Carol Claire, left, of Canyon City, chats with Flora Cheadle, of Mount Vernon, at the community Thanksgiving dinner at the John Day Elks Lodge on Nov. 23, 2023.

JOHN DAY — It was Tina Leighton’s first run as a meal delivery driver, and she wanted to make sure she had the bags of food in the right order for the stops she had to make.

“I have to get everything organized,” she said as she checked the names on the bags against the addresses on her list. Not that she was worried about getting lost.

“I deliver prescriptions for Len’s, so I pretty much know everybody in town,” she said.

The Canyon City resident was one of about 10 volunteer drivers delivering Thanksgiving dinners to shut-ins up and down the John Day Valley on Thursday, Nov. 23, as part of the free community meal provided annually by the John Day Elks Lodge.

The menu, as always, was a traditional holiday feast of turkey, ham, green bean casserole, candied yams, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls, cranberry sauce and your choice of pie: pumpkin or apple.

Leighton’s route took her to a pair of trailer parks in John Day, including the home of Saraha Davenport, who met Leighton at the door and thanked her for the big bag of warm food.

Davenport and her husband were spending the day at home.

“We have no transportation, so we can’t go anywhere,” she said. “Right now we’re watching movies.”

She couldn’t remember the title of the picture they were watching, but she knew one thing.

“It’s a love story,” she said.

After completing her first run, Leighton went back to the Elks Lodge to pick up more bags of food, only to find all the remaining delivery orders had been taken by other drivers.

“Well, that was pretty easy,” she told her husband, Garth. “I thought it would be a lot more work.”

Garth Leighton, a former exalted ruler of the John Day Elks Lodge, was sitting with a cup of coffee in the club’s lounge watching the Green Bay Packers play the Detroit Lions on TV while waiting for dinner to be served in the main dining room. He said he and his wife planned to have Thanksgiving dinner at the club along with her mother, Faye Young.

“My wife usually cooks for the entire family, but we don’t have much in the way of family anymore,” he said. “So we come down here to eat and enjoy the festivities.”

Altogether, volunteers delivered 158 meals this year, including a dozen to the crew working the holiday at Blue Mountain Hospital and a pair to the dispatchers on duty at the emergency communications center, according to Dennis Flippence, the lodge’s current exalted ruler.

“We sent 12 to Kimberly this year, which is the furthest we ever went,” he added.

Another 150 or so takeout meals were prepared for people to pick up.

But that was just Round 1.

As the clock neared the noon hour, the volunteer crew in the club’s bustling kitchen was restocking the steam table and getting ready for the next wave: another 125 or so hungry folks lining up for heaping plates of food at the pass-through window.

Charlie Caughlin, a past exalted ruler of the John Day lodge who now serves as east district vice president for the Oregon State Elks Foundation, said the group roasted 17 turkeys and baked seven hams for this year’s community feast.

The cost of the meal was something over $5,000 and was covered by a grant from the Elks National Foundation, said Janel Parker, the chief grant writer for the John Day Lodge. That money was stretched considerably, Caughlin hastened to add, by the generosity of local businesses such as Russell’s Custom Meats in Canyon City, which provided a substantial price break on the hams, and Huffman’s Market in Prairie City, which did the same for the turkeys.

“It takes a village,” Parker said.

As a steady stream of diners picked up their plates, the long dining tables began to fill up with singletons, couples, small knots of friends and family groups. A low, happy hum of conversation filled the room as people settled down to eat and socialize.

Caughlin looked around the room with satisfaction.

“This is the part that warms my heart,” he said. “You get the fellowship — everybody from the community coming in here, sitting with people they probably never talk to (ordinarily). That’s what it’s all about. That’s the motto: Elks care, Elks share.”