Garden City Park Fire Department Holds Easter Pancake Breakfast

The Garden City Park Fire Department held their first-ever Easter pancake breakfast this past Saturday morning, serving up flapjacks, bacon, sausages and holiday activities to residents and children from the area.

“We normally have around christmas time, 250-300 people,” fire department member Joe McAvoy said, who said that there were 125 people Saturday morning at the firehouse for the fundraising event for the junior department. Admission price was $5 for a child and $10 for an adult and was all-you-could-eat.

This year the Christmas event was cancelled due to the lingering effects of Hurricane Sandy, so the department decided to hold an Easter one to make up for the lost opportunity.

In addition to responding to calls during and immediately after the storm, Garden City Park had sent a truck/ engine company to Long Beach to aid.

“Our one engine actually got damaged from a tree falling on it,” McAvoy said, “it hit the back bumper. Some of those streets are so narrow and then all the debris from the houses, I mean you couldn’t turn the engine around to come back out – they were dead ends.”

McAvoy estimated that they were present for between 12-18 hours and another Garden City Park crew was sent to another station in Freeport for assistance. The department also cooked meals including 30 turkeys, 20 hams and 300 pounds of potatoes for fire departments on the south shore at Christmas time for the other departments and volunteers.

“Any fundraiser for the kids is a benefit,” junior department advisor Jim Salim said. “And they enjoyed it because the little kids got to enjoy painting eggs and we were giving out presents and whatnot and we had Easter egg hunts all over the place.”

Planning for the event starts at least a month ahead of time with members going to local businesses and soliciting ads for the placemats as well as donations for the raffle prizes.

“These businesses constantly help us every year,” department member Jim Salim said.

“We start cooking the night before, a lot of the meat the bacon and so forth and the pancakes start getting cooked about 5:30 this morning,” McAvoy added, noting that the batter is donated by IHOP of Williston Park and the various meats are donated by Garden City Park Boar’s Head distributor Chris Engel Inc. and Los Paisanos Meat Market.

“If it wasn’t for them we would not make as much money for the juniors,” McAvoy said. “That’s a lot of money right there, just the meat alone.”

“They help us out tremendously. Bacon’s always a big hit,” firefighter Andy Zovich said.

McAvoy said that next year the department might hold the Easter pancake breakfast slightly earlier due to the holiday weeks.

“Sometimes all our people go away on spring break and so forth,” he said. “So if we do it next year, maybe we try it a little earlier.”

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