In 2010, Rod Cardinale Jr., who was in his first term as President of Santa Clara County Legal Professionals Association (SCCoLPA), was working on ideas for a new fundraising project for SCCoLPA. After networking with members of other local associations at one of the first conferences he attended, Rod suggested that SCCoLPA host a crab feed. So, he, along with some help from a few other members of SCCoLPA, including Elise and Mark Dresser, Linda Neuman, Elena Schneider, and Pam Stallings, put on a crab feed, in a small community room at a local church in San Jose. The board members all crammed into a very small kitchen and did all the cooking and meal preparation. A week before the event, only a handful of tickets had been sold, but by the day of the crab feed, it was sold out. It was small and casual, but SCCoLPA made a little bit of money, and everyone had a good time.
So, the next year they found a bigger location and did it again – and sold out again. And since then every year, it gets bigger and bigger. We’ve outgrown two different locations, and it is now SCCoLPA’ s biggest and most successful fundraiser every year.
Fifteen years later, we just had our 14th Annual Crab Feed (we missed one because of Covid). I have been helping with the crab feed since I became a member in 2014, and I don’t even eat crab! But I have to say that, as much work as it is, we have gotten it down to a science now and we look forward to it every year. Since the very first crab feed, DJ Lannie has played music throughout the evening, and after dinner, the dance floor fills up with people young and old dancing to great tunes. In the years before Covid, we’d have a Girl Scout troop come with their cookies for sale, which were always a huge hit. Though since Covid we haven’t been able to have them back. We always have a silent auction, with great items that have been donated by our members, vendors, and members’ employers. SCCoLPA has become well-known in the local community for putting on the best crab feed in town every February. For the last two years, we not only sold out, but actually had a waiting list.
SCCoLPA has a great team that routinely works at the crab feed – Rod is our “crab master,” Elise and Mark Dresser are still there every year manning the silent auction tables and the bar, and so is Heather Nowak, Shannon Quigley, Elena Schneider, Ben Silowitz and me. And of course, Rod’s family always helps too. Rod makes the pasta sauce from scratch every year – a secret family recipe. He goes to the grocery store to purchase all the ingredients for the pasta and sauce, garlic bread and salad. And he gets up very early on the morning of the crab feed, so he can drive up to Fairfield (about 90 miles from his home in Santa Clara) to get the freshest and tastiest crab available.
We all gather at the Quinlan Community Center in Cupertino around 2:00 on Saturday. We set up the tables, the silent auction, and we work in the kitchen putting the nearly 800 pounds of crab into trays, melting 10 pounds of butter, turning 5 pounds of salad into individual salads, preparing 9 gallons of pasta sauce and heating 23 loaves of garlic bread. And of course, it wouldn’t be an official SCCoLPA event without a few shots of fireball or tequila!
The crab feed starts at 5:00 p.m. and ends around 8:30 p.m., and we charge $75 per person. For that fee, our attendees get a salad, pasta, French bread, dessert and all the crab they can eat, as well as beer, wine, and sodas. What a great way to spend a Saturday evening!
This year, we had 173 people attend. Every year, we see people that we only see at the Crab Feed – locals who have nothing at all to do with the legal community or SCCoLPA at all. They just keep coming back because they love the crab, they have a great time, and they know that we do too. In fact, this was an event that our beloved, LSI Past President Jennifer Page, CCLS and her husband Tony would attend together each year. While we miss Jennifer very much, we are still honored every year by Tony’s attendance.
We hope to see all of you there next year.
Categorized in: General
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