The Skaneateles Rotary Club’s annual Father’s Day Pancake Breakfast is a community affair.
The breakfast requires all hands-on deck from the Rotary Club and from many others in town.
Rotary Youth Exchange students and families from over the decades help serve.
Other volunteers help cook.
High School athletic teams sometimes provide the muscle for heavy duty set up.
Boy Scouts work all day collecting trash from the thousands who go through, though there is less and less “trash,” as Rotary moves each year to a “greener” breakfast.
And the community makes it work just by being there and showing its support year after year.
The details
The Skaneateles Rotary Club will hold its 55th Annual Father’s Day Pancake Breakfast at the Austin Park Arena Sunday June 15, from 7:30 a.m. to noon.
The Father’s Day Pancake Breakfast is an annual community event serving up all-you-can-eat New Hope Mills pancakes, regular and gluten-free, scrambled Hudson fresh eggs, sausages, orange juice, and coffee.
Guests enjoy listening to the community band while having a great time with dad, family members and friends.
As a result of the breakfast, about $12,000 goes back into community programs such as Youth Exchange, the Food Pantry and local charities every year.
Funds also support many on-going community service projects and improvements.
Tickets may be purchased at Rolands, the Skaneateles Chamber of Commerce, from any Rotarian, and at TOPS during the weekends, or at the door.
Adults, $10; children 6-12, $5; and 5 and under free.
Longtime residents and newer residents say the same thing about the breakfast: it is vintage Skaneateles.
The community has been coming out for the event for 55 years.
The mission and the feel of the breakfast is the same today as it has been for more than half a century: families head in together and end up talking with friends, co-workers and neighbors as they wait for their pancakes.
“It is a reason for families to put that day aside,” and to return home to Skaneateles, Dot Coye has said in previous years. “Everyone is happy to be home, seeing each other and seeing friends. Nobody is in a hurry to get in and out. They stay and reminisce.”
Coye, who turns 100 in June, has been at most of the breakfasts, working alongside her husband, Dana, who died at 100 last August.
Dana Coye was one of the Rotarians who started the breakfast, then a fly-in at the Skaneateles Airport hanger.
It takes a small army to pull off the breakfast, which has become an institution over the years, woven into the very fabric of Skaneateles.
Dana often recalled how he and other Rotarians worried that moving from the hanger to the Allyn Arena in 1977 might take away from the pancake breakfast’s success at the hanger, which drew up to 90 planes.
“During that time, fly-in breakfasts were popular,” he said. “Many of us worried about switching to the arena, but we couldn’t accommodate the growing numbers at the hanger.”
As it turns out, the move was a good one. The people kept coming and the breakfast kept growing until more than 3,000 began showing up for a breakfast of pancakes, sausage and scrambled eggs.
The pancakes and the eggs have always remained delicious, he said, but it is really all about the fellowship.
Rotarian David Lee was in high school during that first breakfast, and worked alongside his father, Burdette Lee, one of the founders, along with others including Coye, Jim Messenger, and Roy Kuhns.
Lee was there for every breakfast, “helping out my dad.”
He officially joined Rotary many years later, after his father had died and his daughter Elizabeth spent a year on Rotary Youth Exchange. Now he has two sons-in-law in Rotary, and his oldest granddaughter, Julia Armijo, helps out.
Why does it succeed year after year?
“It is the nature of our community,” said Lee. “This community has a nucleus of people” who make it work – from the Rotarians and volunteer friends to the community members who take dad to breakfast year after year, generation after generation.
Lee appreciates the tradition.
“You get to see people you might only see once a year,” he said. “And I also feel a great deal of reward in working with the Rotarians and others to make it happen.”
Community service is still the center piece of the breakfast.
Fifty-five years since the first breakfast, the goal continues to be raising money for good causes that Rotary supports year around, including the Skaneateles Food Pantry, the Skaneateles Historical Society, Skaneateles Outreach, Skaneateles Music Guild, Honor Flight, Spafford Food Pantry, Rescue Mission, Youth Sports Programs, Boys State, Boy Scouts and more.
