his wife Cindy, his mother, Sandra, and three children were in Verboort at 6:30 a.m. Saturday, where they bought 120 pounds of sausage to take back to California. Then they made a trip to the cemetery where his great-grandparents, John and Alberdina Vandehey, are buried.
Matthew Dunham, 18, said he appreciated the connection to his family, and felt at home in Verboort.
By noon, they were finishing up the traditional dinner. Son Alex, 9, came hoping to break his father’s sausage-eating record. He wound up the new champ with 15 pieces put away. Daughter Sabrina, 11, thought the food was good, though she wasn’t going for a record.
Dunham last went to the dinner 25 years ago when he and Cindy, now a software engineer at Lockheed, were seniors at Pacific University. “I’m sure we won’t wait another 25 years to attend the dinner again,” he said.
While the Dunhams were eating, Mike and Nikki Harklerode, Hillsboro, were outside in quintessential Oregon mist with their two sons, Owen, 3, and Reid, 4 months. “We always heard about it and this seemed like the year to come,” said Harklerode, who is an instructional coach for the Hillsboro School District.
Nikki is an occupational therapist at Marquis Care in Forest Grove. “We even gave up watching the [University of Wisconsin] Badger game,” she noted.
The Harklerodes moved to Oregon nine years ago from Wisconsin, a state where sausage and sauerkraut are also very popular. “This looks like any number of small towns back in Wisconsin,” Mike Harklerode said.
“Except there aren’t any bars,” his wife joked.
They kept Owen busy on the playground equipment as they waited for their turn to dine.
Back inside, Doug and Elena Englund of Portland sat down to dinner with Elena’s parents, who are visiting from the Ural Mountains area of Russia, near Kazakhstan.
Elena’s mother Ludmila, 71, and her father Gennadiy, 80, seemed to enjoy the food. While they came to the United States to visit family, and not for the sausage dinner, they were likely the couple traveling the farthest.
After eventually eating what Harklerode said was the best sausage he’d ever had, the family stayed on, waiting in line to buy bulk sausage.
“We met some cool people standing in lines. People were very neighborly. I was astonished at what a smooth operation it is,” he added.
The Badgers and Green Bay Packers both lost, but regardless of football outcomes, Harklerode said they would be back again next year.