CHESAPEAKE — The secret to the sauce comes in the stirring, the spices and of course, the garlic. But most importantly it comes from the fellowship of a crew of volunteer chefs who make the fixings for spaghetti dinner fundraisers across the Tri-State.

All parishioners from St. Joseph Catholic Church and Our Lady of Fatima, both in Huntington, W.Va. the men have cooked up hundreds and hundreds of gallons of sauce over the past quarter-century.

On Saturday they brought their magic touch to St. Ann’s Church in Chesapeake where a spaghetti dinner was offered to raise money for the Chesapeake Community Center.

“We’ve been doing this a long time,” Richard Muth of Huntington, said. “Last Tuesday we cooked for the Baptists. We try to be ecumenical.”

All proceeds from the dinner will go to pay for repairs to the ceiling and floor at the gymnasium at the center.

“We have had three ceiling tiles fall off in the last two weeks,” Ruth Damron, director of the Chesapeake center, said.

Damron estimates $3,000 to $4,000 is needed to fix the ceiling and sand and repair the gym floor.

She is also looking into grants to repave the parking lot around the center, a onetime elementary building in the Chesapeake school district. The price tag for that job is estimated at $19,500.

Lawrence County Commissioners are also looking into ways funding can be found for that project.

Helping out their neighborhoods is the main goal of the volunteer chefs, said Muth, who is one of the owners of Muth Lumber in Ironton, a fifth-generation international business.

“You have to support community projects,” he said. “I think these are the things that are important. You get to the point where you have been given gifts in your life and they are to be shared. That is what you need to do.”