St. Charles Kiwanis Serves Thousands of Pancakes

By 6:30 p.m. Tuesday evening, the St. Charles Kiwanis Club had served more than 3,600 pancakes to the community and raised money for the local service organization. 

The annual pancake breakfast is the club's largest fundraiser of the year and was held at Memorial Hall in Blanchette Park Tuesday.

Last year, with snow falling, the club served 1,500 people breakfast and raised about $6,000. This year, as the rain fell outside, the club was on track to serve about 2,000 people between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m., said John Pallardy, past president of the St. Charles Kiwanis Club, while flipping pancakes.

Pallardy was joined by three other volunteers who manned the griddle, churning out pancakes and sausage patties to the line that waited. Pallardy was a machine, chatting with other volunteers while flipping and plating the golden brown cakes. 

The key to a perfect pancake, he said, is in the batter.

"It can't be too runny and it can't be too thick," he said.

Bruce Sowatsky, president of St. Charles Kiwanis Club, was mixing the batter with volunteers from local high school key clubs. As he ran the mixer, he calculated the total cakes served at 3,600 as of 6:30 p.m.

Although he'd been at Memorial Hall in Blanchette Park since 5:45 a.m. getting things set up, Sowatsky said he hadn't eaten one pancake. 

"I can't eat the profits," he said.