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The banquet used to seat a thousand, since cut to eight hundred mostly because there
wasn't enough room or enough chairs. It's still a problem. “We need 110 to 120 tables and
we've got under eighty.” Because there are so many simultaneous events “once you find
tables you can't have them until the function they've being used for ends, and then you
can't set them up until the basketball tournament is over.”
Ten pallets of food arrive by air on Thursday and the chef and his crew on Friday. Food
for the banquet gets cooked in the elementary and high school kitchens. “One year we had
a really bad snowstorm. I called the mayor and when it came time to take the food to the
Rec Center the city grader was standing by to plow the way.”
Timing is everything. The doors to Nome's Rec Center open at four p.m. and serving
begins at 4:30 p.m. “I've got a schoolbus, a flatbed and five or six grunts.” The menu is
salads, halibut, shrimp, prime rib, rolls, rice, vegetables and eight different desserts. There
are three kiddie dog sleds to hold the strawberries. “One day a dog's pissing on them, the
next day they're full of strawberries,” Mitch says, which is why the kiddie sleds and the
schoolbus seats all get a bleach wash before the event.
As many as forty volunteers staff the banquet, waiting tables, tending bar, on garbage
detail, and cleaning up after lead dogs who pee on the trophy. The volunteers receive that
year's banquet apron, “the most treasured item you can get, next to maybe a musher's bib,
and they don't give those away. People volunteer to be servers just to get that apron, and
then they get the mushers to sign them.”
As the banquet continues volunteers are already cleaning the kitchens at the schools.
One year the chef was drunk and got grease all over everything and Mitch rounded up a
guy from Wells Fargo, someone from The Outdoor Channel and Nome Convention and
Visitors Bureau's Josie Stiles. “We were cleaning until three-thirty a.m. The next day the
cook comes in and says, 'Wow, this place hasn't been this clean in years.' Now we do pre-
inspections.” Mitch grins. “And the Iditarod Trail Committee wonders why we have
trouble getting volunteers.”
There can be as many as three banquets because every musher gets a banquet no matter
how long it takes them to get to Nome. “Anchorage sets up the chute and takes it down
and they're done,” Mitch says. Meanwhile, in Nome Mitch and his volunteers watch the
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