By Chloë Ellingson
[1]TRENTON, Ont. (06/02/2012) - A volunteer sneaks a sausage at the end of Monday night's pancake supper at Grace United Church. Roughly 150 people attended the event hosted by Trenton's AOTS. Photo by Chloe Ellingson.
It’s 4:30 on a Monday afternoon, and the community hall of Trenton’s Grace United Church is already starting to fill up.
The smell of pancakes fills the room lined with tables covered in floral tablecloths and set with mix-match cutlery and mugs. Scheduled to run from 5pm to 7pm, the AOTS’s (As One That Serves) annual pancake supper has already begun.
“It’s a lot of fun,” said AOTS member Howard Dyke, 80. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing it.”
Dyke spends the evening serving pancakes to roughly 150 guests from a griddle at the back of the hall, close to the kitchen doorway, which is a busy thoroughfare for those carting trays of pancakes and sausage to and fro.
This pancake supper is an annual event for Trenton’s AOTS. The group’s name stands for “As one that serves,” a quote from a biblical passage in the Gospel of Luke. True to their title, the organization will be putting some of the evening’s proceeds towards its annual goal of sending a few kids to camp Quin-Mo-Lac.
AOTS began in 1923. According to Trenton’s AOTS president, Al Anthony, 76, the group had about 500 clubs across Canada by the 1960s.
“Unfortunately, with the younger people not wanting to get involved and the older people dying off. We are now down to less than 100 clubs in Canada,” said Anthony.
This trend is evident in his own experience. “When I joined the club back in the ‘80s, I would have thought that we had 35 to 40 members,” said Anthony. “We now have 14.”
Dyke said he also worries about the future of the group. “It’s mostly older people, which is unfortunate, because for us people that are over the hill, it’s a little difficult to do all the jobs we have to do.”
The pancake supper does indeed involve physical work. Luckily for AOTS, the hall seems to be swarmed by eager youngsters who scurry from table to table with syrup and coffee deliveries. These busboys and girls are part of a scout group, which meets in the church basement every week.
Youth involvement tonight doesn’t seem to have any correlation to youth involvement in AOTS. Younger people have not shown interest in keeping this tradition going.
“They just don’t seem to have time for church, which isn’t a disadvantage, in a sense,” said Anthony. “That’s just the young generation and we’re not going to change it.”
Despite an uncertain future, this group is not bogged down by doom and gloom. Soup and sandwich events are scheduled for May and September and a strawberry social is on the agenda for June.