EVANS CITY — For the first time in 45 years ham and eggs will not be served in the Evans City fire hall on Good Friday.

Since 1964 the Evans City Area Fire Department Ladies Auxiliary has planned, cooked and served the holiday breakfast to share the Christian tradition with the firefighters, said Teresa O’Malley, auxiliary president.

However considering the declining membership and the advancing age of the group, the ladies decided the event was too large to host themselves.

“After that long time we regretfully decided we can’t have it this year,” said O’Malley, 53, youngest of the seven regular auxiliary members.

It takes from 15 to 20 women to run the event smoothly, she said. “We’ve tried for several years to get more help,” she said, but over the years members have

moved or died.

Younger firefighters’ spouses have careers or children and don’t have time, she said.

“Kids don’t want to volunteer today, they want to be paid,” she said.

The breakfast was first proposed by members of the Westminster

United Presbyterian Church on Main Street, who approached the auxiliary to

serve it, said Jen Westerman, vice president.

Westerman, 82, called the first year “a fiasco” as auxiliary members tried to take individual orders of scrambled eggs, sliced ham, pastries, coffee, juice or milk for each diner.

“You don’t do that, we found that out,” she said.

For several years the auxiliary reluctantly served green eggs that had somehow changed color between the skillet and the serving tray, Westerman

said.

Finally someone added lemon juice to stop the oxidization process, she said.

Every year she said a crew arrived at the fire hall the night before the breakfast to crack 75 dozen eggs into large kettles and set up enough

tables and chairs for 225 people.

At the beginning the women scrambled all the eggs by hand.

“We weren’t so smart then,” Westerman said.

During the past few years someone connected a paint stirrer

to an electric drill and beat all the eggs in one big kettle, she said.

At about 5 a.m. on Good Friday the women had at least two skillets of eggs scrambling as diners trickled in. “It was a lot of work,” she said.

All the community pastors were invited, and a 10-minute “sermonette” was given, Westerman said.

At its peak the auxiliary had about 40 to 50 members. The meal was served family-style to about 200 people and most were out the door in time to go to work, she said.

People from as far as Clarion joined the Evans City community, which had as many as four generations of family members at the meal at one time, she

said.

O’Malley said as membership has waned in recent years the auxiliary delegated the many preparation tasks well, but many women are in their late

70s to early 80s with many health problems.

Another community group could take over, but there is little time left to pull everything together now, she said. “It would be a lot of work and they’d have to step on it immediately,” she said.

But, there’s always next year. “Hopefully the ministerium in Evans City will think it’s a worthwhile event and they’ll run with it,” O’Malley said.