By SUE RYAN
News staff writer
April 26, 2008

Marge Stubbs has been cooking for the Cascade Locks Pioneer Potlatch program for close to 40 years and has no intention of stopping anytime soon.

During Thursday lunchtime, the tantalizing smells of breaded pork cutlets, homemade scalloped potatoes, green beans and rice pudding from scratch floated out from the kitchen. She had served up for nine people and wanted to make sure everyone had enough to eat.

“Are you sure you don’t want more?” she asked.

Stubbs, 81, has always enjoyed cooking for others. Before she came to Pioneer Potlatch, she had experience in cooking for a large group — her family.

That includes husband LaVerne and children Joe, Wanda, Marion, Glenda, Barbara, Donna and Cathy. Wanda Brunecz lives in Fairview now but comes on Thursdays along with her sister Barbara to help her mom with the dishes at the community center.

“I remember getting off the school bus in Cascade Locks and I could smell bread baking,” Brunecz said. “My favorite meal was on Fridays because I would smell that bread baking and knew we were going to have brown beans, fried chicken and fresh-baked bread.”

Pioneer Potlatch serves as a lunch program for senior citizens but anyone is welcome to attend for a small charge. That included Port Maintenance Director Dale Davis, who came by on Thursday.

“Her fried chicken — tops — that is the best and is what she is well-known for are the days that there is a fried chicken dinner served up down here,” he said.

In fact, a drawing is held once a month from those who have attended to come for a free lunch on the first Thursday of the month for the famed fried chicken. Stubbs said her favorite dishes to cook include meats, especially stir-fry, but she also loves to bake, which she learned to do from her mother.

“We had one of those old, heavy black pans with three loaves to a pan,” she said.

Stubbs grew up on a farm 10 miles south of Salem on the banks of the Willamette River. She relocated to Portland later and in October of 1959 moved with her family to Cascade Locks.

“It took a month to move with seven children and everything,” she said.

During the years, she has amassed a thick collection of recipes. One of her books, a 1978 collection from the Pine Grove Church, is so well-worn it is held together with tape and its pages have loose-leaf recipes stuffed between. Some are pages torn from magazines or newspaper pages carefully folded in quarters as well as a flattened Jell-O box with recipes printed inside.

She still reads new cookbooks, including her latest “Dinner for Two” that arrived in the mail last week. Stubbs said she just works with the recipes to feed the seniors.

“A lot of recipes for two people don’t translate to feeding 15 but you just have to get out pencil and paper and figure it out,” Stubbs said.

She also makes pies when she can and bakes ones as well for the Columbia Gorge Lions club bingo nights as door prizes.

Stubbs said of her devotion to volunteering as a cook that her philosophy is “You want to do something, then do it.”