By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
YACHATS – “It’s good to be back.”
That simple statement from longtime Yachats Lions Club member Jim Finlayson on Sunday summarized much of the feeling as the Yachats community inches its way back from more than two years of state and self-imposed Covid-19 shutdowns.
Finlayson and Lions Club volunteers had just finished serving 100 people a breakfast during an event that’s just as popular for socializing as it is chowing down on pancakes, eggs and sausage or ham.
Sunday’s affair was the club’s first breakfast since December 2019, all stopped because of the coronavirus pandemic.
It mirrors the slow reopening of community events in and around the central Oregon coast – ranging from outdoor markets and celebrations in Waldport to indoor and outdoor gatherings centered on the Yachats Commons. The gatherings and events are part of the social fabric of a community that has been interrupted for more than two years and just now restarting as people adjust to living with the ever-changing coronavirus.
Even the 71-year-old Yachats Lions Club had to adjust – and pretty well, in most regards.
The pandemic was hard on its older members, said president-elect Kevin Yorks, but it gained 20 new members – many of them younger – and now has 32 total. And while it closed its meeting hall on West Fourth Street to public events, its thrift shop just up the street thrived.
“The thrift store went bonkers during Covid,” Yorks said Sunday. “We’re setting records for the amount of money we’re raising and giving away.”
The club’s charitable giving totaled more than $25,000 in 2020-21. Now the club is looking for service projects members can tackle, Yorks said, “so we’re not just raising and giving away money.”
But pulling off Sunday’s breakfast required a bit of introduction and instruction.
“We have so many new members and none had been through a breakfast before,” Yorks said.
Longtime officer David O’Kelley was stuck commuting from work on the East Coast, so Charles Reed stepped in to order supplies, test the kitchen Saturday and manned the pancake griddle Sunday with fellow new member Mike Stevens. Reed said they cooked 50 pounds of sausage, 45 pounds of ham, made 300 pancakes and scrambled 360 eggs.
The breakfast also saw the resumption of table help from residents of the nearby Angell Job Corps, which also closed during the pandemic and is only now slowly filling its capacity of 160 students.
“It’s a great opportunity to interact with the community and to just get out and help,” said Dave Johnson, who came to the Job Corps from Bellingham, Wash. last November to study automotive technology and Sunday helped pour coffee, orange juice and clear tables.
While Yorks termed Sunday’s breakfast a success, it’s only a warm-up to the club’s next breakfast on Sunday, July 3 when thousands descend on Yachats for a weekend of events that also were cancelled the past two years.
“This was just a trial run for the Fourth of July,” he said. “We’ll have double the number of people then.”
