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First Baptist Church on the Square in LaGrange was a full house Saturday morning during the Kiwanis Club of LaGrange’s 25th Annual Pancake Breakfast.

For $7 a plate, hundreds of residents received pancakes and sausage, as well as milk, coffee or orange juice.

While LaGrange residents enjoyed their meals in the lobby of the venue, several members of the Kiwanis Club were plenty busy Saturday morning.

Kiwanis members Marc Acree and Eric Davenport were in charge of one of the rotating pancake griddles. The machine rotates in a circle while one person pours on the batter. After a couple of minutes, Acree and Davenport slipped a spatula under one of the cakes and flipped it over. Multiply that action by about a thousand times on Saturday morning, and many LaGrange residents left full and happy.

The majority of the money raised at the pancake breakfast goes toward scholarships for local high school seniors. Kiwanis Club President-Elect John Carden said there are two scholarships. Both of them are for $25,000, one for West Georgia Technical College and the other for LaGrange College.

Carden said he left his house Saturday morning at about 5 a.m. and started cooking around 5:30 a.m. He said the entire day seems like controlled chaos that always seems to come together into a well-oiled machine by the middle of the event.

“We enjoy it,” Carden said. “It’s for a good cause.”

Carden said he was the sausage cook, and by the end of the day, there were more than 1,000 patties and 90 pounds of links served. Additionally, he said IHOP in LaGrange donated the pancake batter, syrup and butter for Saturday.

This year the club will give out six scholarships totaling $8,000 through the Kiwanis Club of LaGrange Dr. Robert E Gordon Scholarship.

“By providing sufficient scholarship assistance, we assure those students are successful in their college pursuit in their respected degree and plan to give back to society,” said Scholarship Committee Chair Elia Baltes. “The scholarship money will help students by instilling a greater sense of belonging — and motivation — to endure their higher education process.”

For a high school to participate in the scholarship, they must offer a Key Club Program; however, students do not have to be a member. The deadline for applications is March 31. Awards will be presented to students during their school’s honors day.

Jackson Services was the corporate sponsor for the 2020 breakfast.