Last November, I was moving my mom from her apartment to an assisted living facility so that she would have a little more support with medications, meals and showers, etc. so that she could remain living as independently as long as possible.
When I was cleaning the spare bedroom in her old apartment, I found a treasure trove of memories, including heirlooms from our grandparents, and even some childhood mementos.
But likely the funniest find was three construction paper signs spelling out the details to our "Frozen Perch Toss" fundraising events from back in college.
Now, to fully understand the "Frozen Perch Toss," you have to understand where I went to college, which was at Bemidji State University, located a good four hours due north of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
And if you've never visited our neck of the woods in the winter ... well, it gets cold. ... Cold enough that the thousands of lakes in the "Land of 10,000 Lakes" freeze over. And one of our favorite wintertime activities here in northern Minnesota is to trudge out onto those frozen lakes, drill holes through the ice, drop a fishing line in the arctic-like waters and do some "ice fishing."
Now "ice fishing" amounts to using a very shortened fishing rod, about 18 inches in length; propping it up on a tip-up device; and then sitting back with a beer in hand to wait until a fish bites your hook. ... And sometimes it takes a number of beers before you see a fish.
No, seriously, this is a favorite winter pastime of ours. ... For confirmation, just view both "Grumpy Old Men" and "Grumpier Old Men." That is three hours of quality entertainment right there, and it'll serve as research to verify that the events I describe below are not far fetched.
So, when you go to college in northern Minnesota, and you endure four to five months in which the air outside is cold enough to hurt your face, you have to get creative with your collegiate shenanigans. There's no running to the beach or surfing or night club hopping for your crew when it's so cold that you have to plug in your car to keep it from freezing. (No really, this is also a true story.)
And as freshman and sophomores living in a dorm that technically was a "dry" dorm, you have to get REALLY inventive with your fun. ... Well, lucky for me, I lived with some complete freaking geniuses!
As you can imagine, when you go to college in the sticks, said college probably attracts a certain number of outdoorsmen, and our beloved dorm in Birch Hall attracted our fair share of them because they could bring their hunting rifles/shot guns and store them in a gun locker in the basement of our dorm building. (Yes, this too is a true story. ... No, really, it is.)
Well, after the hunting seasons would end, and the guns were safely stowed away in the basement of our dorm again, the outdoorsmen would turn their attentions to ice fishing, as described above and portrayed accurately in "Grumpy Old Men."
And then after a successful day of "fishing," those boys would troop back to the dorm where they would have to clean their fish in the dormitory kitchen (sigh ... yes, this is also true) and then freeze them or cook them, which you could imagine added a certain aroma to the hall floor.
Well, one night, a few of our enterprising anglers who didn't bag enough fish to make it worth their while to clean them, but it was too late to throw the fish back in the water because they had already been frozen, invented a game in the parking lot of our dorm in which a large trash barrel was liberated from the dorm hall and placed at one end of the playing field.
The contestants then were marched back a specified number of paces, where upon a line was drawn, and that line would serve as the launching point for the frozen perch. The contestants were then given three throws to see who could land the most fish in said garbage barrel. So accuracy was the the main criteria that determined a winner.
And, yes, as you surmised, the accuracy of the throws, the longer the game played on tended to decrease. ... I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
So after the first level was completed, if there was a tie among contestants, the remaining contestants were then backed up another 10 paces, and the game would repeat itself. And so on and so forth, until eventually there would be a lone frozen perch marksman left standing. As you can see from the headline photo, the winner received half of the prize pool and ... a frozen perch. ... Also. A. True. Story.
Now admittedly, there were a lot of beverages that may or may not have qualified under the campus's "dry" policy involved in the "Frozen Perch Toss" events. ... Yes, "events," as there ended up being a total of three "Frozen Perch Toss" events. ... Hey, we were 18 and 19 years old, going to school in Siberia-like conditions and we couldn't go down town to the bars. We did what we could to liven up the place!
But, to our credit, even though the "Frozen Perch Toss" may have sounded like it was only an opportunity to give some bored college freshman and sophomores a reason to consume beer, we did give half of the proceeds to "Toys for Tots." So I like to believe that we were being philanthropic before being philanthropic was cool.
Hilariously, as the orange sign to the left shows, we had to postpone "Frozen Perch Toss II" due to a lack of perch. It seems that our intrepid anglers had failed to procure the most important element of the "Frozen Perch Toss" ... the perch! ... That night, we settled for a paper airplane toss that I'm certain wasn't nearly as fun.
Well, when I found these three signs at my mom's house last year, all of the memories from that time in college came flooding back. The "Frozen Perch Toss" memories leapfrogged into other memories from those days, and it made for a great day sharing these memories with my family. I even was so excited to have found the signs that I posted them on Facebook to share with my college buddies, who remain my best friends all these years later.
I am so happy that 18-year-old me had the foresight to save these signs. As this is the only tangible proof that the "Frozen Perch Toss" ever existed. ... And yet, I imagine many people still don't believe they do. But after watching "Grumpy Old Men" once through, if you don't believe that it could have happened, then I invite you up to Minnesota in four months and we'll reenact the "Frozen Perch Toss" together!
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