Pancake mix

Five years ago, Spokane newcomers Tom and Pam Deutschman, and their toddler, Zak, invited another young family to have pancakes in Manito Park. Using just a single-burner camp stove, the hosts turned out tasty hotcakes – and made new friends in the process.

Earlier this month, the Deutschmans served their 100th Pancakes in the Park potluck breakfast in Polly Judd Park on the South Hill. The breakfasts, offered every other weekend year-round, can now lure up to 100 friends, neighbors and newcomers for free hotcakes. The guests supply a buffet of additional edibles.

“It sort of has a life of its own,” smiled Tom Deutschman, after hopping from a unicycle he brought to the park.

Once bashful, Deutschman is now so comfortable with people that he spends much of his free time inviting new folks to the breakfast get-togethers.

He said his goal is to bring people together “without any agenda, to have a meal and get to know each other.”

As ordinary as it may sound, Pancakes in the Park is having a positive and profound effect on their neighborhood, he said.

Thanks to pancakes, coffee, music and lively conversations, breakfast regulars have become a close-knit community, said Tom Deutschman.

On a recent Sunday morning, he donned a tangerine dress shirt, houndstooth sport coat and gray felt flat cap. Pam Deutschman sported a blouse in the same shade as her husband’s, and dressed it up with a blazer and whimsical straw hat rimmed with apricot-colored silk flowers.

She and a girlfriend, in a tiara, fired up two Coleman camp stoves, dipping and mixing bowls of pancake batter from 10-pound bags of flour. Another friend lit a third stove to help out.

Within a half-hour, moms and dads, babies wrapped in bright slings, older children in jeans and summer dresses filed in. Empty nesters, neighbors with dogs in tow, grandparents, musicians, people who’d come from Sunday church services and single “twenty-somethings” with bandanas and facial piercings filled out the crowd.

Guests set out colorful trays of watermelon, strawberries, cherries, cantaloupe, grapes and stewed apples. Brownies, cupcakes and cookies sat beside five-pound tubs of healthy butter substitutes, syrup, fruit spreads, fresh-cooked soy bacon and crispy hash browns.

“Who wants pancakes?” hollered Katie Beck, a cook visiting from Seattle.

A little boy lifted up his paper plate and onto it, Beck slid a hot cake fresh off the griddle. “This one’s a little rough around the edges,” she smiled, “but it’ll taste just fine.”

Suddenly, a bowl of batter burped, startling those in line for seconds.

“It’s sourdough” batter, laughed Shelly Flores, “I got the starter from my mom.”

Gradually, well-fed adults took over a swing set. Two small boys circled the grass in a motorized, child-size John Deere lawn tractor. And bluegrass musicians Bill and Kathy Kostelec (two-thirds of the Blue Ribbon Tea Party) sang and strummed guitar and mandolin in front of a rapt gathering of kids and adults.

A few yards away, clusters of grown-ups laughed and talked about family news.

Surveying the scene – reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting – Deutschman said: “This has become my passion. It just has a nice feel to it and it seems to bring out the best in people.”

First-timers Jan and Dan Treecraft learned of the breakfast in an e-mail mistakenly forwarded by a friend. So they pedaled over from about 10 blocks away, where they’ve lived since 1978.

Like lots of people, Jan Treecraft said she and her husband have been thinking lately about the importance of community; perhaps because their grown children live out of state, they’d become more isolated than they would have liked. And she admitted she’s uneasy about the economy and standards of living.

“We think a lot of things are going to get tough for a lot of us and I think the way to get through it is to support each other, to form neighborhood groups,” Treecraft said.

Gatherings like this give her hope that in the future neighbors might form food and tool co-ops and perhaps even share cars, she said.

“I think there’s a lot more power in working locally,” Treecraft added.

Later this summer, the Deutschmans are taking their pancake diplomacy to Iran.

Iranian-born Shahrokh Nikfar, a friend and assistant director of the Northwest Fair Housing Alliance, will serve as unofficial tour guide.

The group intends to be grassroots ambassadors eager to create goodwill between Americans and Middle Easterners, Deutschman said. Plans call for a big outdoor pancake breakfast on the manicured grounds of a museum in Tehran.

We “don’t want to make war,” said Nikfar, “we want to make pancakes.”