By Geoff Johnson, DN staff writer
Published: April 19, 2010, in Red Bluff Daily News
http://www.redbluffdailynews.com/ci_14913426
RED BLUFF, CALIFORNIA - The recipe goes back well over half a century.
Take 225 pounds of pancake batter, 20 gallons of syrup, 15 gallons of milk, 50 gallons of orange juice, 60 pounds of butter and 8 pounds of coffee.
Mix with 32 student volunteers and another 40 Red Bluff Kiwanis members.
Wait a few months, and you have 100 swimming, shooting, floating, fishing, jumping children.
Every year, on the Saturday of the Red Bluff Round-Up, Kiwanis members serve up a massive pancake breakfast fit to serve 1,200.
Every year, those proceeds sponsor 100 fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders at Camp Tehama for the Kiwanis-sponsored fiveday summer camp.
Local children enjoy a free week of summer camp much of the week thanks to money raised during the pancake breakfast.
On Saturday, at the Elks Lodge, as Kiwanis members rushed pancakes and syrup to hungry visitors, a projector displayed a slide show of past camp weeks.
If the slides offered encouragement to volunteers, Kiwanis members could use it. Members were readying the Elks Lodge by 5 a.m. and would continue past 11 a.m., even as the rest of Red Bluff gathered downtown for the Red Bluff Round-Up Parade, Chairwoman Lisa Hansen said.
Hansen has headed the breakfast for four years, but just how long Red Bluff has been pouring on the maple syrup is uncertain.
Club members can trace the event back to at least 1962, she said.
It may continue on half a century more the club has young help to draw on.
Reeds Creek Superintendent and Principal Jake Hosler, working with 14 of his students, was as active as any Kiwanis member.
But in between serving as a traffic controller for the event's volunteer waiters and waitresses, Hosler cradled his three-week-old daughter in his arms.
She is the group's latest helper, he said.
Posted
Apr 20 2010, 10:33 AM
by
Curtis Billue