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A Reason to Celebrate

The Source

Americans love to celebrate. Give us but a smidgeon of a reason to shoot off a firecracker or line up a parade, and we’ll gladly hop onto the celebratory bandwagon. I recently played for an annual church celebration of a tiny congregation in Southern Illinois that holds a Groundhog’s Day Service. I’m not kidding. I’m still searching for the scripture that talks about groundhogs. Maybe it’s in the Apocrypha and they’ve removed it from my Presbyterian bible. There’s hardly a summertime week in the Midwest without some sort of festivity and in most weeks the avid partier must decide which event to attend. When you live in an area that pays tribute to everything from bowls of soup to sweet corn and cow chips, you know you’re living among a race that likes to commemorate things. Last week I traveled in to Jacksonville to help consume tons of Kiwanis pancakes and sausages. Actually, some 5500 other hungry residents helped me out a bit. In fact, it worked out that I slurped syrup on both ends of the day, arriving for the first feeding at 6 a.m. then returning for the final chow down just before the last flapjack was flipped. No one gets an accurate count on the number of pancakes produced during the course of the day, but as the Cardinals were meeting in Rome to elect a Pope, local theologian Bruce Surratt came running out of the kitchen at 6 a.m. to announce that white smoke was coming off the MacMurray griddle. He went on to claim that he’d seen a face appear in the first batch of batter but by this time he’d been heckled back into the kitchen by his fellow Kiwanis. I like pancakes, but that’s not why I attend the annual Kiwanis fundraiser. The real joy of the day has less to do with batter and butter and more with community and charity. There are easier ways to raise $22,000 bucks, all poured directly into the community, and when I look around at the crowd of men and women flapping the jacks and pouring the coffee, I wonder who’s running the town. Like the Rotary, Ambucs, Elks, KC’s and other service organizations, the Kiwanis membership consists mainly of folks who don’t have the time to do this…at least in a purely logical world. This year’s Pancake and Sausage Day will be remembered for the sad footnote of occurring on the morning of Jerry Symons’ death. Jerry was our premier radio broadcaster, one of the town’s most principled civic leaders, and a proud Kiwanian. No one in Mac’s dining hall could remember a pancake day without Jerry. Of course nothing stops the parade of hot cakes and sausage, and as the day progressed some of the pourers, dippers, slicers and eaters came to a more philosophical and perhaps truer realization. This was the perfect day for Symons to pass from our midst as it exemplified what Jerry was all about…service. Gary Scott and Mark Whalen hosted a special half-hour call-in tribute to Symons last week, and they couldn’t accommodate all the calls and emails that came flooding into WLDS, all celebrating the great broadcaster’s life. Scott summed up the tribute by saying that Jerry lived by the motto, “If you have a community to serve, serve it.” And it’s no slight to Jerry’s memory to say that the Jacksonville area boasts dozens….hundreds of men and women give freely of themselves simply because it’s the right thing to do. If they have a community to serve, they serve it. When 5-6000 folks buy a ticket then head out on a cold and windy March day to eat pancakes off plastic plates, you begin to realize that we truly do have something to celebrate in our little corner of the world. And there’s nothing partisan about Jacksonville’s service clubs. Yes, the kidding and jokes are tossed out with real wit and abandon, but the Rotary Club members donate to Ambuc activities, when the Rotary gives scholarships to local youth they can depend upon their friends in the other clubs to contribute, and the only time I ever won a 50-50 drawing at the KC Hall I found that the custom was to buy drinks for the house….at a net personal loss of 20 bucks. Let’s continue to celebrate Burgoo, eat our sweet corn, and toss those cow chips, but let’s remember that when it comes to true causes to celebrate, the answer can be found in the voice broadcasting a high school basketball game, the shoe leather pounding the sidewalks to seek out donations to the YMCA, and the bubbling face of a frying pancake….in the people who are God’s hands and feet in our community.