And let's say hello to Danny Johnson, Dan Johnson, both going to call him Danny Johnson.
And I'll tell you why it had been it.
Thanks for joining me.
I appreciate that.
I want you to get a little closer.
I'm glad to be here.
I want to hear every word you have to say this morning, it's very important.
Now Danny's meet and catering by Danny, they're both you.
Yeah.
Yeah, so and you would tell me Danny's meet has been there.
How long?
Well, we started over in a South Side or was seen in 1987 in a gas station.
So we sold steaks and lobsters out of a gas station.
And you know what?
It was it was successful.
It was great.
And then you moved to what was a three mile now?
How long before my Charles?
Yeah, my friend of mine actually built the store and unfortunately he had caught
something that he passed away and I ended up, you know, buying that because I
was paying rent in the gas station a lot of rent and, you know, I'd rather own
something.
So at the end of your paying for it, you can be done someday.
But you started in a butcher business when you were 18.
Oh no, I was actually 16 working at Rosman's washing dishes and he offered me
a apprenticeship and I didn't want to do it.
I wanted to turn wrenches on motorcycles and also I was like, but you know,
my grandma offered me a house and I had this girlfriend and we ended up having a
baby and I needed money.
So yeah, so I stuck with the butcher business and I said, I could obviously
squat.
I didn't.
And obviously you didn't.
A good thing you didn't.
We love going to Danny's meets on a four mile road there.
But it's a great store and nice people work in there and you look at the cuts
of meat in the in the window there when you're, you know, a little searching it.
Everything looks so good.
We, you know, people buy with their eyes.
That's why right now so much, you know, I mean, you're going to put a bunch of green meat
out there.
Dr.
Suce might come in, but that's about it.
Yeah, we go in there with an idea of what we want and we leave with what we buy
all this for because it looked good and it is good.
Now the reason Danny's here is because every Thanksgiving at Festival Hall,
it's Thanksgiving recene.
Now that's the name of it this year Thanksgiving recene.
And people are invited to come in and enjoy a Thanksgiving dinner with fellow
rescindians or receneites.
So and let's talk about the past how this all got started at Festival Hall.
Then we'll move up to what's happening this Thursday.
Well, a good friend of mine, Ray Stuybeck.
He owns all around 20 out on the interstate.
Oh, yeah, I didn't know that he owns that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we always talked about doing things and pretty active in the community and at that
time, he owned a different business.
So we were talking about the Thanksgiving thing we did at my grandmother's.
McMahon towers back in the day, used to be called.
It was one of the first downtown senior complexes that were rejuvenated down
here.
I can't remember what the building was that they tore it out.
But anyhow, the look at all of people's faces.
When they seen that the meal was free was just kind of like priceless.
So it's like, once my grandmother moved out of there was like,
Ray came in and meet market one day.
It says, Hey, you want to do it?
I knew exactly what he was talking about.
I said, let's do it.
Then we were like, how are we going to pay for it?
How many people are going to come?
Is it going to be 100 people?
Is it going to be a thousand?
Is it going to be 10,000?
We just rolled the dice and went for it.
And I picked up on the media really well.
And that's what saved us because I was hit.
What year was that?
Thank.
Well,
16 years ago, I'm not good at 16.
OK.
Yeah.
I'm not good either.
So, but it's back when, you know, newspapers from popular radio was
popular and apparently still is really popular.
And the internet wasn't as big as it was.
But yeah, we had people reaching out to us like, how can we help?
And we're thinking, oh, this is good because we don't know what, you know,
if worst case scenario, we had to put it on our credit cards.
And it was sweating that one out a little bit.
But, you know, we came up with the idea of sponsor table.
You know, that sponsor's a table for 50 bucks.
And you feed 10 people with your name there.
I mean, people jumped all over that.
And that's great if people sponsor, but what if they don't, you know,
you got to pick up the tab, right?
It's like gambling.
You know, you never really know.
But if it's a good thing and you feel good about it, you should do all right.
Well, we had some tight ears and we had some really, really good ears.
Let's get to what?
So, OK, so this is happening this Thursday, which is Thanksgiving.
People aren't thinking, oh, so you're giving on a Friday this year?
No, it's on a Thursday.
This always is on a Thursday.
And it's coming up from 10 30 AM to 2 PM.
The free community feast opened to anyone.
I mean, you don't have to be people say, well, you're going to feed the poor.
You can be anybody.
Anybody can come in.
Well, that's the thing with this event started.
People thought we were like doing a soup kitchen, but it's for any class.
Yeah, wait, I went there right now.
Yeah, it's like everybody gets served.
Everybody's treated like a king or a queen.
How many volunteers you got?
Total between all the three days, it comes up to 300.
And then we were full a week ago.
We could probably have about 600.
Everybody wants to help.
I want to say my son held one year.
I know we went one year.
And it was really amazing.
And you find people you know, and that you can sit down and have, you know,
you may get a table with 10.
You might have a retired college kid in town with no family.
You might have somebody retired or widowed.
You might have some, you know, well to do a couple just coming down to enjoy
the event.
You might have some people that are really in need.
And they all are equal that day.
They're communicating.
Some of them become friends and Johnson, Danny, Danny Johnson is here with me.
We're talking about the Thanksgiving.
We're seeing event coming up at festival hall.
And that's this coming Thursday.
And the hours are 10 30 till 2 p.m.
Now, let's talk about the money part of it where people can sponsor tables
because you don't have to sponsor it.
You guys walk in and eat, but these things are expensive to put on and to phrase
the cost and it helps and also get you a table of 10, which is kind of nice.
If you want to talk about the money aspect of it.
So how do people reserve tables?
Give us the price list here.
Well, basically, there's a lot of people that just hear about the event.
They want to help out.
So how did idea came up?
It was like, well, 75 bucks.
You know, I think it was 50 at the time when we first started this.
50 bucks gets your name on a table.
This table sponsored by so and so.
It's a sponsored table.
Right.
Right.
So the names aren't the communities.
Kind of like every like selling advertising.
We have 50 tables in there.
Well, you know, a lot of people buy one table.
Some businesses would jump on board and sponsor 10 tables.
Maybe 100 tables.
Yeah.
And we did, we did well with that.
We are always able to pay for the event.
A couple of times it was pretty tight.
And right around COVID time, it was really good.
So people were very generous.
And we actually raised enough money to where we teamed up with our new county
exec, Ralph Malachi had to pick a wiggly.
And we made 1,000 food boxes for Easter.
That would feed a family of four to six doing nice things.
So I got to make up for being a rotten kid, you know.
So we handed out 980 of them boxes through the COVID drive
through where people go in for their COVID test down at festival hall.
Yeah, almost 1,000 food boxes.
Head, hand, potatoes, everything for the Easter meal and a case of water.
And it was a great idea except the case of water thing was a little dumb
because that was a lot of water to carry.
I know because I do it every time for the supermarket.
I bring in this case from the car.
I don't know how many years I can keep doing that.
Let's talk about what's on the bill of fair this Thursday.
Oh, well, your traditional stuff.
It's turkey carved ham at the end of the line.
You know, we get local celebrities like maybe you should come down and carve some
hammer and that Thursday.
Yeah, I already have enough cuts on my fingers.
But we got some steel gloves for you.
I'm a butcher.
So mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, Southern style green beans,
sweet buttery corn.
Ooh, rolls a lot of stuff from the bakeries, the local bakeries jumping,
especially on H.
They've been helping us since day one.
They'll back out at the end of the day.
They fill it trucks up with whatever they didn't sell because they're going to be
closing Thanksgiving.
They drive it over by us.
I mean, we have mountains of stuff some years.
And when people leave, we'll give them say, Hey, take some bread, take some of
that to have my son work.
There's a volunteer when he left.
There's a lot of food left over.
And he took a little sum for himself so we could eat dinner when he got home.
Yeah.
But yeah, that was I remember now.
It was years ago.
So whenever we had extra money, we tried to give it back into the community somehow.
We'd like to have a little buffer.
So what happened this year was, you know,
mean raid decided to part the Thanksgiving thing from our responsibility to another.
And
for one year event turned to 15.
So it was all right, time to pass a torch.
But we started a charity event.
And the other account, we didn't do anything with the extra money.
It's over the few previous years we had because we just been so busy.
But we help people out occasionally here in there and Ray had a great idea.
He said, why don't we close out his 20 cares charity?
That's where he kept the funds from Thanksgiving,
we're seeing another things that he's done and I give it to the food bank.
So we actually gave $20,000 to the Racine County food bank about three weeks ago.
Oh, that's great.
So everything we get eventually goes back into the community.
So yeah, it's a good program.
And now we got a new charity.
That's kind of what I'm running.
I'll be slowly response, my responsibilities will be going down.
So I don't have to get there at 4 a.m.
I can go in 8 a.m.
Oh my gosh, yeah, they all want to do it in the morning.
So in the radio, I know.
I was even thinking, man, it was kind of hard getting up the drive over here this morning.
But that sunrise was incredible.
Wasn't that beautiful over Lake Michigan?
Yeah, like a fire in the sky.
Yeah, that was awesome.
So it just even round numbers.
How many pounds of food are we talking about here when it comes to Turkey?
Well, my back is still sore from unloading the truck.
How far is the turkeys gone?
We can't cook all the whole turkeys because they're just not enough oven space.
So we do about 30 boxes, which is two turkeys per box of the 25 to 28 pound turkeys.
Whoa, let's do a man.
Yeah, that's a lot.
Then we do 40 boxes of bonus skinless turkey breast.
So then weigh about 10 pounds a piece.
So that's 40.
So that's 80, 80 times tens, what, 800 pounds?
A lot.
So it's a lot.
We're going to start cooking on Tuesday.
Do you use the ovens in the kitchen at the festival hall?
Oh, yeah, everything we cook down there.
I got a huge kitchen there.
Yeah, not huge enough for that.
It could be a lot bigger.
But, you know, we're pumping through, we're pumping through 800, 900 people an hour
down there.
You know, we went through 1200 carry out meals because, you know, everybody
don't say a lot of people go through, grab a carry out and head out the door, which is
great.
So, you know, our numbers started out at 750 people the first year.
And we kind of quit, you know, counting because it's just too much work.
And, but our estimates are 3,500 people last year.
Could have been 4,000, could have been 3,000, but it's a lot.
It's just a lot.
You know, this is so good.
You know, thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, followed by the 4th of July.
And people say, well, isn't it Christmas or no, it's Thanksgiving because when I was
growing up, it was a huge family event.
My grandmother had an apartment, my grandparents had an apartment in Queens.
And it wasn't meant for as many people as used to go there.
I mean, we used to line tables and trays starting from the kitchen going through
the, I feel a room.
It was a TV room going right through the living room to the end of the wall.
And that it was just people, tons.
And the younger you are, the further you sat closer to the end of the wall.
And I just remember being with all my cousins, aunts and uncles.
There was no room for you know, mingling.
You had to sit down and talk then.
And I just remember every year going there.
And that was part of my Thanksgiving.
And every year we got the family together.
And that's probably why they're all gone.
They're not around anymore.
So all they have is the memories of them at Thanksgiving time.
And some of my cousins are still around.
But most of my aunts, uncles, grandparents, my parents are all gone now.
So we get that same feeling and vibe down at the, you know, we got this family
to drive some Jamesville mother, father, three kids.
They sponsor a table.
Then they drive all the way down here.
And they volunteer to be, you know, to work the event is the entire day.
But then they all sit down as a family and with other people they
met over the years and they have their Thanksgiving there.
They can get up and help clean up.
Yeah, it's like, and that's their tradition.
It is.
That's their, that's their, those are their memories.
Okay, we're talking to Danny Johnson catering by Danny hosting the Thanksgiving.
We're seeing once again this year at Festival Park.
And it runs this Thursday.
Obviously Thanksgiving 10 30 a.m. to 2 p.m.
It's a free community feast.
It's, you said it's not a soup kitchen.
It's anybody can make a million dollars a year.
And so we, and we get that.
We get all that are just well to do and people that need money.
And you get a nice meal, the traditional Thanksgiving dinner.
You get to sit down and relax with friends.
But here's the important part.
Individuals and organizations can help contribute through table sponsorships.
They were available for $75 at feeds about 10 people donations of any amount
or also welcome every single contribution matters.
Check donations can be mailed to 58 44 Douglas Avenue.
And if you forget that, you can listen to the podcast and get that address again.
58 44 Douglas Avenue or drop them off at Danny's meets on four mile.
Checked you made payable to crystal puff charities.
Now that's spelled with a K K R Y S T A L P U F F charities.
Feel free to share this information with family and friends.
And just again, if you forget any of it, you can call the radio station.
Share it at the front. We'll have the information.
And also you can listen to the podcast at W R J N dot com or every get your podcast.
You do a great work.
There's a Jewish religion.
They call that a mitzvah what you're doing.
And there's payment for this later on afterwards.
That's that was kind of like when we first started doing it.
My mom grabbed my arm and she's shaking my mom's a little lady.
She was like 87 pounds.
You know, say hello to my wife.
You finally got it.
You finally got it.
You know, it's like, yeah, there's rewards for this later on for you.
Thank you, Danny.
I do appreciate it.
And Danny's meets on four mile.
I'm telling you, we go there all the time.
Nice people work in there.
And you just like the window shopping when you're looking through the can.
Oh, I want that.
Oh, I didn't come for that.
Look at stuff there.
Yeah, it is very good.
Thank you very much lifelong lifelong butcher.
Yeah, yeah, I didn't start out that way.
I was just the thing and yeah, you're still doing it.
I started cleaning toilet balls at a radio station.
You never know.
I'm a semi farmer now a little bit too.
Yeah, you got a farm.
I do honey bees, apple cider and a new one is the black walnut syrup.
We're going to mess around with.
Look at you.
Where's the farm?
So did New Yorkville.
Oh, yeah, it's right.
You're a York fillian.
Yeah, you're like, thank you, Danny.
Thank you, Danny Johnson.
Of course, if you missed any of this, you can catch the podcast at WRJN.com
civic media.us.
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Where we get your podcast, you can hear it.