I hard-boiled some eggs the other day, and I guess the proximity to Easter brought back some memories of a recreation council Easter egg hunt that went terribly wrong.
Travel with me to the late 1970s, when the Bengies-Chase Recreation Council’s annual Easter egg hunt was a pretty big deal. It was held at Seneca Elementary School and attracted a huge crowd — more than 100 kids in each of about five age groups.
I spent most of my college years working as a part-time rec leader for the Baltimore County Department of Recreation and Parks. You name it and I did it: I lined baseball, softball and soccer fields, ran drop-ins and after-school programs, was a summer playground leader, I set up chairs for dance recitals, cleaned up vomit, cradled and consoled crying kids, administered first aid and sat on curbs with kids whose parents were a “little late.” I’m Facebook friends with a lot of the “kids” from the best roller skating program ever.
The day of the egg hunt, I arrived at Seneca at the crack of dawn (or so it felt to a 20-year-old) to start setting up and organizing for the oncoming crowd. The rec center supervisor (and my boss) was Kathy Tully. She handed me a cup of coffee and we got to work. Registration tables needed to be set up, bathrooms needed to be opened and inspected, the eggs had to be “hidden,” the Easter Bunny had to be greeted and hidden for her big entrance, the bullhorn needed to be tested.
After most of the more mundane tasks had been completed, a crew of volunteers started hiding eggs. While there were a few nooks and crannies in which to tuck eggs, hiding eggs basically meant rolling them out across a roped-off grassy area.
So with that mental picture in mind, time-travel again with me to the previous week. As hard as it is now to believe, back in the day most public egg hunts used real eggs. That’s right — the real McCoy, bought by the pallet (I exaggerate slightly) at the local grocery store.
Just a couple of miles from Seneca Elementary was the Bengies-Chase Community Building. It was a former two-room Black schoolhouse that was preserved and cherished as a community hub. At a renovation ribbon-cutting much later in my full-time recreation career, I observed in my comments how appropriate it was that a building that once stood to keep people apart now stood to bring them together.
The building housed the council’s community office and also was home to a variety of programs, including Tot Fun Center, tap and ballet and two longstanding Golden Age clubs.
Those Golden Age clubs played a vital tole in the egg hunt. Members hardboiled and dyed the hundreds and hundreds of eggs for the big day. The community center had a pretty big kitchen with a huge commercial-grade stove. The seniors would come in every day of hunt week, hunker down in that kitchen and get to work. Boil the eggs, cool them, dye them, repack them in the original cartons and refrigerate them.
The seniors loved their role in the annual event and they looked forward to contributing each year. It was a fine-tuned machine, a choreographed production of volunteers carrying out their assigned tasks.
Or so we thought.
Travel forward again now to the morning of the hunt. The landscape of the school campus has been transformed, the parking lot is filling early with families who don’t care they’ve arrived an hour early with hyped-up kids they expect us to entertain. Volunteers grab armloads of egg cartons and head out to set up the various age-group areas.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but sometime during the hiding process, a volunteer who accidentally dropped an egg discovered it was raw. We tested every egg in that carton and all were raw. Beautifully dyed but nonetheless raw. We threw that carton away and hoped and prayed that it was an isolated incident.
It wasn't.
Pretty soon, volunteers all across the hunt area were reporting raw eggs. After a quick meeting of core organizers, we decided we would carry on with the hunt, announce before hand that eggs might be raw and if eggs broke after kids found them, we’d count the shells so they got credit for all the eggs they found.
The hunt went on as planned, many more raw eggs were found and counting eggs was a messy task. The Easter Bunny — the late, great Kathi Crouse — made her appearance, photos were taken, prizes were distributed, crowds dispersed, cleanup commenced.
Raw eggs aside, the hunt was a success. Hundreds of community children had a blast, area volunteers turned out on a Saturday to serve their community and they earned their pay in the currency of smiles, giggles and hugs.
A gentle investigation the following week uncovered a not-so-surprising reason for so many raw eggs escaping the boiling process. The problem was traced to one particular day when there were literally too many cooks in the kitchen. Someone would put a pot of eggs on the stove, walk away and someone else would walk in, take that pot off and put a new pot on. The eggs were extremely clean but no less raw. Looking back it seems strange that no raw eggs were discovered during the dying process because they get banged around quite a bit. Who knows? Maybe there was a coverup??
When I think about it, the raw eggs perhaps served a purpose. Many special events just blend into one another — they tend to be the same version, year after year. Maybe a new element gets added from time to time, but the formula remains the same and they get carried out almost by muscle memory.
Thanks to the raw eggs, maybe folks still think or talk about this particular hunt from time to time, as I do.
But we started using plastic eggs the following year. The Golden Age Club members gladly embraced the task of stuffing the plastic orbs with goodies and the hunt with multi-generational involvement carried on.
