“Shrove Tuesday” -the day before “Ash Wednesday” for traditional Catholics and Anglicans, is the day to confess your sins and be “shriven” (forgiven) before the start of Lent, the forty days of fasting and repentance before Easter. None of this was common knowledge to us growing up Protestant in rural North Carolina of the 1950s and 60s. There were some Catholics, but they were largely under the local radar in much the same way as the single local Jewish family.
What we had heard about was the New Orleans tradition of “Mardi Gras,” or “Fat Tuesday,” one of those distant oddities of Louisiana which we had no idea was connected to Catholicism. The fact that it seemed to be just a big excuse for drunken parties was enough to condemn the idea from most southern pulpits; it was not at all clear that the parties and feasting were to get ready for the forty days of fasting. It wasn’t until television and social media leveled the cultural landscape did any of us know the religious foundation of Mardi Gras, and I’d bet money that a significant portion of the local populace still has no idea.
England, of course, historically shed the actual connection to “Popery” in the 1500s, but retained the tradition around Lenten fasting. Shrove Tuesday there turned into an odd national holiday called “Pancake Day,” hosting quirky events centered around- you guessed it- pancakes. Members of Parliament engage in a relay race along the Thames, wearing chef’s hats and flipping pancakes in frying pans, handing off from one team member to another in a 10-lap relay. Such races are staged all over the United Kingdom to raise money for charity.
In Randolph County we’d never heard of that tradition either, and we had no idea of its connection to the one local tradition we all knew well- the Kiwanis Pancake Day.
Every year the local Kiwanis club hosted a community-wide pancake breakfast, lunch and dinner service, with pancakes, sausage patties and coffee for all. It still does- almost every year since about 1957. It began as a replacement for their previous major fund-raising event, the Asheboro Kiwanis Club Easter Monday Horse Show. This was the first major equestrian event opening the spring season, and was once acclaimed as the “best one-day show in the Carolinas.” It offered prizes for walking horses, hunters and jumpers, and saddle horses, with entries from all over the state. Dr. R.P. Sykes and Coach Lee J. Stone were the coordinators for many years, with the monies raised earmarked for “underprivileged children and youth.” In 1947 the club used the proceeds to build a “Teenage Building” on Salisbury Street adjoining the WGWR building (now a day care). That building was also a meeting space for local clubs, and was the original home of the pancake supper.
The Horse Show was held annually for fourteen years, until 1955. The Pancake Supper was devised to fill the gap at the suggestion of Russell Walker, a Kiwanis member who owned the local “Food Line” grocery store. He solicited donations of syrup from Aunt Jemima, and of flour from Randolph Mills in Franklinville, makers of “Dainty Biscuit” self-rising flour. Randolph Mills had had a pancake day in Franklinville for many years, as the company had been making pancakes and selling their flour (along with country ham) in biscuits baked on site at the NC State Fair every October.
The Kiwanis pancake day outgrew that “Teenage Building” and moved to the Masonic Temple on Sunset Avenue until the National Guard Armory on South Fayetteville Street was available. Built by the state under the Governors Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford, the armory was (and still is) the largest public space in the county. That’s when my father became involved, as commander of the local National Guard unit.
Dainty Biscuit flour died out in the late 1980s, but Pancake Day in Asheboro continues as Randolph County’s homogenized version of Mardi Gras.