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Cooking up food, fun keeps Holy Spirit parishioner busy
By Joyce Coronel, news@catholicsun.org
August 21, 2008
When you ask JoAnn Goodall what she likes best about her job, she laughs and asks rhetorically, “What’s not to like?”
The Holy Spirit parishioner spends May 1 through Nov. 1 living in the cool pines of northern Arizona. She’s the cook at St. Joseph’s Youth Camp, operated by the Knights of Columbus. The camp, located near Mormon Lake, just south of Flagstaff, has been welcoming children for summer camp since 1948. Goodall is in her second year as cook.
“We wake up in the morning and we have coffee and watch the elk in our front yard. You sit here and look at the peacefulness and the serenity and think, ‘this is part of God’s creation,’ and it’s awesome.”
The best part, says Goodall, is the children.
“I love the kids; they’re great. I call them my kids,” she said of the children who line up three times a day for the meals she prepares. She also loves to cook and always seems to find a food angle in her various ministries.
Goodall has taken some of her own recipes and adapted them for big crowds. Sometimes she has as many as 80 hungry campers, who seem to appreciate her flair for food.
On a recent Monday afternoon, she was busily washing potatoes for the baked potato bar she planned for later that evening. “I’ve even come up with my own concoctions, like rocky road pudding,” she said. It’s a treat consisting of chocolate, nuts, whip cream and mini marshmallows. (Note to parents: ask for some of her recipes; the kids devour this stuff.)
But most of all, it is the heartbreaking circumstances of some of the camp-goers that keeps Goodall dishing out the tender loving care these children so desperately need. A number of the kids attend because benefactors have sponsored them.
“We had a little boy last year who came up here who lived in a car. ‘You get three meals a day here,’ he told my husband. He said the best thing about living in a car was when you got sick and you throw up, you could move the car.”
During the winter months, Goodall trades in her camp attire and returns to her East Valley home and the parish ministries she enjoys. She’s worked preparing and serving meals to the homeless at Andre House.
“I used to do it monthly when I lived in the Valley year round. Now I do in when they really need help, like during Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
Goodall has a soft heart for children and that’s easy to see from her selection of ministries through the years. She adopted two children after she and her husband were unable to conceive and now has four grandchildren. She’s also worked taking care of babies at the parish nursery and at the nearby Elizabeth House.
The Tempe woman tries to teach her grandkids about the need to serve others. When her daughter brought two of them, ages 10 and 14, from Florida for a visit, it happened to fall on a night when Goodall was signed up to work at Andre House. She figured it would do the children good to see how blessed they were.
“I took my grandkids there and to this day, they still talk about it. Ever since then, every year, we buy four bikes for the Giving Tree at church. That’s part of my four grandkids’ present. They know that the money that went to buy the bikes was part of their Christmas gift.”
Goodall and her husband Jim have been married for 41 years and have belonged to Holy Spirit parish for 20. About four years ago, Jim went through the RCIA program and became a Catholic. Even in that ministry, Goodall found a food connection. She became the official RCIA “cookie lady,” preparing and serving refreshments to the candidates and their sponsors.
How does your work help you to grow in faith?
It helps me appreciate what I have and helps me realize how blessed I am. It helps me realize there are people out there in need and if there’s a way I can help, then I should. You want to help because you’ve been so blessed yourself.
What do you like most about being Catholic?
When my husband wasn’t Catholic, we would go to each other’s church for a year. I finally told him after two years, ‘I’ll still go with you to yours, but I have to go to mine.’ He was going to a non-denominational church and the services were kind of theatrical. I appreciate the liturgy and solemnity, the one-on-one with my Lord and I didn’t feel that in his church.
Your favorite quote?
“This is the day the Lord has made.” Live for today because “tomorrow never comes.”
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